Laaaan

yo, whaddup~

Just browsin'


wave
@wave

for me showing pics of my Nice Old Game Stuff exposes a tension between

  • wanting to show ppl something cool on socials
  • showing off
  • acknowledging that yeah, i was super fortunate to have middle-class economic privilege growing up and currently have a solid job

gaming is an expensive hobby / pastime / time sink that not everyone gets the same opportunity to enjoy. it has always been so but as a comfortably-off teen back in the '90s i was fairly oblivious to that, and becoming more cognizant is a still-ongoing process.

the tension's more obvious than ever to me since the recent spike in retro prices has made the physical collecting hobby yet more impractical. personally, i don't think it's worth the cost of entry these days unless amassing these artifacts really speaks to you on some level.1


Laaaan
@Laaaan

Growing up here in my South American country during the 90s and early 2000s, software piracy always was an integral part of not only kids entertainment, but actual work office software as well.

Happens that these things were largely a luxury to most households, even things like a stable broadband internet connection were, and you'd have to live in a family well off enough to have access to the same things a middle class American family would have.


It became common knowledge for anyone with even a passing interest in computers and games how to acquire and run pirated software. There were dedicated warez sites (shouts out to Chilewarez and Taringa); almost every family computer had P2P program Ares Galaxy installed (and be ridden with a few viruses lol); people had at the ready their copied CD of Windows XP when it was time to fix the computer; you could go to any fleas market or strip mall and have your console chipped, and buy copied CD-ROMs and PS1 games that costed little more than the price of the CD used to burn it (and some sick ass cracktros would be included). It was this easy access to modding and copied games, in fact, that made the PS1 and PS2 practically the most popular consoles of their respective time.

This started to dwindle during the early 2010s, when both the hacking of software and consoles started to become harder, and the legal options started to become more accessible for our regions. The big downside of course is that all most of those legit methods are controlled by DRM, and subscription models, and live services; but when the the legit access and use is easier than pirating, well. Now any average joe can have easy access to all content, and they don't even need to know a slick of english or computer literacy.

Personally, I am of the belief that it was because of this big era of software piracy that big IP holder companies finally saw a market down here, and decided to finally make it available, for better and for worse. And while piracy today is probably not as strong as it was back then, those days haven't been forgotten, it just permeated our culture: computer kids still get asked by their aunt or uncle to help them install Office, no one has ever gotten weird looks for torrenting shows or using cracked software or buying copied CDs, nor have ever gotten a nastygram over it (with the exception, of course, of companies. And even them don't stop using the software in between license renewals).


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in reply to @wave's post:

i've been making games professionally for 22 years and piracy doesn't bother me. it's how i got exposed to such a wide swath of the medium as a kid. it's silly to consider every pirated copy a lost sale. i'm sure it's done actual damage at times but it's also saved countless works from oblivion (usually due to corporate greed). any dev who feels super threatened by piracy is probably either an exec or identifies with the power of execs.

this post has been up for way longer than 24 hours. bill clinton's privacy declaration as written into the constitution in amendment 69 section 420 requires you delete it from your system after that time

i mistook this post for a different one i just read but also i fully agree with you and it's insane that so much stuff is locked away in a vault for no reason other than "we don't having this available would make us even more money". can you imagine how mad companies would get if there were usable "video game libraries"

in reply to @Laaaan's post:

Hell, even in a decently well-off American household we pirated the basics like Office, and much more once everything shifted toward the subscription model. Piracy is overwhelmingly about acces- whether the paid route is beyond one's means or if it just sucks shit to someone who has the means, that's accessibility, and users will go to path of least resistance every time.

this, tbh :angry_kiss: it's basically like that Gabe Newell quote says, "Piracy is an issue of service, not price". I think this is also the reason people usually put up with subscription models, like for streaming. It is simply more easily accessible than, a lot less effort, than it is to pirate it. ....But I already said that on my post 😏💦