I often shed a tear for how piracy killed entire gaming, music and movie industries.
Oh wait - it didn't.
@hvangalen For me it was largely Steam that took me away from game piracy. GOG was also good for a different type of games. Anything else sucked but thankfully those 2 are still big and games can be on multiple platforms easily.
Now movies and series.. I'm seriously contemplating pirating there again because movie X is on Netflix, Y is on Prime, Z is on Disney, and so on. *AND* those are subscription based services too, which costs money. I can't be subbing to 10 services at once, so it's going to be a lot of switching around... which is stupid. The fragmentation is going to promote pirating again. Gee, where had I seen that before...
@trinsec Movies/series: oppisite thing. I used to go to cinema or rent a lot. But, I often went to cinemas and wasted money on crap films. You won't get that back.
So now, I don't subscribe to any streaming services. The catalogue sucks, and eventually they'll pull series. (They often say they pull it because "it's unpopular" but it's because they "just" don't want to pay the original writers. Ironic.)
I would never've seen the film/series if I didn't pirate it. That's an irrefutable fact.
@chasalin
Very nicely visually shown there!
I do want to support Netflix and other streaming platforms. But they are too many, and too closed. They are blocked in China, and I normally use proxy to get around. But they blocked my server's ip (for some copyright reasons? looks like they blocked all ips from data centers), thus I switched to rarbg and the pirate bay...
@trinsec We had a C64 in the 80s and sharing casettes with speedsaved games was a big thing back then. Everybody did it, kids to parents to cops. "Even" the most law abiding citizens didn't think there was anything wrong with it.
My nephew went to those mass-disk-copy-events that were simply advertised in local papers.
These days, I do buy all the games I play.
But not after a demo or seeing/playing it elsewhere. I'd never buy something blind.