Tired of this abusive business model that big companies use on games.
- I see a game on Steam with some decent price
- I click on it
- Dozens of DLCs, “Gold”, “Deluxe” “Enhanced” version to enjoy the full game
- Then you decide to pay for this shit anyway
- But then the game is behind a launcher, that needs online connection and account even if it’s full single-player
- The game sometimes are just a port from an old console with almost full price, a game that you’ve paid for before
- The game needs a hell amount of updates do become playable
- And so much more…
Steam did an excellent job keeping me away from piracy, they provide too much good feature, discounts and etc… But not even Steam can make miracles against those abusive practices.
I must say RDR1 port was the last drop to me, It’s game I played back on PS3 on my teenager time, I wanted to have some good memories and play it again, guess what, a full AAA price on a port, it’s not even a remaster.
I’ve been avoiding EA and Ubisoft games for years, but still buying from big companies on Steam. Now I just give up, there’s no more hope for AAA games, only mercenary companies are left: EA, Ubisoft, Rockstar, Activision, 2K, Bungie etc…
- EA: Games with a hell amount of DLCs, the same FIFA every single year at full price, launcher required, they don’t even try to hide anymore
- Ubisoft: Same thing as EA, lots of DLCs, missed some game content from an old Prince of Persia because they shut an old launcher integrated to the game.
- Rockstar: Launchers everywhere, charging a full price for the same game multiple times (GTA V).
- Activision: You pay a full price and it still comes with a hell amount of micro-transactions, killed COD.
- 2K: Out of nowhere decided to add a launcher to every old game they had (Bioshock and others I think) saying it was “QoL” update, now they decided to remove it, too late. The new Borderlands 4 terribly optimized, here we go with some dozens of updates again.
- Bungie: The live service model, removed a lot of old paid contents from Destiny, the game will eventually die.
I’ll still pay for small companies games, because I can, but those big ones, honestly, I don’t give a shit anymore, they could be erased from existence together with all their games, I really don’t care. Some smaller companies I’ve had a good experience and I think it’s worth paying for: Ghost Ship Games, No More Robots, Hello Games, Techland, Frictional Games, Annapurna Interactive.
Some companies are in a limbo to me, I’m not entirely sure about it: Capcom, Bethesda, Warner, Square Enix.
So, that’s it, I just downloaded Spider Man Remastered and RDR from FitGirl, it worked seamless, I didn’t have a single issue. I could even add as non-Steam game and use Steam input (thanks Steam), I’ll probably use some script to move to savegames data to the cloud, and let the packed games on an external HDD (finally, I’ll own my games).
Another thing that’s hard to ditch to me is achievement tracker, I know we have AchievementWatcher but it doesn’t work too well on pirated games. It’s something I’ll need to get used, not a big deal tbh.
I’ll probably use the money I’d spend on AAA games to explore some indie games. And AAA games are now always pirate.
Obs.: The companies I’ve mentioned here are from my own experience, this isn’t meant to be an Wikipedia of good/bad companies, I know there are more decent and bad companies out there.
I am just ignoring them. Not playing their games even pirated.
Played the demo of Prince of Persia last year, totally liked it, price was good, saw the Ubisoft Logo (CEO tells that you don’t get to own your games, AAA games priced 70-130 €, anti consumer practices), never bought that game never played it.
Nintendo also took a red card this year from me, not another penny from my wallet.
Bonus i put in my Steam ignore list all the games that come out with price >60 €, so i wont make a mistake and buy them even on a huge sale.
I buy indie games and only AAA games full priced like BG3, Expedition 33, Elden Ring, etc… , games that they worth it and they don’t bloat you with stupid stuff. And also their companies respect the players.
BG3, E33, ER, all amazing games that don’t add live service junk, don’t require online connections, and respect the art of video games. They are all worth their price and then some, to me.
Rockstar: Abandoning and cancelling GTA V (single player) expansions and purely focused on milking online for pay2win. I’m not hyped for 6.
EDIT: The worst part - declaring war against modding community because it affected their online sales (since people enjoyed playing modded singleplayer). It backfired, badly, but they still went for it.
Why bother with ethics or morality? I’ve been pirating what I can half of my life now, just because I’m a poor and stingy bastard. Let people with finished mortgages and nice cars pay those companies.
Yes, that’s true, poor people just want to have some fun, but society try to make it wrong, you need to follow all the guidelines of morality. But nobody talk about rich people destroying the world, spending on luxuries, exploring workers, and doing this kind of crap with the gaming industry.
I don’t know if its the age or perhaps I unconciously became sick of the practices OP describes, but the games I genuinelly enjoy playing the most nowadays are mainly AA or Indie. And ofc, I don’t mind paying full price for them.
A non-exhaustive list of those I loved:
- Outer Wilds (became my favourite game of all times)
- Inside/Limbo
- Little Nightmares
- Sifu
- The standley parable
- Still awakes the deep
- Gris/Neva
- Firewatch
- Journey/Abzu/The Pathless/Sea of Sword
- Rainworld
- No man’s sky (a special case, I know)
- Cocoon
- Unravel
- Stray
- Below
- Far
- Pacific Drive
- The invincible
I love Factorio for how few bugs are in it, and for how much the devs care. They even hired modders, and those modders kept making mods while making the game.
I’ve played a few games in your list and loved every one of them. I should probably try the rest.
Just curious. Is piracy your strategy to kill the big companies, since you really want to consume their products but don’t want to pay, because of your stated reasons?
For the sake of discussion, is it not possible for you to not buy products from big companies but also not consume their products?
Using myself as an example, I hate EA so much I don’t install any of their products on my machine. Or I hate Adobe so I don’t use it at home (the workplace is uncontrollable). I don’t pirate their products as there are alternatives, and I cannot imagine how I may enjoy them since I cannot forget who made them.
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Same story as Netflix, it used to be great value but look at it now…
Unpopular take: I’m just gonna quit gaming for a while. If I really need to piss away some time I got a bunch of wad files or newgrounds. F it.
Don’t write off small devs just because huge corpos are assholes
I went back to sailing the high seas for games when The Sims 3 from Steam wouldn’t run on Linux no matter what I did, whilst a pirate version runs just fine.
Pirating in Linux is actually much more complicated than running the game from Steam or from other stores via something like Lutris, because for official versions of a game there are usually scripts doing all the necessary Wine/Proton configuration, but not for the pirate versions of a game, so if it fails to run directly you have to enable logging, dig through the logs yourself and figure out which libraries need to be configured with Winetricks, which is how gaming in Linux used to work 5 years ago (and why very few people did it).
Can you tell me how you got it to work?
This is my go-to for anything that doesn’t want to run:
https://github.com/FanderWasTaken/wine-dependency-hell-solver
I’ve switched a few friends to Linux and whenever they have trouble running a game outside steam, I just send them this. Hasn’t failed yet. While I, like many other Linux users enjoy scrolling through logs: this is easier.
You are the real MVP. This is going to save me a lot of headaches!
If I remember it correctly, the Dodi repack just needs some audio library configured in the Wine instance via Winetricks as a built-in library.
- If using Lutris, you need to enable logging for that game, then try and run it.
- After it fails to run, look at the log and near where it stops you’ll see it complain about failing to load a certain DLL (and after that lots of failing to load other DLLs as a consequence of failing to load that original DLL).
- Google the name of that DLL and you’ll find which library it is part of.
- From Lutris, run Winetricks for that game (it’s in a pull-down next to the “Start” button for the game) and under Winetricks “Libraries” add that library to that Wine instance as a built-in library (if that doesn’t work, download the DLL, put it in the game dir and add it as native).
If what you see in the logs is, instead of a “Couldn’t load DLL”, a “Couldn’t find function in DLL” what you have is not a missing library but instead a library version mismatch. Go to Winetricks and force the use of the native version of the library: sometimes the built-in version of a common DLL in Wine is the wrong version, and you need to force Wine to use the version of that DLL that comes with the game, i.e. the “native” version.
If all that fails, Google that game’s name together with “Linux” to see if somebody else has figured it out.
Thank you for the thorough response! I’ll try that out later ☺️
I am too paranoid about security to pirate a video game. I just don’t play the big AAA titles. There are so many indie games worth my attention and support that I don’t notice.
Well I just download well tested games by others, if it’s trusted by many and have worked just fine, I think there’s nothing to worry about.
You’re right, this was more common in the warez days. Nowadays, I generally trust Pirates. If you’re stupid and download a game from some rando site, and not a trusted repacker then you deserve what happens.
If you’re paranoid, stick to clean steam files and use Goldberg.
I don’t think I’ve pirated a game since 2008! Used to be if I didn’t like their price, I waited and bought on sale or used. Now that I play on PC and used games aren’t a thing anymore, I just don’t play it.
There’s a sea of games out there and If I don’t like the practices of the publisher, I skip them and move to the next. Why should I engage with their product if they don’t respect me as a customer or share my sensibilities? I’m not a hypocrite.
Eh, if it’s a new game I want and I can afford it I’ll buy it. I’m just buying less new games lately.
I am however just going hog wild on emulating all the old console games.
Got my PS2 all set up with a hard drive and FreeHDBoot so I can just load it up with all the PS2 games I never got a chance to play or own! Hacked my Vita and download all that stuff I never played.
Haven’t tried to hack any Nintendo stuff besides my Wii, which I need to do again apparently. But I’m not exactly desperate for things to play, I’ve got loads of things to choose from these days.
I always watch at least 10+ gameplay videos and critiques before buying games, especially AAA. For indies, I don’t do it as much, more like “surprise me” kind of experience.
I stopped (console) gaming right around the PS4 era - partially because side I was heavily invested in WoW and PC gaming in general - but also because I was livid over how Sony handled the Anniversary edition launch, where scalpers scooped up ~98% of available stock.
I feel like I lucked out opting to become a retro gamer around that time - there are just so many great games from the PS3 generation and earlier that I could dedicate (my diminishingly little) spare time towards and never run out of absolutely incredible content.
Hell, my PS2 version of Vice City runs just as it did when it was new - complete with Billie Jean being the first track on the radio; something that can’t be said for any current/PC versions I believe.
I stopped buying games and swapped to graphic novels which is unnecessary af because I pirate comics and get everything for free instantly, weridly just getting more dopmaine/value out of these purchses than games lately, couldve bought bf6 with a friend so itd be half price but im just not feeling gaming, would rather spend 200$ to read old discounted comics, can get quite a bit of content
Think the physical books help remind me that the digital comics exist, I forget my hobbies without daily reminders and if I dont persue them for a week I forger why I even enjoyed them. Need to start using blender again but I cant remember why it was fun til I use it lol
Honestly a lot of my excitement for BF6 was killed by the PIF acquisition of EA.
Looking forward to EA games becoming even worse than they already are. /s
If something isn’t respecting your values, I’m of the opinion that you make a stronger statement by not even pirating those games. If you’re spending time playing them, you’re also not spending time and money playing some game that was meticulously made to respect your values. You’re fine playing indie games, but you’d play more of them if you gave up playing these AAA games that you decided to pirate. You talk to your friends and on forums about the games you play, which will at some point convince someone else to buy and play them, too. If you want them to hurt, so that they change, don’t even give them the time of day.
This is the best way. Give your time and money to something you believe in instead of wasting a moment on something you don’t.
That’s right, it’s exactly what I think, you are one way or another helping a game to be known. The same strategy people talked about why Microsoft don’t shut every Office cracker, they want normal people to use it and get used to it, so companies will use it too, eventually, and they can audit some IT companies, charge a hell amount of money if they use pirated software.
I agree with everything, but I’ll still pirate AAA games, just for the experience. I classify publishers/developers companies like this:
- Companies it doesn’t even worth playing to avoid indirect marketing: Ubisoft, EA
- Companies that at least it worth pirating: Activistion, Rockstar, etc…
Let’s be honest, the games are good, probably made by some people who love what they were doing, but then it was put behind a shitty business model, because developers are just trying to make a living while executives trying to harvest all the money.
I think as the time goes, developers will start making their choices better, leave predatory companies, start or join indie companies, and I, at the same time, will migrate to a more indie focused gaming.
You follow your own moral compass. My feelings are, if I was short on money, I’ve got a backlog and a stream of games being thrown at me for free (legally) such that I’d never have to pirate and never be bored. I’m willing to pay more for a good product, and I so thoroughly enjoyed Borderlands 1-3 that I bought the deluxe edition of 4 that was a no-go for you; they’re one of the few AAA devs keeping LAN alive, and that is worth me throwing me money at them to tell them they’re doing it right, on top of just making a very fun game. The companies whose games you’re pirating are the ones that need the attention the least, but every game you could be instead funneling time and money into benefits so much more from each individual sale. Plus, the reason we’ve got so much anti-consumer bullshit in games now is because piracy was a boogeyman for the industry for a long time, so I’d rather not give them any additional data points to make things even worse when we’ve already got an entire era of video game history that disappears when their servers go offline. That’s how I see it anyway.
The times I don’t feel gross about pirating, personally, are when the pirated version is supposedly the better version of the game (like emulating an old console game instead of playing a compromised PC port) or when the game is delisted and no longer available through ordinary channels, like Battlefield 2. You do what feels right to you. Pirating Nintendo games is an option to me, but they bother me as a consumer in all sorts of ways, and I instead spend that time and money on games like The Thaumaturge rather than playing through Tears of the Kingdom. Nintendo will be just fine without my sale. The team behind The Thaumaturge may or may not have made enough money to make a second game. If Nintendo was a less shitty company, I’d be buying and playing Metroid Prime 4. Maybe I’ll end up discovering and enjoying something else during that time that needs my dollar more instead.
