8mo ago

Ultrakill dev says it's fine to pirate his game if you don't have money to spare: 'Culture shouldn't exist only for those who can afford it'

www.pcgamer.com Ultrakill dev says it's fine to pirate his game if you don't have money to spare: 'Culture shouldn't exist only for those who can afford it'

Spreading the word about a game you pirated and enjoyed is "at worst an equal trade," Hakita says.

Ultrakill dev says it's fine to pirate his game if you don't have money to spare: 'Culture shouldn't exist only for those who can afford it'

Anti-Corporate Movement @lemmy.giftedmc.com

haui @lemmy.giftedmc.com

8mo ago

Ultrakill dev says it's fine to pirate his game if you don't have money to spare: 'Culture shouldn't exist only for those who can afford it'

www.pcgamer.com /gaming-industry/ultrakill-dev-says-its-fine-to-pirate-his-game-if-you-dont-have-money-to-spare-culture-shouldnt-exist-only-for-those-who-can-afford-it/

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PC Gaming @lemmy.ca

alessandro @lemmy.ca

8mo ago

Ultrakill dev says it's fine to pirate his game if you don't have money to spare: 'Culture shouldn't exist only for those who can afford it'

www.pcgamer.com /gaming-industry/ultrakill-dev-says-its-fine-to-pirate-his-game-if-you-dont-have-money-to-spare-culture-shouldnt-exist-only-for-those-who-can-afford-it/

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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ @lemmy.dbzer0.com

moosetwin @lemmy.dbzer0.com

8mo ago

Ultrakill dev says it's fine to pirate his game if you don't have money to spare: 'Culture shouldn't exist only for those who can afford it'

www.pcgamer.com /gaming-industry/ultrakill-dev-says-its-fine-to-pirate-his-game-if-you-dont-have-money-to-spare-culture-shouldnt-exist-only-for-those-who-can-afford-it/

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104 comments

It's fine to pirate every piece of media. From books, to movies, to music, to textbooks, to newspapers, to my own comments online.
Information and art is meant to be shared and enjoyed. Pay walling a distraction from reality does nothing but make reality worse.
- Soooo people shouldn't get paid for taking time to create books, movies, music, textbooks, newspapers?
  
  There should be means that would allow fans and appreciators donate money to creators. And it looks like we already have a lot of those.
  Also, culture and art should be promoted by governments. Therefore taxes could go that way too.
  Anyway, it's not like people say it's fine for everyone to not pay. But at least we know it's fine for many to pay much less than the rest, see regional pricing and discounts. Creators are totally fine with those. Nothing prevents it from being extended further to people who have a hard time trying to become potential customers.
  
  Why the fuck do they make money 15 years after doing the work though? Build a house, you get paid for the house. Write a song? Infinite money.
  
  Eh, there's a difference between compensation for work and using laws and legislation to sew up something tighter than a cats arse for personal exploitation
  
  That's a completely different statement
- What about people who need money to not only survive but to continue making art? What separates art from, say, coding, as a form of labor that is not worth compensation? Is an artist’s work not worthy of adequate compensation?
  
  This is why concepts like UBI would be so transformative to society.
  Imagine a world where no one had to choose between creating and surviving. Where writers and artists and coders and musicians could just make beautiful things and give them to the world for nothing.
  
  Coding isn't always compensated. Open source projects thrive because of the work of developers that don't get paid in most cases. That doesn't stop them (although it's probably because they do other work and can spare time and money).
  My point is that both, art and coding, don't require compensation. Many people do both for the sake of it.
  That doesn't mean they don't deserve compensation (in the form of donations). They do, most than any other.
  
  I'm fine with compensation, I'm not fine with the whole work once and siphon off the labor of others into eternity.
  
  What if code should also be shared freely?
  
  People who can't pay experiencing their creative work doesn't take anything away from them. Complain about the lack of funding for art instead
  
  It is a statistical fact that people who pirate things tend to buy more things than people who never pirate anything. Furthermore, people who exclusively pirate are a minority. It is also a fact that the majority of pirates would rather pay for things if the service provided is a superior experience to that of piracy.
  Gabe Newell said "Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem."
  
  Don't do work that requires uploading your work to the internet before being paid if you're not okay with some people experiencing it for free.
- Artists and creators need and want to be paid. It’s fulfilling for some of them to have a monetary success associated with their work, and for others they need those funds to survive. We should pay artists and creators, I don’t care if people pirate. Pay the goddamn creators you like so they keep making more cool stuff!
  
  I saw this video on here sometime ago and thought it brought up a great alternative that still lets people experience these things for free and lets artists still get paid:
  https://youtu.be/mnnYCJNhw7w
  _Anti _{Commercial-AI} _license _(CC _BY-NC-SA _4.0)
- I find this opinion hard to reconcile with Lemmy users' general stance that Reddit/Google are in the wrong for using comments to train AI without asking permission.
- What job do you do? I take it you do it for free yourself since that's what you are advocating for
  
  To be fair, it would be based if everyone did their job for free.
- Information and art is meant to be shared and enjoyed.
  And sometimes art and information is released for free and you are more than welcome to enjoy that for free, but when the artist asks for a payment for services rendered, and you refuse payment but still use their services, you are breaking a social contract (and a legal one, as well). To not pay for services rendered is illegal. If you want to use something, whether you are renting a car for the weekend, or you are using someones art for entertainment, if they require a payment for the service you use, you are obligated to pay for that service if you use it. If you don't want to pay for it, then don't use the service. You aren't owed a video game, movie, book, textbook, or newspaper anymore than you are owed a rental car. If you use a service, you pay for the service, even if the service is entertainment.
  
  You're both right.
  So I'll talk about a totally different point:
  The day the MPAA and the RIAA sued fans for tens of thousands of dollars for pirating content that was still generating millions, is the day I said I would never, ever, pay for their content again, and pirate it guilty-free.
- Agreed. Once you start blocking culture to only those who can afford it you start losing culture once it becomes unprofitable.
  _Anti _{Commercial-AI} _license _(CC _BY-NC-SA _4.0)
- The audacity from woke people.
  
  this opinion has nothing to do with woke people smh. this is just the new sin word just like how they did with communism. everything conservstives didn't like was conmunism, now everything they don't like is being woke
- Isn't a car a form of art since it was designed? So you should steal a car too?
  Come on.
  
  I'm not an advocate for unlimited pirating, but this is a poor analogy. Stealing is taking something from someone, as in the previous owner no longer possesses that item. Pirating digital media is not taking anything from anyone, as it's digital and thus still exists. This is why the courts do not call pirating theft, they call it copyright infringement.
  
  YOU WOULDN'T DOWNLOAD A CAR
  
  if you want to build a copy of my car be my guest
  
  Uh no? Cars have functions, and very real material costs that digital art does not.
  
  You must be a troll. Good joke.

Pretty cool move. If I come across one of his games that interests me, I'll gladly buy it.

Gotta love this quote from the article: "piracy doesn't mean a lost sale if the person pirating the game couldn't afford it in the first place."
I've seen this happen time and time again with people I know who simply couldn't pay even a single dollar for a game, and had no other options available. They deserve to experience culture and entertainment just as much as the rest of us.
- The original owner of Galactic Civilization 2 basically said the same thing. He also wrote the Gamers' Bill of Rights.
  So of course GalCiv3 did the exact opposite, removed a key feature (milky way map) that was in the first 2 so they could sell it as an overpriced DLC, and made as many DLCs as they could (though not nearly as bad as Paradox or EA).
  I don't know who owns Stardock Entertainment now, if the owner sold it, sold out, or got hostile takeovered, but now they're just like all the other big corporate assholes.
  
  The enshitification is a very real thing unfortunately.
- To be fair, piracy does drive down sales, as some of the people who would otherwise buy the game do pirate it.
  Even still, word of mouth is a great way to compensate for that effect; also, culture really shouldn't be reserved to those who have the means.
  
  To be fair, piracy does drive down sales, as some of the people who would otherwise buy the game do pirate it.
  Do we know that for sure? If games don't have demos, and don't have pirated copies available, how do you know that people who would have otherwise pirated it are just going to go ahead and buy it?
  Also, isn't the opposite true? If pirated copies of games are available, won't some people treat them as demos and if they like the game then they will end up buying it to support the developer and to get official updates for the game?

In my teenage years and early 20s I pirated everything because I was broke. I could squirrel away enough money to build a low grade gaming computer and the benefit to me was "I don't have to pay for games because I can pirate them". That or I survived on Demo CDs that came with magazines I got at the book store (and later on I think it was demoplanet.com?). If it wasn't for these resources, I probably never would have gotten into PC gaming.
Now that I have expendable income, I buy games that I want to play.
I would never have been a customer if I wasn't originally a pirate. It's the circle of life.
Also I just went and bought this game because I have money to support shit like this and I'm all about supporting developers who understand.

Based jakito

Based.
Makes me wanna buy the game even though I know literally nothing about it.
- Right? First thing, look for a torrent. Second, put aside some money when I have it.

Note to PC gamers: If you have anything with RTX on it, you are not broke.

These devs fuck

The strategy makes a lot of business sense too. It's why piracy controls in Microsoft Windows were so weak for so long.
Steve Ballmer said something along the lines of if the Chinese are going to pirate software, I want it to be Microsoft software.
I'm not sure if this game has an online mode but generally speaking the network effect of online means more people playing equals a better online experience. If half those people didn't pay, the ones who did pay still get a better online experience right?

Gangster dev

Why doesn't he just put the game up for free as an option then?
- I don't think Steam supports any sort of sliding scale system and they have a price parity rule which would be broken by offering it elsewhere
  
  You can offer the game elsewhere for less / free, you just can't sell steam keys for less than you sell them on steam.
- Piracy is illegal, so a lot of people will still abstain from downloading the game for free.
  If you provide it for free on official distribution channels, your revenue drops drastically.
  
  Is it illegal if the creator is saying they’re ok with you getting it for free?

It all depends on your income, man. If you are well off you have no excuse to not pay for anything. If you live in Vietnam then by all means all software becomes suddenly free and free of guilt.

Well he is free to put it under a libre licence anytime.
- Which he did. His statement is the license.
  Plus free software doesn't strictly mean that the author doesn't get paid for their work.
  
  Piracy isn't a libre licence.
  Libre licence means sharing the source code and the game assets.
  Here piracy means free to play.
  And you're right free software doesn't mean the author doesn't get paid. But that's not the point here.
  Lastly, in some legislations (author's right), a statement like this one don't work because the author himself cannot violate his own rights. Which mean that people can be sue for pirating a work even if the author stated that people can pirate it. To me, it's endangering the audience.
  On the bright side, it's still nice to have an author acknowledging piracy doesn't steal sells and that culture is meant to be shared.

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.
  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.
  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:
  obviously this is not the case. Pirates have existed for decades.
  pirates pirate because the cost is either too high for them to afford, or higher than what they value the game/... at. If you consider yourself a "rational capitalist" (which, let's be real, is what most of the anti-piracy-crowd sees themselves at) then consider this as the market working as intended: demand simply isn't high enough at the price they're selling at
  and once more, just to make sure this comes across, pirating a digital product incurrs zero (0) loss on the side of the developer/studio. No, you can not count "virtual" losses from what they could have sold if the pirates ever had the intention of buying, or pirating didn't exist (because, y'know, it does).
  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?

104 comments