Jinxey said:
Putting yourself in a developers shoes it's easy to understand why they get mad at people stealing (yes pirating is stealing) their product.
Whine and ***** about "oh but I didn't have a demo" or other pitiful excuse. The developer is providing you THEIR product on THEIR terms. If you don't like those terms, vote with your money but that doesn't enable you to steal with good conscience. You try working 2-5 years of your life while providing for your family at a small company and than have some entitled snot tell you he "deserves" it for free.
Sorry, but this hits home for me. Some of my best friends have been layed off due to "budget cuts". Furthermore many companies have had to shut down due to rampant pirating.
Actually I agree with you, and your friends have my sympathy.
I'm not going to say that I haven't downloaded the odd cracked game or two when I was a little younger and stupider, but these days it's a different story. As someone on a generally low income I often don't have the spare cash for things like computer games, but I don't see that as justification for piracy. If I can't afford a game I simply don't play it, I've never played Assassin's Creed 2 or Bioshock 2 or a lot of these other games the community deems essential. Gamers as a whole seem to have a strange sense of entitlement when it comes to games, as if the fact that they're a part of the community grants them the right to an experience without paying. I hate to sound like some sort of snotty capitalism worshipping prick, but if you can't or won't pay for a game then you can't legally own it, and in most cases shouldn't be playing it (making an exception there for things like local multiplayer for example).
That's not to say you have to play full price or be "killing the industry", I mean a lot of my current games came off of Steam during their sales, or out of a bargain bin. And back when I had a console I did a lot of second hand stuff and trade-ins. I mean yeah it doesn't help the developer as much as paying full retail at release but it's still helping them out to buy a discarded copy that will otherwise make no profit at all for anyone. Just because you're low on money doesn't mean you can't play games, it just means that a lot of the time you might not be able to get a shiny new release. You can vote with your wallet AND get a decent gaming experience without breaking the law. When that new release shelf game winds up on the table at EB for fifteen bucks it will still be as awesome or crap as it always was.
Just don't listen to idiots who tell you that you have to play everything right away or at all, because you don't. It wasn't true eight years ago (when frankly I think PC games were at their quality peak), and it's certainly not true now with all the homogenized, blinged up generic shit video game developers churn out for the masses these days.
