this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2024
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These sorts of stories are stupid, and pirates love to eat them up because they see it as validation, because one developer is financially independent enough to not go broke if his game doesn't sell. Most indie devs are not in such a position.
If he truly thought it was fine to download his game for free, he'd have released it for free in the first place. It's pretty easy for him to have a chill attitude and say it's okay to pirate his game after making nearly $100 million on it.
Edit: I also read the actual tweet. I think the author was responding to an "aha, gotcha!" moment. Someone posted a screenshot of them pirating his game with the caption "I love pirating indie games." It almost feels like a troll post. And the dev didn't bite the bait. He was like "eh, you do you. Devs gotta eat, sure, but you know what, culture should be accessible too."
Your argument is weak.
Ultrakill made the game to make money. Releasing a game "for free" for all makes no business sense.
Plenty of publishers do release games for free. Though they hope sell players' data, or ads or add-ons.
This dev is just one dev. Everyone else is free to do whatever they want.
So, there.
This is true. I don't see a problem with that. Give me $100 million dollars. It will be pretty easy for me to do neat stuff that doesn't necessarily bring me profits.
Edit: Downvoted by corporate suits. On Lemmy of all places.
Additionally: word of mouth can turn into sales down the line, too, if the pirate liked the game and talks about it.
At worst, the developer isn't negatively impacted (by people pirating a game they couldn't afford / had no intention of buying), at best it leads to more sales.
I don't see the problem.
And I know that someone reading this will be foaming at their mouth, excited to say "But what if everyone did this? Then developers/studios/... wouldn't make any money and stop producing games/movies/...!", so I have to preemptively add the following:
Edit: btw I say this as someone who has never pirated a game except for Minecraft when I was, like, 10. I love playing (esp. Indie) games and am happy to pay for them. I just want people to leave folks alone who can't.
The people cracking games were never in a position to buy the games in the first place.
I wouldn’t necessarily say never. Truthfully, I’ve pirated a few games and once I found out I loved them I’ve bought copies. I had the capacity to buy, but didn’t want to sink the money in for a potentially low return. I definitely would never have had the money to buy all of the games I pirated over the years though.
I also don’t consider sharing of ROMs of outdated games that are no longer available for sale in order to use in an emulator as piracy, and I’d say the vast majority of my fee-free game downloads were focussed there. How can I be depriving the creators of anything if I literally have no way to pay them to access the content?
The point is that a pirated copy is not a lost sale, because it was not guaranteed that the pirate would have bought a copy if they could afford it or whatever.
Anti-piracy people hate reading this, but piracy leads to more sales in many cases. People don't want to spend so much on something they will only maybe like. Many people who pirate a game often end up spending more money than people who bought it outright.
I am one of them. I pirated NieR Automata, because I had no idea if I was going to like it or not. I bought 2 copies on PS4, 3 copies on Xbox One, and 2 copies on Steam to give to friends. For myself I also bought the White Snow Edition of NieR 1.22, a still sealed copy of NieR Gestalt imported from Japan, and a digital copy of NieR 2010 on the Xbox Store. I even felt so inclined that I broke the one rule I have and spent money on the mobile gacha game, not because I wanted any certain character or whatever, but because I literally wanted to tell the company that I want to buy more NieR products and want to see more of what Yoko Taro can cook up.
One instance of me pirating a game generated that much revenue for the company where I otherwise would have had no motivation to give that to Square Enix, and my friends would very likely not have played the game either.
Honestly I only personally consider anything as piracy if the product is still available for sale from the actual publisher/developer. If its no longer available, then whether I pirate it or not doesn't matter to the company because where I other wise would give them money, they apparently don't want it.
It is a piracy. Stop making excuse