Pictured: ResetEra forum user being warned by moderators for, gasp, Advocating Piracy.
There are legal considerations when you are bottom-lining a massive public forum like ResetEra, sure. Shit rolls downhill. But even if avoiding legal blowback is the main impetus here it sure seems sad to have to deny the obvious reality that so many of us "pirate" as a matter of course, as naturally as we breathe. Sad to have to keep up appearances to kowtow to the moneyed powers and stay in the appointed, respectable lane. That's the opposite of being real.
A similar phenomenon is endemic in corporate entertainment media, which refuses to be frank with readers / viewers about actual reality. Same reasons: can't offend the manufacturers / advertisers by advocating people work around oft-broken, user-hostile systems.
In games media specifically I am bemused by the intersection between emulation + piracy (different but often related things) and the need to maintain corporate / advertiser respectability. Not even a stuffy old-guard outlet like GameSpot can fully deny how exciting, useful, wonderful the MiSTer FPGA project is, but any coverage of it kind of elides and glosses over the fact that 99.9% of the games any user will play on their MiSTer will have been obtained gratis from the internet.
At least that means we get to read that obligatory, always-hilarious sentence advising readers to obtain ROMs legally only by dumping their own physical media. Again, the polar opposite of being real and acknowledging communal, observable reality. Total brainworms.
Wonderful that we can access games history so easily; less wonderful that both mainstream and specialist press can only speak about it obliquely, if it acknowledges the phenomenon at all. And the press outlet certainly won't full-throatedly endorse readers stocking the MiSTers it just told them how to build with ROMs. That's... gasp... piracy!
It's kinda like they tell you how to build a gun but then forbid you from seeking out bullets. Unlike weapons, thankfully, misappropriation of intellectual property is relatively harmless.
Games shouldn't be a luxury. Our world is burning thanks in part to the same interests that want us to Consume their Products only in specific approved ways at specific approved times after parting with specific approved amounts of capitalist points. None of us are getting out of this alive and we deserve all the entertainment we deem necessary to make this living mess a little more bearable. Their word for that is "piracy."
Given all the so-called branding know-how corporations have on tap, you'd think they'd have tried to make it sound a little less cool.
