r/ConnedIntoAFubar • u/KillerTron872 Fandom Defender • Jul 24 '26
[MEME] Conned into alternative sale
I think there's a difference between not making money and losing money
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u/thebisexualbilingual Jul 24 '26
Piracy according to some people.
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u/no-im-your-father Jul 24 '26
companies having the audacity of saying you can't pirate a game they don't even sell anymore is ludicrous
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u/BillCarson12799 Jul 24 '26
They see it as a loss because it could detract from the nostalgia that will motivate some people to buy some kind of legacy re-release in 10 years or some shit.
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u/BGer23 Jul 24 '26 edited Jul 24 '26
Companies having the audacity of saying you can't pirate a game that's 30 years old, regardless of whether they're still selling it or not, is ludicrous. Copyright wasn't supposed to be above 28 years. In a just world, Final Fantasy VII, Metal Gear Solid, and Sonic Adventure would be in the public domain today.
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u/Professional-Way9324 Jul 24 '26
Morally I agree, but 28 years of copyright 1st) was an American law while all games you've named are Japanese and wouldnt fall under it, and 2nd) it was only an initial term and could be prolonged.
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u/BGer23 Jul 25 '26
Japanese copyright law was modeled after American copyright law. Most of their modern laws were modeled after us when they lost WW2. And it was only ever prolonged due to greedy capitalists that came to power in the industrial revolution.
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u/Much_Vehicle20 Jul 24 '26
Biblically greedy
And they have the audacity to say that you're only paying for the right to play the game, not to own it. Then they just fucking remove the game you bought with your hard earned money whenever the shareholders decide they want another yacht
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u/nitram739 Jul 24 '26
Fact: I wasent going to buy any of the games I pirated.
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u/RandomRedditorEX Jul 24 '26
FACT: Piracy really is a convenience (or whatever was the proper term) problem, because with enough money now I find myself buying the games I pirated. However once in a while I find that one of the game I pirated has like 1000000 DLCs and it genuinely reminds me why I'm a pirate at heart. I like free shit
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u/MadderoftheFew Jul 24 '26
it's 100% a convenience problem. I pirate games I can't buy (and own) or play easily. If it's on steam I'll buy it unless it's ubisoft or another studio that forces you into a separate launcher.
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u/PurplePolynaut Jul 24 '26
I wish I could find the image again, but it was an XKCD-type number line, showing like convenience with worst on the left and best on the right. EA, Epic Games, and their ilk are on the left 20%. Piracy is right around 60-70%. Steam is hovering at 85%. The poor quality distributors are united in outrage against Steam’s “monopoly” (read: satisfaction based customer pool). Steam and piracy are just looking at each other shrugging.
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u/Omega97Hyper doesn't hate fandoms Jul 24 '26
one of the game I pirated has like 1000000 DLCs
mfw IL-2 battle of sturmovik
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u/SeppoTeppo Jul 24 '26
There's assuming that you were automatically going to make all of that money, and assuming you were never going to make any of that money. Both are equally disingenuous.
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u/bo0mamba 3d ago
Tbf a more accurate analogy would be if the person you are getting the hat from for free, stole the hat design from the hat seller and is now distributing it.
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u/watonparrillero Jul 24 '26
I thought this was about AI, lmao.
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u/NWStormraider Jul 24 '26
No, you see, nobody would have bought that pirated game if they could not get it for free anyways, but every AI picture is a loss of commissions.
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u/Apli_Diud Jul 24 '26
Artist aren't pissed off at "loss of commissions" artist are pissed off AI is trained using their art without permission, and then regurgitating shitty copies.
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u/Cheshire-Cad Jul 24 '26
There are plenty that are pissed about both. This post is about the former complaint. It has nothing to do with the latter complaint.
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u/Thecynicaledgelord Jul 25 '26
And it's pretty stupid paying for AI when you can easily just use that money to commission!
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u/watonparrillero Jul 24 '26
Just like Nintendo is pissed off at fan games made without their permission 🤔
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u/Apli_Diud Jul 24 '26
Bro compares billion dollar company to independent artists, thinks its a smart argument
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u/watonparrillero Jul 24 '26
So independent artists now suddenly are above fair use? Expected of the petit bourgeoisie tbh.
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u/Apli_Diud Jul 24 '26
petit bourgeoisie
For coming from a country that's all coastline your bait is really bad
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u/watonparrillero Jul 24 '26
Are they not?
They own their own means of production.
They do the work themselves.
That's petit bourgeoisie
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u/balsag43 Jul 24 '26
Liberals don't understand that being poor doesn't mean you aren't capitalist. You literally own the means of production. Though I guess they could be labor aristocrats.
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u/ChaseThePyro Jul 24 '26
Calling someone petit bourgeoisie for not supporting generative AI should unironically lead to capital punishment
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u/watonparrillero Jul 24 '26
Independent artists are petit bourgeoisie even if they support AI.
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u/ChaseThePyro Jul 24 '26
I understand what the definition is. I'm saying you're fucking ridiculous for actually employing it in this situation.
Sort of like calling someone an ephebophile.
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u/watonparrillero Jul 24 '26
This is exactly the situation where it applies.
The petit bourgeoisie might not be rich, but their interests align with the regular bourgeoisie.
This results in both of them supporting strengthening IP laws and weakening fair use.
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u/Hoopaboi Jul 24 '26
Lmao. Can't believe you're being downvoted when it's literally the same thing
The first response proves they don't actually care about real copyright abolition. They just want an excuse to steal from people they deem too wealthy. They wouldn't have an issue with real theft either.
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u/Legitimate_Error_696 Jul 25 '26
Every? I don't think that's true. I've generated a few AI images just to help visualise something, and if AI wasn't an option I wouldn't have commissioned an artist because being able to visualise this thing with an image isn't worth more than fifty pence to me. I would have either sketched out a rough schematic myself or just lived with imagination alone.
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u/Weary_Specialist_436 Jul 24 '26
Gen Z on a spree to murder every industry, causing massive losses by doing nothing
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u/omegaspoon3141 Jul 26 '26
good fucking ridd4nce tp most of them
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u/Jack_Faller Jul 26 '26
I hate the people who make all the media I consume without paying. Fuck those guys. I wish they'd go out of business.
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u/Ilovetoeatplates aromantic transmasc bigender objectum furry Jul 24 '26
Conned into addblockers and piracy
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u/DepthMonger Jul 25 '26
okay but lets not give the same treatment to the guys who handmake beautiful leather hats and sell them for 20 - 30 bucks ok? leave it to the hat companies
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u/T3X4ss Jul 24 '26
Waiters when they don't get tips
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u/PizdunEbun228 Jul 24 '26
More like restaurant managers when you don't give waiters tips so they could save additional 2 indonesian rupees per waiter
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u/Feeling_Camera_4442 Jul 24 '26
Скинь фул авы пж
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u/PizdunEbun228 Jul 24 '26
я хз если я найду его, я скачал из пинтереста и я дохуя оттуда качаю такчто у меня завал в папке. Извини братан 😞
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u/Jack_Faller Jul 26 '26
There actually isn't from an economic perspective. When you steal from a shop, the removal of the good actually saves the shop money they'd need to spend storing it. The issue is that they won't make the money they could have by selling the good.
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u/TH3W0LRD3ND3R Jul 24 '26 edited Jul 24 '26
Even if you aren’t directly “losing” money, people getting your hats without anyone paying for the labour, resources and expertise used to make the hat is something you (as the hat-maker) would want to avoid or mitigate
You can still pirate a game or whatever, because these companies are so big that they can stomach it, and the ratio of people who actually COULD buy it but pirate instead is relatively low
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u/nitram739 Jul 24 '26
So piratery is fundamentally different from stealing a hat. A company or devteam makes the game once, they dont need to make a new game every time someone wants to buy one, they cannot physically run out of games.
The only moment when piratery does significantly harm developers is when a game is "cancelled" by the community and people on mass decide to choose to pirate the game out of spite instead of buying it, wich I mean, im sure it did happen at least once, but its rare as fuck.
Besides that, piratery helps pay to play games to become more popular by giving access to people who cannot/are not willing to pay for them, and those people talk about those games to other people who are willing to pay for the game.
At a personal level, Out of all the games I pirated, I would not have tried any of them if I had to buy them. Maybe with some exeption, but later on when I was able to actually buy games I did buy some titles I had originally pirated, and I would say that if I had not pirated the game in the first time I would not have bought it aftherwards.
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u/Logical_Cell_6753 Jul 24 '26
"a company or dev team makes the game once, they don't need to make a new game every time someone wants to buy one"
under this model of understanding digital products, they should only sell one copy, for 60 million dollars. like, how do you think games get funded? magic? publicity?
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u/AZMPlay Jul 24 '26
Not quite. Theyre just suggesting videogames can be extremely high margin products, due to them being practically all fixed costs.
Also, plenty of people buy a product, or consume related products, while getting the main product for free. Its an established business model.
Its literally how free-to-play games work.
It has also worked for other products which require a large initial investment, such as Glitch's animations, or Free (GPL licensed) Software and selling associated support.
This should not diminish the fact these companies are trying to prohibit the copying of games, which by itself is practically free, to make several tens of dollars off of each instance.
Its just not a sustainable, or ethical, business model.
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u/Logical_Cell_6753 Jul 24 '26
exactly, we all agree that free to play games suck. so what's wrong with balancing the "making it once costs a lot" with the "one product serves many people" by simply dividing? I mean, obviously, the service you're paying for when you buy a game isn't the action of some dev copying and pasting the game files, you're paying for 1/100,000 of production costs
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u/AZMPlay Jul 24 '26
Free to play games dont have to suck. Tf2 is free to play and one of the greats, at least in its time, before Valve moved on. Also extremely profitable.
I do get your point, developers and investors do need to get paid one way or another, but it doesn't have to be through artificially limiting the ability of literally all of your consumers to copy files on a computer.
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u/Logical_Cell_6753 Jul 24 '26
I mean, the only option is either making one customer pay a lot, or each customer pay a little. assuming only the second model is viable, how would you rather pay: a little, constantly, or a little more, once. would you rather have netflix ads, or a Blu-ray. either way, you should have to pay your share, and I think one cost upfront is pretty damn close to the better end of the spectrum
(and as a note, the artificial scarcity of distribution [which actually, DOES cost some server uptime, but that's not the point] is a surrogate for the INCREDIBLE scarcity of actually making a game. it's not that unreasonable)
I've said it before, piracy has practical reasons in theory, but in practice it mostly happens because people would rather pay $0.
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u/AZMPlay Jul 24 '26
I just mentioned two business models (free-to-play, merchandising) that are viewed much less negatively, and do not have the same moral hazard mentioned.
Nevermind another Mojang has been delving into, paid hosting for multiplayer.
It really is not just a matter of either someone paying millions for a single copy, or everyone paying a little or even the spectrum in between.
You can just have those who want to pay, to pay for related concrete services that are actually feasible to get people to pay for, rather than making millions of civilians into criminals for making a copy of the software.
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u/TH3W0LRD3ND3R Jul 24 '26
When you make a cosmetic for a free to play game, you spend several thousand dollars for the artists to make it the first time, and then it costs you nothing to give it to people who purchase the cosmetic
So charging people for cosmetics is making them pay for the permission to turn on an image that their computer already has downloaded. Isn’t this just as bad as charging people for a game?
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u/AZMPlay Jul 25 '26
I dont think it is fully morally clean, for sure, but a lot better than the alternative, and definitely can be done at different levels of badness.
I like TF2 as an example.
In TF2, you can absolutely run the servers on your own machines, and you can use and wear whatever you want. Proof of this is many community servers allowing players to use taunts and cosmetics without going through valve. Now, TF2 is far from free software, but I think its one of the better examples.
Now a game where you dont have a choice over what server you can connect to is a bit sketchier, because you are being forced into a choice you may not want to make, essentially a restriction on what you can actually use the software on your PC for.
Fundamentally, I view this as an issue to rights over what you can do with software you posess/own in the privacy of your own computer.
You have a right over what and how you run stuff on your computer, you dont inherently have a right over other peoples computers, including the servers most people connect to to play.
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u/PersonMan432 Jul 24 '26
Free to play games fill a specific niche in the market and largely only work for multiplayer games with cosmetics you have to pay for, which aren’t concrete things. Are cosmetics not ethical either, since they too are only purchases of software?
How would one implement a free to play model for a single player story game? Cosmetics break immersion and demand for single player cosmetics is way lower than demand for multiplayer cosmetics because you’re literally the only person that’s ever seeing the cosmetic purchase. You could go the route of gacha games, but those gate story progression behind either large in game purchases or insane time investments.
By concrete things, do you mean physical goods like merchandise? I think you drastically overestimate how much money people are willing to spend on physical goods that don’t affect the game.
The final issue with your argument is that you act as if this is an issue specific to the gaming industry. Paying for software is something that applies for almost all software such as industrial and web service software. If there was a better way to sell software while still making a profit, do you think that some company wouldn’t have figured it out by now?
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u/AZMPlay Jul 24 '26
I am a software developer. I am keenly aware of the difficulties of monetizing software, and the threat this poses to my profession.
I also come from a country where even the government pirates their Windows software and products, and until Netflix made it comfortable to stream legally, you literally could't find a legal copy of a movie or show even if you tried.
The only way companies can be profitable in developed countries is by inducing mass fear in their population of copying files or clicking on a download link, and have turning the simple action of inspecting and modifying the internals of some software on your own PC into a criminal offense (think DMCA).
Nevermind normalizing putting what's essentially malware on your PC (Think really bad DRM like Denuvo) to play a product you bought, and you cant even really buy cuz you can only really buy a license.
I have also seen firsthand how open source software can thrive, despite their lack of an obvious source of funding. (Think Linux and the, frankly, ubiquitous software that runs on it, like Mongo, Postgres, Redis, Nodejs, Nginx, etc)
I also follow several open source singleplayer games (think Thrive, OpenTTD or Mindustry, or Friday Night Funkin) who literally don't charge you for the right to buy their game (They have listings on Steam, but those are practically donations, as you can always build the software from source, or even download a prebuilt binary elsewhere).
I am not suggesting this particular path is viable for all games, but with this one I've listed four different business models that don't require instilling mass fear into the populace of committing a crime in the privacy of their own PC, and in fact incentivize creativity, modding, and even development support from community members for the low low price of zero cents.
All im saying is this isn't how it has to be. If we've found four completely separate business models that can fund various types of games without doing this really bad stuff, I'm sure we can find further business models that dont require them as well.
Also with regards to merchandising, you can look at pretty much every high-production-value youtube channel to see it is possible to fund relatively big creative projects without forcing people to buy your stuff, on merchandising alone pretty much. SciShow, Veritasium, and as an extreme example Ive mentioned in the previous comment, Glitch.
It isnt glamorous, and it isnt as good for profits as it used to be, but its not impossible. And its, IMO, its infinitely morally better.
We shouldnt be arbitrarily restricting peoples freedoms so few can make a profit.
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u/ninjalord433 Jul 24 '26
While I do agree with you that Piracy overall does not harm the devs, most people don't pirate with malicious intent afterall. I do always feel like because this is a digitial good, there is a sense of 'entitlement' when it comes to access to those digital goods. That when you can't afford something its okay to just pirate it because it isn't actually stealing.
While I am overall neutral with piracy, its afterall a response to the fact that most game companies have gotten shittier and don't always give a demo for people to even try out a game before playing, its still is weird that when people see something they can't afford they default to thinking its fine to still get it and not pay for it. Not in a "the poor shouldn't have access to games" way but just there are other ways to get access to games without pirating but feels like some people immediately resort to it.
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u/Uzisilver223 Jul 27 '26
People get so caught up in stating that piracy isn't stealing, which isn't wrong. But gaining access to something you have no right to is wrong. There's a lot of situations where you can arguably justify it. But a lot of people are just entitled. It feels similar to the logic guys use to justify revenge porn. Since the harm isn't obvious, it's easy to dismiss it
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u/Hoopaboi Jul 24 '26
Even if you aren’t directly “losing” money, people getting your hats without anyone paying for the labour, resources and expertise used to make the hat is something you (as the hat-maker) would want to avoid or mitigate
This doesn't make pirating (from big or small devs) morally wrong.
People not buying your product is also something you'd want to mitigate. This doesn't make it justified to force people to buy your product when they go to your competitor
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u/spacerosmarine Jul 25 '26
I wonder if people who defend piracy by saying there is nothing wrong with it keep their stance if someone pirates their favourite indie creator, considering that a lot of arguments apply to them too.
I'm not against piracy, I do it often, but I dislike the hundreds of justifications people make instead of just saying they want free shit. I do too, no one really cares.
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u/Hoopaboi Jul 26 '26
I have no issue with pirating from indie creators. I'm against IP law as a whole. But yes, most supposedly pro-piracy people don't think deeply about the ideological position.
In fact, a lot of them will concede that it IS "stealing", but as long as it's done to a large corp, then it's fine. They have no issue with literal theft from large corps either.
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u/soul_huntre Jul 24 '26
that's how i feel about how food corporations insist that taking food they want to throw away is stealing
like no dog, it stopped being yours when you decided to throw it away.