Piracy

This meme is so true. How can the boxed price of a game (or software) be the same as its Steam or digital version? When you buy a game digitally, it never truly belongs to you; services like Steam or PS Store only allow you to download and play it. 20 years later, you can plug in your Atari cartridge and play, but you can’t be sure that Steam won’t go bankrupt and deactivate its servers. (Nintendo recently closed its shops, including for the 3DS, PSP servers are shut down, etc.) Right now, if you want to feel nostalgic and buy and play Need for Speed Underground 2, there's nowhere you can do that because it’s abandonware, a forgotten software. Thousands of people are dumping and archiving games, shows, and movies, trying to keep them accessible with their own means, while companies and lobbies label them as criminals. Neither side is innocent—piracy is not theft, but let's admit, it is unfair. (I’m excluding small indie developers here as they are both affordable and individual creators.) The companies, with their excessive pricing, instead of selling their products once, turn them into SaaS with lifetime monthly subscriptions. They sell games for $60 and then add microtransactions, turning them into service games. Due to their greed, when things go wrong, they protect themselves and secretly keep the rights to leave you at a loss. The streaming platforms, for which you pay full price, don’t even let you choose the quality of the movie you want to watch. What you watch today might disappear from all platforms in two months. Without the people who dump and archive these contents, the old series you love so much could disappear forever. We pay dozens of lira for five streaming platforms per month, yet they still force us to watch from hdfilmcehennemi. Look, no one pirates music anymore—first thanks to the iTunes revolution and then Spotify. Pirated music is almost gone (you can check torrent sites’ seed ratios in music versus games and movies categories). The reason for this is simple: these applications make you feel like the money you pay is truly worth it. You can access almost the entire world archive with a search, and at a really affordable price. Because of reasons like this, the piracy problem is still not solved. The people who do it are content with their situation. Are they doing the right thing? No. But the companies whining about this should look at themselves before blaming the users.