Use code "SOG" at www.gfuel.com and save some money. Check out the newest podcast episode: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/nZp3aK91p5PeZqM.html

Yes. It is legitimately the best way to preserve games since publishers don't want to do it

I don't know if it's morally okay to pirate, but I know it's morally wrong to buy a game from Ubisoft.

"pirates having a better experience than legit users" has been happening since the first DRM fiasco, which incidentally was also Ubisoft's fault. Pirates were playing Assassin's Creed day one while legit users were locked out because the DRM server wasn't working.

You forgot to mention how the piracy community often keeps their own servers online for people who want to play multiplayer on abandoned Triple A games, that's why you see people launching Spacewar on Steam.

I would never pirate an Indie game, but I’d definitely pirate a game from a AAA company especially if it’s one that can’t be bought or is just too expensive for what it is.

Piracy in most cases is done because; A: You dont have the cash - you wouldnt be able to afford it anyways. B: To try a game before you buy because demos are either non-existent or not representative of the actual game. C: The game is no longer available through legitimate retailers / the service required to access the game is terrible or offline. Developers like those that made Darkwood actually didnt think the piracy was a problem. They even let people torrent it for free on pirate bay so that people could get a virus free version of the game and try it out, but urged people to buy it if they liked it.

"The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It's by giving those people a service that's better than what they're receiving from the pirates" -Gabe Newell

There's a reason piracy is having a renaissance. These greedy companies do not care about the customer, whether it be locking one show behind a $5 streaming platform nobody wants or charging people to replay an older game on a "remastered" edition which is worse than the modded game they banned modders for making playable. The whole entertainment industry thought it was in the clear and could get away with this shit, but it wont, and it will suffer!

When companies decide to restrict your access to games you pay for? Entirely, yes.

"One thing that we have learned is that piracy is not a pricing issue. It's a service issue. The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting anti-piracy technology to work. It's by giving those people a service that's better than what they're receiving from the pirates." -Gabe Newell

This whole debacle seriously needs legally addressing. Companies abandoning software that people have paid for, should either: 1) Publish a patch to remove DRM 2) Opensource the code 3) Refund *all* customers (+ inflation) failing to do one of them should mean them losing intellectual property of the title and it becomes public domain.

I think piracy is a fair response to having to buy hundreds of dollars worth of DLC just to have a complete game that you could have bought 5 years ago for $60

In a perfect world, companies would release their server software so people who love these older games can self-host and maintain multiplayer features at no expense to the creators.

When you're in a third world country and a game is priced higher than the minimal wage, ig piracy can be forgivable sometimes.

Dude, there was a study done like 4 years ago of about 300+ pages explaining how piracy isn't harmful and it was supressed by the EU. Piracy isn't an issue, we don't live on the 2000 anymore.

For Preservation Sake: Yes, yes it is. For the sake of Morality: No it is not. When it comes to piracy, I personally think pirating games from Triple A companies is no big deal since they make millions of dollars regardless. I don't think it is okay to pirate from indie developers though. Only a real asshole would want to steal from someone who's barely got themselves off the ground.

As a wise man once said: "piracy is good and always moral"

I’m with the “I don’t care crowd” Whether I pirate or buy a game is entirely dependent on whether or not I’m motivated enough to grab my credit card from the other room.

Muta: pirating media is bad Also Muta: piracy is the best thing since free food

Short answer: Yes. Long answer: If the game is no longer available for purchase or made it no longer playable, then yes. It is morally ok. I believe in persevering video games, no matter how old.

We've had this discussion in the anime community for years now and the conclusion is basically either you provide fans a way to enjoy the shows legally in as high quality fashion as they would by pirating or you shut up and don't bitch and moan when they do pirate. That means reasonable prices for subscriptions, having all shows in a season avalibale in all countries via a streaming site, and notably against Netflix, same day releases. If you cannot provide at the very least those features, don't complain when someone pirates a show. Same with games, if pirating gives the consumer an objectively better experience than buying the game legally then just do that. Paying specifically to get a worse experience is not better, it's just letting the companies off the hook and letting them know they can pull stupid shit like this without repercussions. Going through the trouble of pirating a game is not something most people will do even if it's literally free. Most people do, in fact, pay for the stuff they enjoy if they can afford it. But if later down the line the company is gonna spit on you for buying a game and forcing you to rebuy it just ot be able to acces what you already own, or will simply take it away from you alltogether, how could they justify charging you for it in the first plce when you can get it and KEEP it for free elsewhere? It's on them to keep making that commitment worth it, if they fail on that because they are greedy as fuck or just don't care that's on them, not on the consumer.

Some companies treat their customers so badly that I actually feel _immoral_ for buying some of their games. When it comes to those publishers, I'd pirate their games even if I were rich.

I did a paper on this last year for my research writing class. SOG actually inspired the idea for me. Thanks for keeping us updated!

It depends. If it's a game no longer available for purchase, it should be legal/moral.

Ubisofts newest games catch phrase is "Long live piracy". I feel like someone didn't think that one through

Nintendo's poor executive choices is why I'm 100% on Emulation and Piracy for their Retro Games, since some Games are never going to be rereleased, and don't get me started with RockStar's poor attempt of GTA: SA Remaster.

This is why I’m thankful I bought most of my Wii games physical during my childhood. Yes, my Wii will eventually be beyond repair, but those games can still be ripped and stored for historical purposes.

Fuck copyright, if i can get something free, i will get it for free.

I dont always do it, i'll generally do it for old games that cant be bought or if I previously owned the game and I have a reason I cant play it anymore, for example, when I was younger I had a Luigi's Mansion disc but now its broken and so occasionally ill play the game via piracy. Pirating big, new, expensive games is (generally) not something I support, but I wont ever complain or hunt anyone down for it.

I took a videogame ethics class and the most important thing my professor wanted me to remember is that piracy and theft are legitimately two different things.

Piracy wouldn't be such a hot topic if gaming companies didn't find new and innovative ways to piss of the consumer with their BS and apply "anti-piracy" mechanics that more often than not ends up hurting the people who bought the game fairly. Assassin's Creed 2 is a great example where the official, bought PC version was riddled with problems thanks to anti-piracy tech while the pirated version had almost no problems whatsoever. It's astounding how Ubisoft could be so unbelievably stupid in this regard.

i dont really care about pirating but at this point pirating is like downloading a game and paying is like donating money to the developers and getting the game

Perfect example: Silent Hill 1, 2, 3, 4, Origins, Shattered Memories, and Book of Memories all cost $100 second hand and Konami refuses to invest the money/time to properly preserve them. Loading up Duckstation and/or PCSX2 is free and preserves games very well. Plus no money to Konami. I’d say piracy is morally legal. EDIT: I'm actually wrong. Shattered Memories on PS2 goes for $300-400. jfc you might as well just pirate the damn thing

So as a indie game developer, most of the games I have helped make are on the piratebay. While I don't see the sells of the games, it's nice to know someone is getting the chance to enjoy the work put into it. Thanks for playing, please support indie devs when you can. :D

I actually wasn't sure about the physical disc thing before you actually dispelled that myth! Thank you for enlightening me!

I do a lot of offline cold-storage but you raise a very interesting point about disc's there are bundled with major patches that are installable without internet access.

as a indie gamedev myself, i don't mind if my game gets pirated. i grew up on pirated games and im forever thankful for them. i wish i could pay for it but living in a third world country is not easy. not everyone has it easy. so i just believe they play it pirated is still better than not playing it at all. maybe they like it and market it for us.

Pirates have done more for video game preservation than most game companies ever have, games like Driver: San Francisco or any PC Spider man game that is unable to be played on PC legitimately can be fairly easily gotten through piracy and if companies are going to fully abandon their games then they should just do it the right way and make it DRM free and either sell it for cheap on GoG or just give it away for those who care to still play it. As Gaben said "Piracy is an issue of Service"

I “legally downloaded” a game for the first time in my life last month. I wanted to play need for speed underground 2 with a friend, but the version I had (Xbox) was bugged when you tried to play it on the Xbox 360. There were slowdown issues (those were bearable) but the split screen mode was completely broken so like the good samaritan I am I purchase a ps2 copy off of Amazon (it was like 40 bucks for a 17 year old game) so I can emulate it on my pc. Well my order gets cancelled and I didn’t have enough time to obtain another copy before my friend visited so I visit an iso and rom hosting website and “legally acquired” a digital iso from them. If EA still supported the windows version of the game I would’ve gladly bought it from them, but they don’t support any nfs game past 2008.

"I just don't care anymore" I definitely agree. If the game I want to play is an independent game project made by a minimum wage working college craduate then I'd probably not pirate it but that's it

As Disney once said, "Take what you can, give nothing back."

Gaben got it right. Just improve products and piracy will be solved.

I love how Muta has to make a video on this topic like every 6 months.

Lack of ease of access leading to piracy is what Gabe focused on during early days of Steam. When you have shit like SecuROM/DRM making it hard to play, unable to buy it for your region, or other QoL then it leads to piracy. Obviously some people are cheap or literally can't afford as such it isn't a lost sale but if companies want sales then being consumer friendly is important. GOG makes money despite lack of DRM last I checked.

You're sort of right that you can install physical discs without an internet connection and it can't be taken away, but there's a small issue: 99% of AAA games released now practically require a day 1 patch to play, so once someone decides to shut off the servers you're still screwed. Piracy is the only way games can be properly preserved.

the fact that the question if it's "morally okay?" has to be asked already tells me there's something going terribly wrong with the "proper" way to play games

I do it because i do not wanna pay for a game that can't even run on the gaming laptop anyway.

5:42 the fact that you had to explain that had me in stitches 😂😂😂

When it comes to morals and piracy, it all depends on the context. Maybe it's because I've on the seas for so long and seen terrible companies use the moral argument to manipulate people, but I don't ascribe morality to piracy in general. I, for one, don't care about legality when that same law serves to benefit companies screwing customers in the ass in every way.

With how most games are riddled with predatory microtransactions now, I think piracy is definitely morally okay. Honestly should be encouraged.

Meanwhile, Capcom is still keeping servers for Mega Man Powered Up and that game came for the PSP back in 2006! That's how Protoman is unlocked so if they ever shut down the servers, it's gonna be impossible to download him unless people save him on the memory card. Ah well, I think it's really cool they did not shut down servers for the game and I hope they never do. Users can also upload and download custom levels.

I used to be a huge pírate when I was younger, pírated lots of books and games that I couldn't afford. That didn't affect any of those game/book sales at all. All the specialized education I got from said books allowed me to get very high paying jobs, and now I've got one of the top 0.8% biggest Steam libraries in the world. Piracy in some sense can be like a "pay it forward" type of thing.

When I was young, I pirated a ton of shit. Then I got my finances in order, I went back and *PURCHASED* a whole mess of titles that I had enjoyed via piracy. So now I own about 200 games that steam thinks I never played. I tried to buy batches too and unfortunately, my batch for Assassin's Creed excluded Brotherhood and Revelations. So if I ever get time again to do some gaming, I might go back and have to pirate those titles in order to enjoy them again. Annoying as fuck. But yeah, I've come full circle. Same deal with Microsoft and Adobe though too. I paid for a few versions via the upgrade path. Then they tried to recruit me into creative cloud. For about three times the annual cost I was setting aside for it. Fuck em. Excel took out shared workbooks, which allows shared excel files on local file servers, replacing it with co-authoring, which only allows saving online, and accessing excel online, which is missing a lot of advanced features like scripting that is relevant for the function of the excel file, so it's a deal breaker. I told the Microsoft guy about the problem and he didn't care. Fuck the lot of them.

You also have to remember companies have pirated there own game to re-release it, since the pirated version has a fan patch to to remove the DRM that some companies couldn't, or a ROM they couldn't find/was easier to get

speaking of games not being supported, Disney Infinity 3.0, certain items you can place ingame are locked behind an account linking feature, but even with the latest version update 3.0.0, you cannot get these items if you didnt log in.

i very much feel u muta... game preservation is high on my list... too many golden games being lost to time or forgotten and the online stuff is crap the moment the servers gone the game is lost to time and its honestly depressing... missed my chance to get a digital copy of Too Human... couldnt get my hotmail stuff sorted in time to get a copy and now its gone... gota find a way to play it again... meh... such is life...

Unless company's like Microsoft , Sony , or Nintendo make it easier to access the library of games from their back catalog then it is up to the community to preserve those games. The moment they restrict them or make it impossible to play such games then yes I see the benefits of piracy.

Gabe Newell once said, “The easiest way to stop piracy is … by giving those people a service that's better than what they're receiving from the pirates,” as in, make a game better so people will buy a real copy instead of pirating one. I would like to see Valve maybe stand up for us and say “We’re not going to let you sell your games on Steam unless you offer a better experience than pirated versions offer and make strides at preserving your games.”

I am an avid collector of game series, and let me tell you it has been a nightmare trying to get some of them (like Pokemon, for instance). Buying repros or downloading them doesn't sit well with me. But man do I love being able to rip roms and have the satisfaction of backing them up myself. It preserves them and ripens them for mods. Can't tell you how much fun it was to mod the heck out of Breath of the Wild on Cemu. I've been obsessed lately with buying all the Nintendo games I can from the 3DS and Wii U eshops because it's gonna be closing down soon. Really lucky to have finally gotten all of Smash 4's DLC for both systems, along with tons of Pokemon, Mario, DK, etc. Wouldn't be as big of a deal to me if it was all on Switch and I didn't have to subscribe to play them.

Youre absolutely right, its a losing fight. We can just sit back and watch everyone suffer the consequences 5 or 10 years later when they will basically have no way to play any older games and then switching to piracy. If the companies dont give a shit now, the probably wont give a shit later

old ones, yes new ones, only when not indie reasoning: I ain't paying 70 bucks for a half-assed, incomplete, ptw, microtransaction-riddled game from an underperforming rich company who's been letting fans down for the past decade. indie game devs are chads though and deserve every cent. I'd pay for the old games if they actually sold them for a change. In theory, of course.

My moral code for piracy: - Singleplayer game with no online element= yes definitly (unless a studio i respect, then im buying it) - Multiplayer = no point so no (unless just to test out the game in offline mode) - Indie games = if i can i try to always buy them but i do download them to test them out

Yes, it's morally fine, especially with AAA titles. You can't guarantee that they're gonna be good, and money is very thin, so the ability to have an extended try before you buy is invaluable for putting your money into the right places.

I feel like another great way to preserve an online game is a community server browser, old battlefield, old CoD, Csgo, etc. all have server browsers and still have a community around them, albeit small, but those games are still active all these years later, and the company can still shut down the online servers without too much backlash. But it all comes back to the fact that this is AAA gaming, anything convenient for the player is way too much work for someone to make.

Let's also not forget that DRM is actually hindering game performance. Denuvo especially is a super bloated solution, and there's been numerous occasions where cracked versions run better than legitimately purchased ones. Resident Evil is a recent example that comes to mind, and it took Capcom a good while to get that resolved.

Moral or not moral, I could care less. Nintendo fleeced my ass in the 80s charging $50 for games back in 1989, thats $130 by todays standards. I paid my dues. The amount of money I saved pirating for 20 years has saved me literally thousands of dollars that I used to pay off my House. Morals don't pay the bills. And the companies are making enough money without my ass.

If it wasn't for Piracy my poor ass wouldn't have even known how to play video games in the first place.

Short answer: Yes. Long answer: Context matters. Should someone pirate something that is still commonly available in the market place? No. But anything that is no longer generally available at retail is fair game. If no one is currently making money from it, or in the case of reissued games, has already made all reasonable profits, then it really doesn't matter if someone pirates something or not. Preservation is important. Playing a game before buying it is reasonable. Combating exorbitant prices on the secondary market is necessary. Obtaining pirate copies of games otherwise inaccessible is reasonable.

I've always thought that buying one version of a game should give you the right to pirate a game. I already paid for it once, I didn't steal it. The studio got a sale from me, and I didn't hurt their bottom line, especially if the game is no longer available for purchase.

My personal rule with piracy: If I can buy a brand new copy, I won’t pirate. If it’s something that can only be played through used hardware, time for downloading…

To me? Always. Growing up I couldn't bother my mom with buying me a game so I always pirated. And I do it still. Its completely unfair for argentina to get a game for 50 cents b ecause their minimal wage is super small but my country gets the full 70 euro when in 2019 we had lower minimal wage than Argentina. When I asked Steam they said that legally they cant charge a different price for different countries in the European Union. I s aid fuck this shit its free then. Cause a minimal wage after taxes would be like 650bgn and a 70usd game turns into a 70 euro game which turns into 140bgn. That's more than 1/5th of the minimum wage. It just makes 0 sense. So Right now I may or may not have around 10 pirated copies of popular games on my PC that allegedly amount to like 400usd saved from buying. I make great effort to buy indie games especially if they are co-op. I had pirated Terraria before but the game is so cheap and good that I had to buy it even made a friend buy it too.

I've always had the mindset that if some content is not available, let's say old retro games, downloading a copy off the internet is not an issue. I don't have a Nintendo 64, GameCube or similar consoles, so emulation is the only way for me to enjoy Super Mario 64, Pikmin, Mario Sunshine and so on. Nintendo would not get my money if I bought a console and games off eBay anyways. Also just a concern of e-waste, emulation allows me to have most of the games I hold dear on a single device.

It all depends on the context surrounding piracy. If it's something that is affordable and can be easily accessed, then no. If it's too expensive or it is not accessible in your area, then yes, pirate away! Simple as.

Reminds me, my Minecraft account recently got revoked too because my account created in 2010 was created with an email that I can't remember, so according to Mojang, there's no possible way for me to recover my account to then upgrade it to a Microsoft account. So now I can't play Minecraft on the account that I've been using for the past like 12 years.

It's good when muta makes this kind of content so it exposes more of it. It's way easier to go to piracy when those companies make horrible services to the point it makes people enjoy playing older games more often than new ones on this industry.

Pirating for old games especially I think is a good thing for two reasons. 1, the developers tend to be gone or the conditions in some way are complicated to the point where they aren’t even making money off the game anymore so pirating does next to nothing. And 2, being a older game, official digital copies are usually not available for said games and physical copies can be very rare and pricy. So to have access to the game for a modern day user can be incredibly hard and run the risk of the game being almost basically lost. Pirating remedies this by allowing the game to be present in a downloadable form for anyone to hold and play.

Pirating from companies trying to turn everything into a stupid cloud streaming service is 1000 percent okay

Because of how companies release their games nowadays, I would argue that there is nothing wrong with piracy.

Games like Wolfenstein 2009, that are literally not available to buy anymore, I think those games, and ONLY those games, should be able to "pirate." And if people say that you can just buy it off ebay or something, it still won't support the devs.

Oh also, Mutahar. I heard that those "You wouldn't download a car" bumpers that they put on DVDs was used without permission. Supposedly it was meant for airing at a film festival *only*, but then the creators found that it had been reproduced an ungodly amount of times without authorisation on DVDs around the world.

There are several studies that show that piracy does help the gaming market. But, the gaming market seem to have a questionable markets and are getting away from the physical.

As one man said "Piracy is a service problem". If the game company can't deliver the service that you supposed to get (cuz you already paid for it) then it's their fault that you start piracying their game

I just gotta say it again, I bought 5 Playstation 2s, to be sure I could play my favorite games until I died. I also took Muta's advice and got an emulator setup too. For some of the games it doesn't work quite as good, I had to do a lot of searching to find settings that would run Ace Combat 4 correctly, but now I have one more back up ^-^

When it comes to piracy I see a few situations where it's morally ok. 1: Abandonware (games that can't be obtained anymore). 2: Games you've already bought. It's absolutely not ok is for small indie games or games with a small amount of financial backing.

My take on it is that: -It's okay if it is an old game from a big franchise, especially if it's an EA game, like Need For Speed. -Online only games are no-no, might get banned.

Yea because even Rockstar uses cracks in their own game to bypass their own DRM. Hilarious they cant code their own bypass for their own game

Me who lives in a third world country and doesn't have a credit card, and even if I did I won't have enough money for it anyway. So yes, it's the only way to get games from my point of view

My view on piracy has always been thus: If you cannot get it legitimately from first/second party source (so developers directly or a storefront like Steam), then piracy is moral. If the first party source version does not function properly due to silliness like online service requirements for a singleplayer game, or half-assed emulation from the dev/publisher, then piracy is not really 'moral', but justifiable. Pirating just because you don't want to pay for something is blanket immoral. It's a case by case basis thing, from my POV. On a side note, I do not consider used market relevant for classic games. The whole 'moral' argument around piracy is whether it qualifies as 'stealing' profit from a developer/publisher. In practice, with games bought second hand, the original creator sees no profit from that, so that moral argument disappears immediately. Add on the absurd pricing you frequently see with older games, as well as having to wade through a flood of knock-off carts/burned discs that people are charging realprice for, and you see why one could argue it moral to obtain 'illegitimately'.

I remember I first tried Cuphead and also Undertale through the pirated version, and the longer I played it the more sorry I felt for not buying it, so then I bought it, in a way piracy helps me to know if a game is worth the price

1:55 "It's not hard to preserve movies" Screen gets blurry in pure spite.

Love your hair in this video, what shampoo do you use?

Despite what Nintendo and their fanboy consumers and KZfaqrs may say, it is their lack of care on game preservation and their refusal to either rerelease it on modern platforms, and of they do, treat it right and not monetize it at a outrageous price tag with none of the effort that went into the original software that causes people to emulated them. Why pay $60 for a shitty Mario Galaxy port, _in a collection that is now unavailable and limits your control settings,_ when you can just emulate them at the highest resolution your computer allows, with the controller _you_ want, _with custom mods._ It's literally a no brainer.

I'd say pirating from huge multimillionaire studios, especially the greedy ones like EA, is completely ok. Where I draw the line is pirating from small devs who put passion and effort into their projects. I think we should support them. Edit: to any dumbass who is stretching and trying to point out 'loopholes' in this take, like the guy in the replies, use common sense and understand that I meant support good people who don't scam or use NFTs or groom children. Jesus.

If it's basically abandoned? Yes. If it's Konami? YES.

Thats why im pirate, I dont trust game companies

It's always morally correct to Pirate EA Games

It feels so weird that games from the 90s would be preserved way better than the games in 2020's in 100 years.

One of the biggest reasons for Video game piracy ,that most companies don't even try to tackle, is that they always address Europe , Australia , North America and some areas in East Asia and South America only when it comes to providing digital or physical services for their games (I.e. they only have branches to provide their games and their support services in these areas only) Which leads 2/3 of the world population to either (importing) or (using pirated versions) of these games...places like India , south America , China , Middle East are totally ignored when it comes to providing factories and branches that manufacture and deliver these games with an affordable price for consumers. Imported products in most of these companies would cost (double) or (Triple) their original cost in other places in the world because they are not manufactured locally or because they are taxed heavily by these countries (whether bought digitally or imported as physical copies) in addition to gaming companies not providing support to these digital products in these regions and not having legitimate presence in these regions either. In such abandoned regions, i see ALOT of people paying willingly tons of money on games like PUBG and Fortnite, just because their developing companies bothered to open branches that communicate and support their own games in these regions (even though they are dogshit games) , so those regions have markets that are WILLING to pay for the games, but cannot find a proper way to do so , either being scammed by taxes and importers and with no future support, or just playing a pirated version

Great video man!