Think of who you're hurting before you consider piracy.

a game I made in 1995
a game someone else made in 1995 which was later hostilely acquired by EA only to see it immediately fire all staff and shutter the studio
FTFY
- RIP Bullfrog (Theme Park, Theme Hospital, Dungeon Keeper etc.)
  
  And Maxis (Sims, Spore) 😥
- Yeah, EA has done more to hurt game devs than pirates have. "Salary means we don't have to pay overtime!"
- Kane Lives!
  
  True, but he plays for Bayern Munich now.

Or Nintendo:
"Stop pirating our old games!!!!!"
Okay, then sell me one of your old games.
"No."
- More like: Nintendo, "here is an HD remake of that old game you wanted."
  Fans, "We don't want to pay for old games!"
  
  Actually more like: "Here's an HD remaster of an old game that we ported previously but instead of giving you the same price as that lets just charge $60 instead."
  Fans:
  
  Leaving this here:
  https://www.eurogamer.net/did-nintendo-download-a-mario-rom-and-sell-it-back-to-us
  Nintendo has also committed piracy of their own software, by downloading a rom that a piracy group extracted and uploaded to the internet, so that Nintendo could then can re-sell the game back to us.
  If Nintendo will sell me the old games I love, I'll happily rebuy them so long as there's no installed killswitch (sorry, "DRM") that will take it away from me one day.
  
  More like: Nintendo, "here is a collection of old games that you have to pay for a monthly subscription in order to access."
  Me: "that's really stupid, no thanks"
  PS: it is possible to be a fan of Nintendo's and also think they are dicks about emulation and piracy and don't offer reasonable alternatives...many things in life are multi-faceted as such, and it's perfectly OK (and healthy ackshually) to acknowledge the bad in those we admire.
  
  Does that boot taste good? What would you do if you wanted to play, for example, The legend of zelda: four swords?
  
  Nintendo: "Emulators are piracy"
  Nintendo, 15 years later: "Anybody want to buy our emulated games on new consoles?"
  
  I don't mind the HD remakes, but I do mind the constant obsession with releasing them over making a new game or, ye gods forbid, coming up with a new IP. That, and it'd be nice if they wouldn't leave several of them locked to dead on arrival systems (like the WiiU) which just creates the same problem all over again.
  But what really gets my goat is locking all the Virtual Console releases onto the shop of whatever console they're on, so when that service inevitably goes defunct they're all lost again. Those old 16 bit games aren't changing, having content updates, or getting patched. And they're just emulating them anyway, so just put a whole bunch of titles on a Switch cartridge or something and let me play them in perpetuity as long as my Switch still functions. I will not pay $60 for Mario 1 again. I probably would pay $60 for the entirety of the first party library from the NES on a cartridge.
  All my old NES, SNES, N64, and Gamecube games still work just fine, decades later. But there's stuff that was on the DSi and WiiWare shops that's just gone forever, and you can never get them back.

"You wouldn't download a car, would you?" ... yes. Yes. I WOULD. Not that we can 3d print cars just yet. but I would in a heart beat if I could.
- I don't trust a 3d printed gun, why would I trust a 3d printed car? But if I could make a car myself, I definitely would, even if I had to pirate the designs.
  
  3d printed firearms have transformed into a whole cottage industry with all sorts of variations. The ones that are safest are essentially just stocks capable of holding the parts of a firearm. The ones that are completely 3d printed are still pretty sketchy and illegal to sell
  
  The thing people forget is that 3d printing doesn’t just enable the direct manufacturing of parts, it also enables the manufacturing of tooling for parts that would never have been manufacturable at home otherwise.
  For example, you can rifle a metal tube and form a chamber using electro etching and printed tooling. Or, you can make tooling to make magazine springs
  The key point to be made here is that a fully plastic gun is sketchy but 3d printing has absolutely transformed the ability to make reliable and effective firearms at home without any off the shelf firearm parts
  The same type of thing is happening in the car hobbyist world. We aren’t printing cars but people are using prints to make molds, form sheet metal, align parts for weldments and manufacture low stress plastic parts like intake manifolds.
  
  Most dashboards in cars are already 3d printed.
  
  3d printing has come a long way, both in materials and quality. especially as you step away from FDM or resin printers. I certainly wouldn't trust a rando facebook marketplace printer who bought a creality to make a quick buck... but I would trust my own prints- mostly because I know what the materials are, and know I'll check for good print quality. reality is, though, that about the most you can print right now is a half baked golf cart chasis. if you want it to be safe... you're going to have to add a lot to it, and at that point, you might as well just buy a damn car or something.
- You wouldn't download a car, would you?
  Movies studios now trying to download actors.
  
  Unions stepping up to the at for us all.
  
  "Trying"?
  They're working round the clock to develop CGI "actors".
  Gonna be interesting when actors start being replaced.
- Open source cars, let's go!
  
  Marcin Jakubowski is already doing this with Farming Equipment!
- Borderlands lets you download a car, that's the second best way of getting a car in the game
  
  And when you download a car there's even a pimento taco -- a pimentaco -- in the glove box.
- but I would in a heart beat if I could
  with your 3-D printed heart
  
  Hey, don’t knock it. My head lays down a sick dun step, some reggae and this weird steel drum Tropicana thing I’m pretty sure they ripped off some 90’s on hold music cover
- If I had a dollar for every car I downloaded for GTA4..

I'm fine spending money for a quality product.
Quality product. Not DRM-laden, always-online, unoptimized garbage that pushes microtransactions in my face. It's not a price problem; it's a service problem. If I'm going to get a shittier experience as a legitimate customer, piracy is the smart thing to do.
- If you're concerned about DRM, just use GOG or Itch. If you're concerned about shitty games, do research before you buy something and just avoid studios like EA.
  
  Don't underestimate the FOMO factor.
  Avoiding a title is simply not a consideration for a lot of people—especially if it's shitty. They're important context for meme and conversation material.
  I genuinely wish this was a joke.
  
  It won't change anything until people stop preordering games and actually wait for them to come out before shelling out a hundred bucks.
  Pre-order and dlc is what has made gaming so awful lately. Game companies realized they can make a half-assed game and fill it with microtransactions and still make shit loads of money
  
  do research before you buy something
  So instead of playing, I now have to do work to figure how to spend my miniscule available time on what to play to get the most out of said time.
  I'm not mocking what you said. I'm just lamenting the state of gaming.
  
  Imma get downvoted for that but even Epic has loads of DRM free games... there's plenty of choice to buy DRM free games these days...
  
  i really want to use gog but they don't offer regional pricing.
  like for example factorio is 8$ for me on steam but 36$ on gog. Skyrim is 40$ on gog and 17$ on steam.
- I don't pirate those either. I just don't waste my time with them.

It's probably not even made by EA but some company that made good game before being acquired by EA

I don’t pirate indie games, small-budget movies, or music from unknown bands. I hurt major corporations specifically.
- For some older indie games, piracy is the only way to play them. But otherwise, I agree with this.
  
  This is literally the genesis of GOG.
  
  Good exception.
- Exactly.
  They steal more than we can dream.
  They just used their influence to legalize their grift.
  Legality ≠ Morality
  Especially in a horrendously unjust nation such as ours.
  
  The phrase “Legality ≠ Morality” comes to mind several times a week. Too many people let themselves ignore ethics because they don’t think (or care) about the difference.
- Indie games are better these days anyways. I just use AAA games as performance benchmarks lmao.
  
  I mean, I wouldn't set the bar that low.

Should be Nintendo, not EA. Fuck EA and all, but at least they don't kick up a big fuss when someone aquires games they don't sell anymore.
- Or steal code from the community they're busy suing...
  EA are definitely the bigger problem as far as I'm concerned though.
  
  Oh for sure but for this meme about pirating old games, no one else is worse than nintendo imo

Never pirate from indie developers. But for giant companies, pirating is a drop in the bucket for their revenue.
- Then why don't illegal obtained keys just become banned? As long as they don't, You can't expect customers to see any problem with them.
- Obligatory "but does piracy count as lost revenue?"
  
  Piracy probably generates more revenue than it destroys.

- But how will the US military get more cannon-fodder if people play Kirby instead of CoD?

Is it really a victimless crime to go to archive.org and download yourself a copy of the never before released yet still fully completed Thrill Kill for PlayStation? Of course not, you need to think twice about the company that canceled the game and any bonuses the developers were promised, and didn't even tell them about it, with the developers themselves having to learn about it from IGN.

looking back i'm definitely guilty of pirating some indie games
- Indie dev here. Do whatever you want
  
  I used to make small games too for a little bit. Same.

You wouldn't pirate a car?!
- I would if I could!
- Speak for yourself

Image Transcription:
A four-panel comic by mygumsarebleeding.
The first panel shows a person with short, black hair, wearing a black shirt with the EA logo on it. They are talking to a person with long, black hair who is wearing a red shirt and facing away, arms folded. The first person is saying "I'm so sorry honey".
The second panel shows the first person from the first panel speaking to two smaller people, both wearing red and sitting at a table with their heads in their hands and empty plates in front of them. The person is saying "I'm sorry my children...".
The third panel shows a close-up of the person saying "There will be no food tonight".
The fourth panel shows an even closer view of the person's face, lines under his eyes indicating distress as he says "Somebody pirated a game I made in 1995".
[I am a human, if I’ve made a mistake please let me know. Please consider providing alt-text for ease of use. Thank you. 💜]
- Good human
  
  Thank you, fellow human 🤖

More like Nintendo

I just spent the night on my first emulator playing F-Zero Gx. I'm so sorry children :(
- That should have been the lead racing series for Nintendo.
  Mariokart is just an arcade game with a racing theme.
- They're going to go hungry now

This is my fault. I haven't downloaded any premium content for my 1984 Summer Olympics game on my Apple ][c.
(Which for its time, was an amazing game)
- Isn't that one of those games that's near impossible to find a hard copy of? I might be thinking of another one.
  
  One of the games I grew up playing was Silent Service. For years it disappeared, then one day GOG brought it back from the dead because they secured the rights to publish the hacked pirated copy they had been sitting on since the cold war. Without piracy, the game would have just disappeared.

I just downloaded exodos and bankrupted thousands of people

If it's EA then "skimmed profits off the top of" is probably more accurate than "made".

A shitty gaming studio that loves to ruin game franchises
- EA and Ubisoft are responsible for ruining more of my favorite game franchies than I think all others combined.
  
  How about we make a short list; Deadspace, starwars battlefront, Titanfall...

But you can feast on your sense of pride and accomplishment!

Rockstar games grabbed a pirated MAX PAYNE 2 and more!, slapped a price sticker on 'em and uploaded to steam! 🤷🏿‍♂️ LMAO
- pirates rights violation here! 🤣🤣

don't copy that floppy https://www.google.com/search?q=don%27t+copy+that+floppy
- Gives me BL2 flashbacks. The hours I spent read-only farming for a perfect Pimpernel on that mission turn-in...

Devil's advocate: is the time spent playing a pirated retro game still a kind of lost revenue, since you could be spending your time buying and playing all their new shit? I say this as a long-time retro gamer who finally broke down and bought some new shit recently.
- Make a better product then.
  
  Yep, hey EA, want me to spend time buying and playing your new games instead of yet another playthrough of Burnout 3? Make a game better lmao I WILL buy it
- Going to work is lost revenue.
  
  Yeah, game companies should be lobbying for UBI for everyone
- In a sense I guess? But then it’s still their fault for not keeping it available for purchase.
  
  Or they pull a Nintendo "Heres a game we made 20 years ago. That will be $50"
- Yes, just as much as when someone dares to enjoy a different hobby.
  We are just statistics to them.
- I'd say no, because they don't own your time by default.

Odd contradiction. I support pirating when a person can't access media legally (whether due to financials or just dick-moves by corps). However, this is the same logic that writers are striking against with streaming and I sure as hell support them.

I would be so fucking happy if this would be true.

Battlefront was dope tho
- Which one?

Of course piracy preserves old games. Also piracy is not a problem when it is miniscule. The issue is when piracy becomes the norm, so that these companies will be pushed towards more locked systems (consoles exclusives) and abandon PC. Some may even call for androud style locking up on PC.
- Google is already trying the latter with the Web DRM stuff they're trying to shove down everyone's throats (and why I stopped using Chrome and Chromium — I've been daily driving Firefox for a while now and replaced Chromium with Brave for when I need a Chromium browser).
- Streaming happened after piracy…but then piracy still happens to keep streaming in check it seems. It’s like that looming ‘did you want to make some money or no money?’ Threat On the greedy distributors. Has absolutely fuck all to do with the artist.

Yes you will scream bloody murder about AI pirating from artists. Get it together lol.

I pirate because I'm selfish, just like most other people in this thread.
- I pirate because I literally cannot afford it, but do buy often when I can. We're not the same.
  
  It's still selfish behavior. Pirating something because you don't have the patience to save for it doesn't change anything.

Whatever you need to tell yourself to justify your stealing.
- It isn't stealing, nothing is being taken.
  
  My legal right to distribute my works how I see fit is absolutely being stolen. I'm absolutely allowed to sell my work in limited quantities.
- How dare people "steal" a 30-year-old game that no one is selling anymore!
- Tell me you are lacking so much knowledge on how computers work that you shouldn't be allowed to use them without telling me.
  
  I do LFS for funsies. Please resort to more personal attacks because the reality hurts.
- That you don't know the difference between theft and copyright infringement tells us all we need to know.
  
  Whatever little semantics you need to justify your stealing 🤷‍♂️
- Theft implies ownership. Even if you buy the game, the company or library host you bought it from doesn't consider it yours. So why would pirating a game be ownership, or "theft," either? Companies say what's in their best interest, money. Ownership, especially of digital media, is a social construct. Writing a file onto your disk is not stealing, as it implies limited supply. No product should have infinite profit, it should be relational to labor not money.
  
  You are stealing my right to distribution. I've addressed this.
- Bingo. I steal shit once in a while. I don't delude myself.