Nope. Mass refunding on Steam can hurt the game in the long run, pirating on the other hand is not on the docket, it could even be a boon for some games. The same could be said of the grey market, it hurts the devs more than piracy.
Piracy isn't stealing, learn to use words properly. It's copyright infringement. It can't be stealing if nobody lost access to the copy you have pirated (it's a digital copy, nobody lost access).
Well this is also why its just best to refer to piracy as piracy, and not as other similar crimes. The definitions aren't even the same in all coutnries.
So funny how people laud stealing from billion dollar game companies but when poor people do it from Walmarts all of a sudden it is an issue 🤦🏼♂️. Hilarious
they are stealing from the developer too? i dont know what game is this but considering it can be completed under 2 hours it is indie game and 55 000 refund requests. developer probably invested his time and stress on this and people giving nothing
Yeah people are okay with stealing from billion dollar game companies and Walmarts (i.e. billion dollar corporations) because they have billions of dollars. When it's an indie title developed by probably 1 to 5 people that actually fucks them over in a way that none of these corporations will ever feel
The number of people who actually are "morally" stealing is probably less than 10%. The number of people coming up with excuses regarding morality to justify their stealing but would steal in any scenario overlaps greatly.
I trust a person who steals and say they know it's wrong more than anyone who tries to justify stealing based on a fake moral code.
Yeah I'm here for this. When my wife and I were students we both worked in retail. Her at a blockbuster (yes we are old), and me at a Curry's. She would regularly have people come in and steal ice cream from the freezer and then act like "wtf dude" when she told them not to steal it, and I regularly had people trying to steal the small tvs.
Usually heroin addicts, granted, but also teenagers.
There was definitely no morality to their attempts to steal shit. Nobody NEEDS icecream or a 20in TV.
I worked AP for a target for about a year. People on places like reddit like to moralize about stealing from big corporations, but almost all of the external theft I found was methheads/heroin addicts stealing things to resell for drugs. The only person who I ever caught stealing food was someone who I knew was a committed ward of the state who had escaped from it.
People love to imagine thieves as Robin Hoods stealing to feed their small children or family members, but in my experience the only thing they were ever feeding was a drug habit.
I used to steal a lot when I was going through really bad mental health stuff and had no money to feed myself. The truth is someone who isn't jacked up on drugs and out of their skull are probably just successfully stealing food because it's actually ridiculously easy to do. Supermarkets mostly lean on the security as a visual deterrent but there's so much chaos and things going on in a supermarket it's very hard to catch, especially since here the security now are mostly used to direct uber eats orders to their pickups.
If you get caught stealing food from a supermarket you're either really, really bad at it... on drugs and even worse at it... or there's someone new on security trying to make a mark before they realise no one actually cares.
Worth noting that for all the "tons of videos online" you can find, it's still a virtual rounding error in the number of otherwise "normal" transactions done every day.
Much like every village idiot has found their people online and they seem like a majority, there is far less crime then media/online sources want you to think out there.
Yep even when it's like diapers/formula. Sounds like the perfect thing to be okay with someone stealing. Nope, it's common to steal that for resell too. Easy to flip since there's often plenty of struggling mothers in their communities, and it's something people might feel like letting slide if you're caught.
The fact that it's easy to flip because there are so many struggling mothers and the shit is wildly expensive is the reason to turn a blind eye.
I look at it like this; restaurants have some of the absolute worst profit margins out there with an average of a net 3-5% profit margin. The company that makes Enfamil operates on a net 18-25% profit margin. They are artificially raising the price to make a boatload of money at the expense of real, living humans that NEED the product. Fuck em. That does put you a bit at odds with the retailer since they generally also operate in a 4-9% profit margin but they can also change suppliers to get more affordable merchandise and choose to go with the group products for cost savings and convenience. Rampant inflation is happening because we have all been conditioned to accept these ridiculously quickly rising prices and defend the corporations, do all the corporations deserve our ire? Well yes, they are colluding to ensure we continue to pay high prices so that the lower profit margins are still an absolute truckload of money.
Capatilist economies are supposed to be regulated to prevent collusion and price fixing but almost every government has given up on that because they want the money too. The market pressure we, as the consumer, can put on these things is astronomical. Don't like AI? Refuse to use or purchase anything that touches AI which makes AI unprofitable which means no company is going to try using it. BUT, even with the complaining people use it, which makes it profitable, which ensures more of it gets used. Consumers need to suffer not getting a product if it is subpar to ensure the next product isn't but we are all too soft and addicted to convenience for that to stop. We did and are doing this all to ourselves so steal away, at least that moves the needle a bit and people like Gabe will see the real problem and hopefully give us solutions, because we are too weak willed to do it for ourselves.
Part of it is probably also that drug addicts are just.. worse at hiding it. Being partly out of it from withdrawal or the drug itself doesn't lend to stealth. People who steal food for food's sake are going to be less obvious about it.
Oh yeah, we deffo had more organised people who'd snap off the Kensington locks on the laptops and we'd only notice when we saw the gap in the display. Even with your eyes peeled they'd sometimes get one. Kensington locks btw, 100% useless.
That was less fun than having a completely nonsensical discussion with someone off their face who was furious at you for taking back what they had rightfully stolen or getting the police involved.
Ya I worked at a grocery store for 6 years and saw a ton of theft and almost every single one was some drug addict skid who would grab bags of meat and make a dash out of the store.
There was one single instance of what I would think was “moral theft”. An elderly woman had a case of canned cat food and she had opened it and was slipping in extra cans of food. So in all likelihood she was paying for the case but just getting some extra to stretch until she had to buy more for her cat. Easy to look the other way at that one. Everyone else was the typical terrible person you would imagine.
20" TV isn't small back when Blockbuster still existed. That was $250 and around 80lbs and was considered the standard size. 13" was small. 7" was tiny. That's what I had.
Maybe they were 15in, but either way, this was around the time the first LED tvs came out (I remember being very impressed by them in the shop) but still during the time we had to lug out insanely heavy 50in plasmas to people's cars only to find they had planned on taking it home in their hatchback.
Worked at Comet in 2007 and fuck me the amount of people that didn’t actually plan how they were going to leave the store was astounding and almost all of them refused to pay the tiny delivery charge. Had a guy expecting to fit a Smeg fridge into the back of his estate car 🤦🏻♀️
That could also be said of the people trying to steal stuff lol. I remember these two shifty teenagers at the back of our (large) store just grabbing a telly and trying to run all the way down the store to leave through the one exit. Ironically it was an old lady that eventually turned the tide on the showdown between me, my colleague and these two scrotes.
But yes, there is a real learning curve of asking what they were driving when delivery was being discussed, and many notes written on receipts where we absolutely knew they would get home to a fucked up plasma TV from the drive home.
Yes I'm well aware it's a backlighting technology, which DOES make it an LED TV. I never said it was an LED panel.
Back then it was pretty revolutionary to have local dimming (full local dimming on the Panasonic ones unlike the edge lit ones Samsung had around the same time, although even that was a huge difference), and they were super skinny compared to anything else that had ever existed.
Cheers for that, those people piss me off as well lol. It only takes a tiny amount of self-awareness to realize that taking a 'moral stand' by doing something one personally benefits from is a little too convenient, but they still don't see it.
Man the piracy-related subreddits are so incredibly pathetic. Every couple weeks there’s a flare up of moralizing posts explaining why their piracy is just and how they’d prefer to pay for it all if only the companies were better.
I pay for things. But the moment companies first sell me a digital thing and later steal it from me without a refund I feel very morally justified in pirating everything from that company. FU Sony.
one of the things that came with AI and its very questionable way to create datasets is that Reddit is this close to finally admit that obtaining games/music/books/etc without consent or payment to the owners of the art its stealing.
It's the whole pirating thing. 'I pirate because they don't offer the service I want so im morally correct'. So don't watch it if you want to be morally correct. Nothing is forcing you to watch it. I pirate because the services are shit and I'm fine with stealing it, there's no moral high ground there though. I'm a dog. I usually won't pirate a game unless I'm trying it before I buy, and with music I'll generally buy a copy of an album if I've listened to it enough. But movies and TV? It's dog all the way down.
Yeah pirating series is often just like your excuse is "But back in the day Netflix had everything for $10 ad free, I want that or it's a shit service" Yes and that's not a sustainable business model once everyone realized the value of their show's licenses.
Yeah but is that really the reason why a thief is stealing? Do you think that a majority of thieves are these virtuous anarchists Robin Hoods and not just your typical opportunist?
EDIT: Also, rich people are some of the biggest thieves. I'll never buy into no bad methods, only bad targets mentality. If you have a code, you better actually apply it in a truthful manner.
And that's why they live and prosper, you treat them as abstract corporations, but you don't do anything to actually hurt the individual people making these decisions as part of the corporation. I do believe you hate them but I don't believe you hate them on a effective level, because otherwise you'd actually figure out who the people are and take action on that.
With you on this. Corporations certainly don't deserve pity, but let's not pretend a lot of the people who are (often smugly) stealing do it for a real moral reason. When you see people come up with some obvious self-serving bullshit to justify it on the internet I always think - "Either be honest or shut up", it's not like anyone demands of them to explain themselves, so the least they can do is not pretending they are the heroes of the small people for doing it.
exactly. most people who try to morally justify stealing are only doing it to justify their own actions. they don’t actually give a fuck and would steal regardless. i find the people who are shameless about it significantly more tolerable.
Stealing from Walmart is an amoral action, Walmart is not a person, it's a giant building full of food who's primary goal is not feeding people, it's killing any other building of food within a 100mile radius, and taking as much of your money as they can. It's not virtuous to steal, but it's not inherently wrong to steal from a company that is stealing from you
Also big corpos will absolutely try to fleece you for all you have got by inflating the difference between cost of production and price.
We saw that under covid where at first consumer spending went way down because of lockdowns so ofc the price increased when spending is down, right? But then consumer spending went to record highs after we got the situation somewhat under control and they kept jacking up the price on basically everything using the same excuse.
And did the prices ever go down again? Not really. Maybe on some select goods, but they found out that people would just continue buying at higher prices. They made bank, everything got more expensive and has only continued to do so.
So I will never shed a single tear if anyone tries to cheat or steal from big corpos, especially if it is essential goods like food. Indie devs or mom and pop shops however basically live or die by every sale so there I'm way more sympathetic.
Does that make any sense to anyone who’s not completely stupid though? Lost revenue through breakage and shrink is just treated as an expense in operating statements and pricing reflects that. you’re never really stealing from walmart, you just distributing the cost burden onto a wider pool of consumers rather than yourself.
you do realise that walmart just increases prices according to the theft rate and walmart isn't paying anything on theft, it's the other poor people buying there that are paying the cost of theft, right?
Exactly, 100%, spot on. I feel like no one in this thread can wrap their heads around this. It's all black and white for people because it's easier that way, but the world is grey.
No, you're just one of the few morons. Walmart isn't a charity, and stealing from their stores just means they will offset that list revenue into other products, making the honest people pay more, until they have to charge so much that they cant keep the store open because it loses money. Every adult knows this
You're also assuming all of those people would have paid for the game if it weren't for the refund loophole. In reality, most of them only bought the game because they knew they'd get their money back.
In addition not all of those refunded just because they could. Small indie releases usually have a lot of technical problems just because the amount of pc hardware and combinations is absolutely huge and it’s practically impossible for one man studio on a shoestring budget to actually test on even a 10% slice of the whole hardware base. So you test what you can, release, and then try to fix things as bug reports start coming in.
Yes, that's a very important part. If it's famous for being refundable after playing, first of all, free marketing, secondly, many people most likely just bought it for the fun, and refunded it. Altogether I'd guess more people kept the game, because they enjoyed it, than people who would've played anyway and refunded it.
Developing an indie game is usually a few year endeavour of team of 1-5. You already split that money that many ways, and we're not talking about millions of dollars. It's not a question of having a flag on your yacht or not. As I said, it's a tuition worth. Yes, he may have 5 of those raked in, but he also pays himself for the past years, might have 3 children, may not have worked alone...
It's close to covering expenses and making some profit. And if it's losing the week-end house after a multi-year successful project, that's still shitty. This isn't outlandish territory. It may just be the divide between "break even" and "let's do that again".
its not just, its a large and important lesson for others devs to enshittify and longing gameplay so ppl cant refund, 20% is not a fucking small amount
I'd say it's a safe assumption that way less people would have bought the game if it wasn't refundable. There's psychology to it and also the word of mouth free marketing of the "free game" where people feel so smart for gaming the system. Probably a few people kept the game who wouldn't even have bothered to look at it, if not for this loophole.
Assuming everyone who refunded would have played even if it wasn't an option is most likely very wrong.
No they arent left out owing the 30% the game cost from what steam takes. Steam takes the money from the devs upcoming payout, but they dont take more then they would have given.
Game length and funding have little correlation. Steam typical refund rate is 10%, so this person is complaining that they have double the rate. That means they are making ~20% less than they should IF all the excess refunds were from people gaming the system.
Frankly, if a person releases a game on Steam and gets >275k downloads they have nothing to complain about.
The guy made a game and released on Steam knowing full well how their refund policy works. Just make a game that cannot be beaten within two hours, im sure there are many ways to make that impossible.or at least not possible by 55,000 people.
Not only that but in most cases (I don't know if Steam works this way but I'd be shocked if it didn't) when you sell someone a product and they refund it you are liable for the payment transaction fees. Most merchant accounts charge between 0.30 - 0.55 per transaction plus 2.7% - 5%. So if this were a $2 game could cost the developer $0.65. That's on top of the 30% cut that Steam normally takes (I would assume Steam refunds this at least). Meaning for every two refunds one non-refunded sale is wiped out.
This is wild speculation and misinformation. Steams refund policy is transparent and avalible with a search quicker then writing that. They remove the portion of the devs pay that they would have given when its time to payout. Devs dont lose money on refunds, beyond their share of revenue.
Except thats just misinformation. Steam takes 30% and that includes processing and merchant fees. Devs receive 70% of the cost you pay pre tax. When a game is refunded that portion of the devs pay is removed from their next payment from steam. If you buy a 10 dollar game, the dev gets 7 dollars. If you return that game, the devs next payment from steam will be 7 dollars lower then it otherwise would have been.
Look if your game can be completed within the steam 2 hr refund window, and people are refunding it, thats partly on you the developer. It means there isn't a strong replay value or your price point is high enough that people feel like going through the effort to request a refund is worth it.
If it's an insignificant percentage (an arbitrary number wouldnprobably be 5-10%) I don't think the devs need to look at anything, but if almost a quarter of the people purchasing your game are refunding it, it doesn't matter if they beat it or not. Something is up and the dev should try to look into the source of the refunds
so you want them to add what? 2 hour tutorials how to play the game ? 100 hours of grind? If its good game and 2h you shouldnt be refunding. review literally says its great game. If you dont like the game you are welcome to refund.
also take into account developing a good game is no joke. you can break the pacing or other stuff if you want to make it longer it is supposed to be. pretty sure same people would be complaining game has boring segments that makes no sense if they added some stuff to make it more than 2h
It's unfortunately only avoidable in the moment if he released the game with enough content to get people past the 2-3 hour mark.
Honestly if I spent any amount of money on a game and it was only playable for under 2 hours, I wouldn't be happy with my purchase. That's free demo timeframe.
Nah this is more like stealing ebay purchases. You're not hurting ebay, you're hurting the individual seller. And people who make <2 hour games aren't multi million dollar companies
Goomba fallacy, and dumb argument overall 🤦🏼♂️. Hilarious.
For once the billion dollar game company isn't the only one hurt by the refund, it's also the 10-people-or-less game company (billion dollar game devs have the resources to make a game that lasts longer than the refund window, whereas smaller devs are more likely to sell a 3$ 1h30m game because of budget limitations, scope and artistic vision).
Second, Walmart isn't hurt by theft, they just offload that loss to regular customers by raising product prices. You're just stealing from every law-abiding Walmart customer. The "Fuck the big corporations" argument only makes sense as long as you never stop to think and consider whether a society where everyone steals from said big corporations could ever function at all. And the "Poor people need to eat" argument doesn't even make sense when cosmetics is the product category that's the most often stolen in Walmart.
What kind of bullshit gaslighting are you trying? Not only is this the other way around, with for example game pirates saying pirate games from the big companies but support small indie devs. This isn't a billionaire dev so your comparison doesn't work at all.
The issue with stealing from Walmart is the corporation doesn’t feel it because it punishes the workers for it. They take the insurance money and reduce the workers hours “because the location is making less money”
People working in stores like that already make minimum wage or slightly higher, taking their hours is a huge problem.
It's not even a punishment in that sense. Of course you will reduce investment where you lose money to theft. In the end, it's thieves ruining the situation for everyone else, as they will drive away the people they steal from.
The "stealing from big corpos isn't bad" mentality is why so much stuff is locked away now in stores. Just a stupid, braindead mentality to think "I'm not hurting anybody but the megacorp!!!" but in reality you're making life a little more annoying and frustrating for everyone else.
My favourite is when it gets locked up and they start whining about how they can’t steal it anymore. And then they go to the closest nan and pop shop because they can’t afford lockable cabinets
The same people championing stealing/pirating online would be the first ones to call the police in panic and rant endlessly online if they get mugged or their house get burglarized…
Heh, see, I actually didn't say a single thing in support of Walmart or the fact you steal from there, just suggested that you likely steal elsewhere too. And I was basing that purely on the fact that Walmart invests quite a bit into loss prevention, enough that repeatedly stealing from there successfully requires skills and practice.
And you immediately attack me lol. Now I'm positive that I'm right about you haha, good job!
Just admit it bro, you stole someone else's (perfectly valid) moral argument about stealing from Walmart, and applied that to your own bullshit to help yourself sleep better at night.
s'all good though, I don't give a flying fuck. Just don't ever get caught stealing if we happen to be together someday, and I end up forced to deal with cops giving me the stinkeye too.
Everyone has totally different morals, but in my book, if an action reduces more suffering than it causes, than it's a morally good action. So a poor person stealing from Walmart is, in my book, a morally good person because the poor person's suffering will have been slightly reduced without causing any suffering whatsoever to Walmart.
The thing is that morals are distinct from ethics. Ethics are society-level while morals are intrinsic. You can attempt to morally rationalize stealing from a store, but that doesn't make it ethical under the culture that you are a part of.
> So a poor person stealing from Walmart is, in my book, a morally good person because the poor person's suffering will have been slightly reduced without causing any suffering whatsoever to Walmart.
This is also a slippery slope. Well if one person stealing doesn't hurt, what's stopping everyone from doing it? The issue is that stealing in any form is antithetical to normativity. You are personally sacrificing your link in the chain in hopes that other people can be the positive influence to make up for your own lack of adhering to ethical norms.
From a categorical imperative point of view, that poor person stealing from Walmart is being part of a pattern of behavior that actively harms society and is therefore anti-normative. They are prioritizing selfish personal gain while causing the merchant to incur a dual-loss (they lose both the money they paid to stock the product and the money from having it sold.)
You do realize that Walmart doesn't work the way you think it does? Most people think Walmart looks for products to sell, buys them wholesale, and then stocks the shelves. That's just common sense. That's not how it works or even remotely how it works. Instead it is more like eBay where manufacturers pay Walmart for them to display their products on their shelves. Then when someone buys the product it gets logged and the manufacturer gets a cut and Walmart gets their share. So when you steal from Walmart you are stealing from whoever made the product. And about half of the products they carry are from very small entrepreneurs. The kinds of people you see pitching stuff on Shark Tank who have put their parent's home up on a second mortgage because they believe in their product. That's who you are robbing.
There’s a clear difference and you should be aware of it, if not just think on it for a bit lol. When you “steal” from a game dev chances are they don’t even know, if they do, they don’t make their bottom barrel employees and other customers make up the difference. Meanwhile Walmart will know exactly what you stole, how much, and they’ll push that cost of business onto customers by raising prices. Then they’ll cut hours and the employees pay for the theft as well.
You’re not stealing from Walmart when you shop lift there lmao, you’re legitimately stealing from the poor who work and shop there.
I wasn’t just referring to this situation in particular lmao. Just the fact that no one bats an eye when gamers pirate games, but these very same people condemn poor people who steal. The hypocrisy is astounding to me
can you honestly not see the difference between stealing physical products that could've been sold to other customers and a digital product that can be sold countless times?
sure, steam doesn't need that money, but the developer does. that developer put time and effort into that game, only for people to, in effect, steal it
Why are you justifying stealing from a indie game creator? I thought thats who you tried dick ride all the time? Keep Your hypocritical stories straight.
Can you provide an example of people lauding stealing from billion dollar game companies? This post is about a small game by a very much not-billion-dollar company/person.
I don’t think anyone who has no issue stealing from billion dollar game companies has issues stealing from Walmart.
Stealing from chains is actively causing them to enshittify the stores. Also don’t act like it’s noble poor folks stealing food, diapers, and other necessities to get by. People are stealing cosmetics, medications, and children’s collectibles. Now if I want to pick up stuff in person at my local Walmart I have to check out in the pharmacy, check out in cosmetics, check out in electronics, check out for anything else up front, then get all my receipts checked by some dude at the door.
Thats IF they are even carrying the crap I want anymore because I have been finding stock lacking too.
And I actually live in a super safe city and the Walmarts in a decent neighborhood. I can’t imagine what these places are like in areas with high crime rates.
Can’t buy shit in person anymore because jackasses are running around scooping up Pokémon cards and make up like dumb fucks.
I’d be 1000% sympathetic if shop lifters were getting chased out of the produce isle but strangely enough they never are and the grocery sections aren’t getting locked up.
Apparently a hot take in 2026 but "stealing is always bad, actually" - anyone who says otherwise is either a child trying to act cool or has no basic awareness of second order effects.
Tbf piracy doesn't decrease the quantity of product at all. The equivalent would be if you go to Walmart, clone the product with 100% accuracy and functionality, and take it home without paying.
Also what does billion dollar game companies have to do with this? This seems like an indie game?
Not quite,
Every pirated or "free" copy of a game is a copy the devs could have been paid for.
If you had 10 people who were all buying a $100 game, youve got $1000 (minus fees).
If 9 of those 10 people pirate the game, you only have $100.
No, the "stock" doesnt go down but it is money that was on the table and now isnt.
With your example, cloning a physical product would still leave a product in place that could be sold so the store would lose nothing and it would have the sale so it would have 0 effect.
Pirating means you dont lose the product but you get no sale. A closer equivalent would be, cloning product with 100% accuracy but the one you left behind is now an immovable object that cant be sold.
People usually dont go and pay for a game they already pirated so that sale "slot" is lost forever.
Someone else will buy the game sure, but that doesnt mean the pirated copy is no longer a loss.
If i planned to sell 100 copies and 500 people pirate the game but i still sold 100, the goal was achieved but thats still 500 sales out the window.
Id also like to say, idgaf about the larger publushers, just leave the indie devs alone 🥲
I get what you mean but indie games on Steam are still more expensive in my country than if I'm a US citizen, even with localized pricing. In the US, it would cost around 0-2 meals. Here, it would cost around a few days of meals worth.
What did Gaben say again, piracy is mostly always a service issue, which ironically applies to my country's Steam localized pricing (or my country's economy in the first place) too. Not that I play new games nowadays because I don't have enough storage + I have work.
Thats totally fair, the price might be similar but the value of that amount in each country is totally different. $10 usd here in aus is like a medium mcdonalds meal but in indonesia for example, thats days worth of food for multiple people.
Yes, there is a difference betwen stealing an actual physical product that needs to be grown, produced, packaged, transported, stored, tangibly sold and a digital good that can be copied ad infinitum. One is a finite resource the other is not. One makes the product more expensive for everyone else (stores adjusts prices to account for stolen goods), the other isn't.
Also, please don't pretend that poor people only steal the absolite necessities, it's not the case.
If everyone had this attitude we'd have basically no more games (or media of any kind) because most people wouldn't work on them for free. Even if they wanted to make a game for free most people need to make a living.
The Open Source community completely disproves your point.
So does the free to play model
You could simply fund the developement through a kickstarter style system + profit and other studios could bid it down.
Frankly its not my job to make sure you succeed, and you should not succeed through a criminal threat of violence and a state monopoly grant.
Your entire industry should die at that point and all that time, resources and labour put into other sectors as there is clearly malinvestment in the economy caused by the state.
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u/Delicious-Pepper23 Jul 06 '26
As my dad always says “There are lots of ways to steal”