Nowadays, the absolute vast majority of games that I play are shit tbh.
This is why I pirate games first to try them out. I wanna be very clear that if I think a game is good I buy it, no questions asked.
However, since most games don’t have demos or trials, I don’t want to feel like I’ve wasted money so I look to piracy so that I can try them out before making a purchase.
AITAH?
For the people discussing here: remember that the morality of an act depends on the act itself, the context where it happens, and the moral premises. It does not depend on how you phrase or label the act.
With that in mind: since I define arseholery as “actions or behaviour that cause more harm to someone else than they benefit the agent”, and there’s practically no harm being caused by OP’s actions, I do not think that OP is being an arsehole.
Good point!
No. Intellectual property is not real, so nothing is being stolen by you.
If it’s a small developer, and you like the game, make sure to support them if you can. If it’s a mega studio, don’t feel bad about not paying anything.
That’s my personal policy at least.
Intellectual property is not real?
So unless I make something physical I am not making anything real? So all my work up to the point of a plant being actually built is not real?
Doing anything on a PC or smartphone is not real.
Inventing a train of thought that cures every known desease and mental illness is simply not real - because you can’t touch it. This is the equivalent of dark ages church logic.
The results of your ideas are real, the outcomes and impacts are real. The mental labor you do is valuable, but none of it is “property.”
If your thoughts and ideas and concepts are property that can be stolen, then please explain how you can be deprived of them.
Thinking hard about something is labor, but it’s not property, it can’t possibly be property, because it lacks all of the aspects typically required to define property.
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IP laws are not the only way to ensure a creator is compensated for their work. Money isn’t the only possible compensation, and modern IP law doesn’t protect most small time creators. It protects mega-corps and their monopolies on content/products/services.
It stifles competition and progress, not enhances it.
I used to think this way, then I realized physical property is not real either. Both are defined by the state, recorded on paper somewhere, and protected by force.
Just because you can actually physically go to my property does not change the fact that it is only my property because I have a deed.
I’m still not sure how to feel about IP but I’m less dismissive of it for now.
Let’s word it differently then. Physical property is literally real, like, you can go to it. IPs are not a resource. The game devs do not run out of copies of a game because OP pirated them. They remain at an infinite supply. If someone breaks into your house and makes off with your microwave, you are now short a microwave; If you pirate software, the developer is not short in any stock of software
Possession of property isn’t the same as property itself. Although I agree with you that I am sceptical of property in general, at least physical property makes some sense when defined. Intellectual property just makes absolutely no sense.
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People should be rewarded for their mental labor, but that’s not the same as saying they have created intellectual property.
A thought or concept is not an object that can be stolen. An idea cannot be a scarce resource that is used up.
If concepts or ideas can be “stolen” then that means somebody is being deprived of them. But unless you somehow erased the idea from all parts of that person’s brain and transfered it into yours, nobody has been deprived of anything, and thus nothing has been stolen.
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You cannot be “deprived of profit.” That makes no sense. Nobody is owed any profit for simply trying to sell something.
If I create art to sell, and nobody buys it, I haven’t been robbed of anything at all. And that fact doesn’t change if somebody walks past my art booth, looks at my painting, admires it, and then walks away. They didn’t “steal” anything from me. I haven’t been deprived of anything. Unless you want to make the claim that they are a thief now that they enjoyed my painting without paying my anything for it.
If that’s true, then everybody who walks through an art fair or gallery but doesn’t buy any art is a robber and should be arrested and charged.
The idea that IP protects the little folks who are struggling artists is a capitalist myth perpetuated primarily by corporate advocates that are the actual beneficiaries of IP laws. It’s used by mega-corps to lock down massive amounts of content, make billions off of it, exploit actual artists to perpetuate their monopoly on creative expressions of characters.
It’s also used by pharma corps to artifically restrict supply of critical drugs to the population in order to make billions in profits and enrich their shareholders.
And the whole, “nobody would create anything if copyright/patents didn’t exist” is yet another capitalist myth, disproved by countless examples. As if the entire internet doesn’t run on the back of Linux, a free and open source project spanning literal decades, Wikipedia, the largest single encyclopedia of human knowledge in dozens of languages, all the millions of pages of fan fiction and hobbiest artists that have created passion projects with no expectation of making money. Etc etc.
Don’t buy into the propaganda.
No, not at all. Games used to have demos and trial versions, like basically all games, but game studios used to have to actually finish making a game before they shipped it. Trying before you bought was the business model of the whole industry. Now so many games are shipped in such bad condition they wouldn’t dare let you try it first. Trying before you buy is just prudent, as long as you actually buy the ones you like enough to play through.
There were plenty of demos of amazing first levels and absolute trash as the rest of the game.
Blatantly lying as marketing is as old as videogames themselves.
Used to do that for decades. Nowadays with steam i just return the game.
I don’t trust the refund policy. If they have a so called refund policy why not force every published to add a 1-2 hour free trial instead? We should be able to try games and evaluate before the money leaves our pockets.
Because the “default path” is different, a free trial would have way less conversion than the current system.
With a free trial you have to take an action to buy it. With a refund you have to take an action to be refunded.
Or they could do it like SaaS, where you’re automatically charged at the end of the trial unless you decide to cancel before… But that’s a bit convoluted and it wouldn’t bring much compared to the current system.
Personally unless it’s a dirt cheap game I do enough research before buying and I rarely have to refund. But I definitely refund if the game is not at the level of quality that I expected.
Don’t trust the software company to do what they have made legally sound claims to doing, and that hundreds of thousands of people have said they’ve done.
But do trust the script kiddies writing crackers not to install invisible keyloggers and ad trackers.
Nope. Ive been burned on several games (back 4 blood anyone?) And tired of losing. Maybe the game isn’t for me, maybe it won’t run on my system. I have several games I bought after trying them from torrents: rimworld, farcey series, fallout 4 (love/own 3 and NV, needed to test 4). Several games that I really like I’ve bought a second copy for a shared account so my kid can play them also.
Nothing wrong with trying before you buy in my opinion. My library is full of games I r never installed. :(
Spot on!
Me too. Latest one is battlebit. Game looked fun. Plays very well. Balance is shit.
Nah that’s essentially the same as buying and refunding. If you can’t afford a purchase it’s perfectly fine.
Nope
Is it a small studio or a place that encourages unionization and pays creators for their creation? Then not really, cuz you still paid for it in the end.
Is it a shit studio with shit ethics? Then yes. Stop giving monsters financial approval.
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You can achieve the same with refunds on steam
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