They get it. Looks at all these “influencers” getting shit they don’t need for free all the time to spread word.
Piracy is basically the same thing, but it’s somebody getting something they do need/want and giving it honest word-of-mouth promotion
I don’t remember who it was but some developer who’s also an influencer was having a problem with piracy on one of his games in I think it was brazil? something to do with the fluctuating currency making it prohibitively expensive no matter how low you set the price, so he just made it free in Brazil.
PirateSoftware I believe it’s who you’re talking about. But yeah he didn’t make it free, just priced well for that country
Also it’s better for Devs than buying grey market keys bought using stolen credit cards.
I wish there was a middle ground. The grey market keys provide convenience that pirating doesn’t, like steam activation.
I stopped using key resellers for games though after learning about how they’re sourced
Pls dont pirate indie games. They are usually made by a very small amount of people that work realy hard and deserve every cent. And usually they are very cheap. Everybody can spare five bucks once in a while.
I can’t :( It’s 5 dollar for you not for me. (I am a Teen BTW)
Pirate today, buy tomorrow…unless its a AAA dumpster fire. Always pirate AAA games. The gaming experience tends to be better because pirates remove all the anti-cheat and other BS.
Cheap is relative, for me Hades was very cheap but steam changed the default price adjustment for my country and now Hades II cost almost twice for what I paid for Hades I.
What would make it easier to donate for things which have been freely distributed as torrents? Some links in a bundled text file?
For indi-devs having a “donate” option on their page might be good for both people that maybe pirated but liked it enough to send some amount (even if not the full price). And could be a random source of money to off-set some of the pirated copies from people that just decide they wanted to show additional support for the efforts of the devs.
Lots of fans are willing to leave donations especially if the devs are at risk of shutting down or some other hardships. So long as the donation options only go to the devs/creators or their specific studio/company and not to some larger entity/publisher. Store fronts like itch.io allowing devs to have both an official front to allow safe free copies along with the normal price and “pay what you want” stuff is also nice.
This is why Name Your Price is a better system
Ultrakill is one of those rare examples of media where I genuinely feel a large amount of guilt if I pirate. Great community, super responsive (and largely queer) development team, incredible game…
First time in forever that I’ve actually bothered to buy a game without pirating it first. So here’s a hot take that goes against everything I usually stand for: pirating indie games is kinda bad.
With all the recent studio shutdowns and a largely saturated market, it’s becoming harder and harder for indie game developers to make a living. I hope everyone remembers to support independent projects they truly enjoy - be it music, games, or any other piece of media - because otherwise we’re going to end up with only 3 game studios that pump out the same homogeneous bullshit every year.
