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'

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

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.

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)}

To be fair, it would be based if everyone did their job for free.

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.

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

Is the "wOkE" in the room with us right now? 🤣🤡

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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?