Tired of this abusive business model that big companies use on games.
- I see a game on Steam with some decent price
- I click on it
- Dozens of DLCs, “Gold”, “Deluxe” “Enhanced” version to enjoy the full game
- Then you decide to pay for this shit anyway
- But then the game is behind a launcher, that needs online connection and account even if it’s full single-player
- The game sometimes are just a port from an old console with almost full price, a game that you’ve paid for before
- The game needs a hell amount of updates do become playable
- And so much more…
Steam did an excellent job keeping me away from piracy, they provide too much good feature, discounts and etc… But not even Steam can make miracles against those abusive practices.
I must say RDR1 port was the last drop to me, It’s game I played back on PS3 on my teenager time, I wanted to have some good memories and play it again, guess what, a full AAA price on a port, it’s not even a remaster.
I’ve been avoiding EA and Ubisoft games for years, but still buying from big companies on Steam. Now I just give up, there’s no more hope for AAA games, only mercenary companies are left: EA, Ubisoft, Rockstar, Activision, 2K, Bungie etc…
- EA: Games with a hell amount of DLCs, the same FIFA every single year at full price, launcher required, they don’t even try to hide anymore
- Ubisoft: Same thing as EA, lots of DLCs, missed some game content from an old Prince of Persia because they shut an old launcher integrated to the game.
- Rockstar: Launchers everywhere, charging a full price for the same game multiple times (GTA V).
- Activision: You pay a full price and it still comes with a hell amount of micro-transactions, killed COD.
- 2K: Out of nowhere decided to add a launcher to every old game they had (Bioshock and others I think) saying it was “QoL” update, now they decided to remove it, too late. The new Borderlands 4 terribly optimized, here we go with some dozens of updates again.
- Bungie: The live service model, removed a lot of old paid contents from Destiny, the game will eventually die.
I’ll still pay for small companies games, because I can, but those big ones, honestly, I don’t give a shit anymore, they could be erased from existence together with all their games, I really don’t care. Some smaller companies I’ve had a good experience and I think it’s worth paying for: Ghost Ship Games, No More Robots, Hello Games, Techland, Frictional Games, Annapurna Interactive.
Some companies are in a limbo to me, I’m not entirely sure about it: Capcom, Bethesda, Warner, Square Enix.
So, that’s it, I just downloaded Spider Man Remastered and RDR from FitGirl, it worked seamless, I didn’t have a single issue. I could even add as non-Steam game and use Steam input (thanks Steam), I’ll probably use some script to move to savegames data to the cloud, and let the packed games on an external HDD (finally, I’ll own my games).
Another thing that’s hard to ditch to me is achievement tracker, I know we have AchievementWatcher but it doesn’t work too well on pirated games. It’s something I’ll need to get used, not a big deal tbh.
I’ll probably use the money I’d spend on AAA games to explore some indie games. And AAA games are now always pirate.
Obs.: The companies I’ve mentioned here are from my own experience, this isn’t meant to be an Wikipedia of good/bad companies, I know there are more decent and bad companies out there.
I am just ignoring them. Not playing their games even pirated.
Played the demo of Prince of Persia last year, totally liked it, price was good, saw the Ubisoft Logo (CEO tells that you don’t get to own your games, AAA games priced 70-130 €, anti consumer practices), never bought that game never played it.
Nintendo also took a red card this year from me, not another penny from my wallet.
Bonus i put in my Steam ignore list all the games that come out with price >60 €, so i wont make a mistake and buy them even on a huge sale.
I buy indie games and only AAA games full priced like BG3, Expedition 33, Elden Ring, etc… , games that they worth it and they don’t bloat you with stupid stuff. And also their companies respect the players.
I always watch at least 10+ gameplay videos and critiques before buying games, especially AAA. For indies, I don’t do it as much, more like “surprise me” kind of experience.
Unpopular take: I’m just gonna quit gaming for a while. If I really need to piss away some time I got a bunch of wad files or newgrounds. F it.
Why bother with ethics or morality? I’ve been pirating what I can half of my life now, just because I’m a poor and stingy bastard. Let people with finished mortgages and nice cars pay those companies.
Yes, that’s true, poor people just want to have some fun, but society try to make it wrong, you need to follow all the guidelines of morality. But nobody talk about rich people destroying the world, spending on luxuries, exploring workers, and doing this kind of crap with the gaming industry.
I don’t know if its the age or perhaps I unconciously became sick of the practices OP describes, but the games I genuinelly enjoy playing the most nowadays are mainly AA or Indie. And ofc, I don’t mind paying full price for them.
A non-exhaustive list of those I loved:
- Outer Wilds (became my favourite game of all times)
- Inside/Limbo
- Little Nightmares
- Sifu
- The standley parable
- Still awakes the deep
- Gris/Neva
- Firewatch
- Journey/Abzu/The Pathless/Sea of Sword
- Rainworld
- No man’s sky (a special case, I know)
- Cocoon
- Unravel
- Stray
- Below
- Far
- Pacific Drive
- The invincible
I went back to sailing the high seas for games when The Sims 3 from Steam wouldn’t run on Linux no matter what I did, whilst a pirate version runs just fine.
Pirating in Linux is actually much more complicated than running the game from Steam or from other stores via something like Lutris, because for official versions of a game there are usually scripts doing all the necessary Wine/Proton configuration, but not for the pirate versions of a game, so if it fails to run directly you have to enable logging, dig through the logs yourself and figure out which libraries need to be configured with Winetricks, which is how gaming in Linux used to work 5 years ago (and why very few people did it).
Can you tell me how you got it to work?
If I remember it correctly, the Dodi repack just needs some audio library configured in the Wine instance via Winetricks as a built-in library.
- If using Lutris, you need to enable logging for that game, then try and run it.
- After it fails to run, look at the log and near where it stops you’ll see it complain about failing to load a certain DLL (and after that lots of failing to load other DLLs as a consequence of failing to load that original DLL).
- Google the name of that DLL and you’ll find which library it is part of.
- From Lutris, run Winetricks for that game (it’s in a pull-down next to the “Start” button for the game) and under Winetricks “Libraries” add that library to that Wine instance as a built-in library (if that doesn’t work, download the DLL, put it in the game dir and add it as native).
If what you see in the logs is, instead of a “Couldn’t load DLL”, a “Couldn’t find function in DLL” what you have is not a missing library but instead a library version mismatch. Go to Winetricks and force the use of the native version of the library: sometimes the built-in version of a common DLL in Wine is the wrong version, and you need to force Wine to use the version of that DLL that comes with the game, i.e. the “native” version.
If all that fails, Google that game’s name together with “Linux” to see if somebody else has figured it out.
Just curious. Is piracy your strategy to kill the big companies, since you really want to consume their products but don’t want to pay, because of your stated reasons?
For the sake of discussion, is it not possible for you to not buy products from big companies but also not consume their products?
Using myself as an example, I hate EA so much I don’t install any of their products on my machine. Or I hate Adobe so I don’t use it at home (the workplace is uncontrollable). I don’t pirate their products as there are alternatives, and I cannot imagine how I may enjoy them since I cannot forget who made them.
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Same story as Netflix, it used to be great value but look at it now…
Eh, if it’s a new game I want and I can afford it I’ll buy it. I’m just buying less new games lately.
I am however just going hog wild on emulating all the old console games.
Got my PS2 all set up with a hard drive and FreeHDBoot so I can just load it up with all the PS2 games I never got a chance to play or own! Hacked my Vita and download all that stuff I never played.
Haven’t tried to hack any Nintendo stuff besides my Wii, which I need to do again apparently. But I’m not exactly desperate for things to play, I’ve got loads of things to choose from these days.
I am too paranoid about security to pirate a video game. I just don’t play the big AAA titles. There are so many indie games worth my attention and support that I don’t notice.
Well I just download well tested games by others, if it’s trusted by many and have worked just fine, I think there’s nothing to worry about.
I don’t think I’ve pirated a game since 2008! Used to be if I didn’t like their price, I waited and bought on sale or used. Now that I play on PC and used games aren’t a thing anymore, I just don’t play it.
There’s a sea of games out there and If I don’t like the practices of the publisher, I skip them and move to the next. Why should I engage with their product if they don’t respect me as a customer or share my sensibilities? I’m not a hypocrite.
I pirated the RDR remaster and felt very entitled to because I bought it way back on xbox360 with the Undead Nightmare mode, but that whole DLC is broken even though they still sold it to me on the Xbox store. So I pirated to new remaster and when I went to play Undead Nightmare, it’s still broken lol
This was me 20 years ago.
Congrats on finally seeing the light, but what took you so long?
Sometimes day to day life sucks, we need to escape into games we like and look past all the privacy and annoying bullshit. But when nearly all games are this way, easy to step back and go “wait a minute…”
When (not if) enshittification takes over, I’ll pirate their shit.
You can’t blatantly assume all games are like what AAA is. Indie development is the beacon that says that games can still be made simple, without all of the corporate fluff and shit jammed into it.
I said nearly all. There are exceptions, but everything has become a shit show lately.
I truly hate to even consider this, but indie games have already started to turn, and will start to go more towards the same issues.
What valve did for gaming and capitalism in 2004, they need to undo or come up with a new solution or something, or maybe somebody else. I’m not sure if communism or anarchy or a new capitalism or a creative solution that fixes everything and makes everybody happy and is ethically sound and sustainable. But the amount of AI slop and desperation that current capitalism is fucking everybody with is only going to get worse.
The “indie games are our salvation, our guiding light” was ten years ago, and AI is here to stay, for whatever effects and changes it brings, because it’s affecting literally all aspects of our lives because we live in a capitalistic society where tech and information is utilized by and affects the entire planet and every single human being, plant, and animal.
Okay, okay.
I am going to have to whip out this criticism for anybody that has made these kind of rants.
STOP. FOCUSING. ON. AAA. GAMES!
I’m not kidding, that’s your problem and that’s anyone else’s problem who get sick of gaming as a whole. You keep kicking that can down the street for AAA game development to pander to you, but end up disappointed over and over and over. But you still kept your hand out, you still bought their games at Day 1, you still bought their DLC, you still waited for all and any patchwork. You were still there!
Meanwhile I and several dozen others by now, have been in the pirating game for years before you and anyone else had the guts to finally join in after having your face slapped hundreds of times by this point.
And people have been also telling you for years as to what the better alternatives that was out there were, but nooope! Still stuck to AAA development.
Took you long enough.
It’s funny you say that.
I started pirating games again when the official version of The Sims 3 from Steam wouldn’t run on Linux no matter what I did, but a pirated version (which I got just to check if I could get it to work) ran just fine.
Once I figured out how to run that version of the game in Linux (as well as how to sandbox it with Firejail), that knowledge meant I could just as easilly run other pirated versions of games.
Now, generally I’m the ultimated patient gamer (notice how all of that was for The Sims 3, which is from 2009, with its latest DLC being from 2013), but in my Redbeard persona I can just as easilly get recent AAA games as I can any other (probably more easilly, even, as those are the game torrents with the most users).
So I’ve downloaded a number of those, and installed a couple.
And you know what: even the supposedly best ones are BORING. Even highly regarded large open world ones, with their beautifully crafted supposedly alive worlds feel shallow and formulaic in terms of game play and don’t really hold my attention for all that long. I literally have 4 or 5 downloaded recent AAA games waiting to be tried, which I simply can’t be arsed to install because everytime I do try one it just turns out to be dissapointing. I find myself going back to Indie games I’ve played again and again like Project Zomboid or The Lone Dark, or even really old AAA games like The Sims 3 or The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (all bought and paid for, BTW).
Even when the only costs are my time and storage space, modern AAA games aren’t worth it over Indie games of older AAA games with far less dazzling graphics.
As I refuse to pirate Indie games, by now I’ve pretty much given up on piracy simply because if you exclude Indie games, all the other games are kinda shit.
There’s a scene like this in one of the Telltale Sam and Max games that really deserves a better reenactment. Went something like this:
Sam: “So, Bosco, how much do you want for this…’Deadly virus’ that’s really just a tissue you sneezed into?”
Bosco: “A hundred trillion dollars.”
Max: “WHAT? That’s insane!!”
Sam: “How crazy can you get to think we’re going to pay something like that?”
Bosco: “All I know is, I keep finding the dumbest junk around my store, and think up the most ridiculous price I can imagine for them! And you two keep paying it! So who’s crazy now, fool?”I think you can generalize it even further to don’t reward bad behavior. That should include purchasing goods and services from organizations that try to exploit people or commoditize art.
I stopped buying games and swapped to graphic novels which is unnecessary af because I pirate comics and get everything for free instantly, weridly just getting more dopmaine/value out of these purchses than games lately, couldve bought bf6 with a friend so itd be half price but im just not feeling gaming, would rather spend 200$ to read old discounted comics, can get quite a bit of content
Think the physical books help remind me that the digital comics exist, I forget my hobbies without daily reminders and if I dont persue them for a week I forger why I even enjoyed them. Need to start using blender again but I cant remember why it was fun til I use it lol
