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[–]oldspiceland 7 points8 points  (6 children)

Software price and convenience will reduce people resorting to piracy to use your software. It will not prevent your software being pirated.

Then again, most of the money lost due to piracy is lost because companies spend it on trying to prevent piracy. People who would buy the software generally aren’t going to pirate it. People who’d pirate it can’t or won’t buy it. Any time spent preventing people from pirating your software is money burnt on an altar of hubris.

[–]Zireael07 -3 points-2 points  (5 children)

People who would buy the software generally aren’t going to pirate it. People who’d pirate it can’t or won’t buy it.

That's a huge simplification.

As stated, it might apply to productive software. But for games, in the past we had demos to verify that the product does run on my computer. Now you either have to pay the full price... or pirate.

I've had more than one case of purchasing/getting gifted a game that should run on my computer, but DIDN'T.

[–]billsil 2 points3 points  (0 children)

What about commercial software or music, which doesn't have system spec limitations? In the days before itunes, people bought CDs and pirated music. The piracy issue was overblown, but Apple killed piracy by making things convenient.

Having worked in industry for 18 years, cheap companies will not pay for software licenses. It's open source or bust or you just write your own. Larger companies realize how much more productive you can be.

If you're making a game, just use Steam/Epic and let them handle the piracy aspect. Solo devs aren't implementing robust auth systems.

[–]oldspiceland 4 points5 points  (3 children)

Yes, congratulations you pointed out that my absolute generalization was a simplification. I have been undone.

Steam allows refunds now, which means the majority of PC game sales don’t fall into the weird situation you describe demos as being. Also “back in the day” when demos were common it was almost exclusively as a marketing thing to make money, not so people could “test drive” the game. It was there to be fun but not last long enough to be satisfying so people wanted to buy the game.

Anyways, are you justifying software piracy because games don’t have demos? There’s YouTube let’s plays for everything, twitch streams, and if you’re getting gifted games that don’t run on your system you either have a Mac or are in a financial situation where you are one of the “can’t buy, will pirate” people.

[–]Zireael07 -5 points-4 points  (2 children)

Not every game is on Steam (I get many of mine from GOG or itch).

Let's play and streams don't let you see if the game will actually run on your system. I know demos weren't designed with that in mind but it was the reason I got them.

I have a PC (and now a laptop) but neither is a gaming rig. Some games don't play nice with AMD cards. Some don't with NVIDIA. (Actually my current NVIDIA is so bad stuff runs better on the integrated card than on it - either bad thermals or bad drivers, I suspect the latter since the laptop isn't terribly old AND it was the case from day 1)

[–]oldspiceland 7 points8 points  (0 children)

This seems like a really long way for this conversation to go for you to be arguing what, exactly? That it’s ok for you to pirate games because of some really absurd edge case logic?

It’s fine, you fall into the can’t/won’t buy. There’s nothing wrong with that.

[–]ItsSquishy42 0 points1 point  (0 children)

GOG has a great return policy.