Humble Indie Bundle 7 Torrent

[trjp]

Not necessarily. I'm a pirate. And I don't react badly to your post.

*takes a sip off his soda*

Note: I'm not suggesting piracy as the 'wrongness' - the 'wrongness' is the validation people apply to the act, validation which often takes complex and archaic form (reinforced and shared within communities of people who 'share' stuff).

It's attack that which causes the problems - you're attacking a person's worldview - indeed the shared worldview of a community - it seldom ends well, you seldom achieve much!

For example, today someone challenged me over how much I value the companionship of my dog - they said it was a dumb animal which didn't offer me anything other than demanding my time and effort - that it was a 'security blanket' which walked by itself.

Now, I could easily have challenged their view in detail but instead I just waited until they went to pat her when I nudged her tail which results in her trying to bite anything nearby ;)

[internetonsetadd]

William Burroughs told me--in a fever dream, obviously--that pirates helped to create modern democracy. Who knows what wonderful forms of governance are on the horizon thanks to the culture of file sharing?

[BlackAlpha]

William Burroughs told me--in a fever dream, obviously--that pirates helped to create modern democracy. Who knows what wonderful forms of governance are on the horizon thanks to the culture of file sharing?

Socialism? Are pirates socialists?

Here's an idea. If you got 50 euros to spend on a game each month, and you spend it every single month, is it okay to pirate games you could otherwise not buy because you spend all your available money on games?

[Kadayi]

ea bad
indie good
banana

Sad but true.

I can't help but feel there's this weird 'star wars' mentality going on in gaming culture (across the board) where in anyone 'big' is somehow The empire and anyone 'small' is somehow part of the rebel alliance, and that somehow the big guys are robbing everyone hook line and sinker (despite the fact that the credits on most AAA games are longer than those on films these days) and should be utterly despised where as it's free pass time to anyone out there whose the latter and that making them overnight millionaires is perfectly acceptable, and the validity of their works is beyond question (HLM & violence for instance).

[c-Row]

What do you think is the moral approach towards buying games you played when abandonware that have since become available on GOG?

I'd like to turn around the question - what about games you already bought 15+ years ago? CDs get scratched over time or might even disappear completely. And good luck getting floppy discs to work on your current system if it actually comes with a drive these days. You already paid for the game, and it's not like anybody has to rebuild it from scratch every time like a physical item.

[soldant]

...and anyone 'small' is somehow part of the rebel alliance...

Phil Fish as Luke Skywalker. Or maybe Princess Leia.
Star Wars Episode 7: A Fish Too Far.

I'd like to turn around the question - what about games you already bought 15+ years ago? CDs get scratched over time or might even disappear completely. And good luck getting floppy discs to work on your current system if it actually comes with a drive these days. You already paid for the game, and it's not like anybody has to rebuild it from scratch every time like a physical item.

Also a lot of the old developers are long since defunct or aren't going to be picking up any benefit from trying to buy such old games, so you're not even really supporting the old devs either. Personally if it's long out of production and there's no way to get it, I don't have a moral problem with piracy in that case. Freelancer for example is becoming harder to find... actually there's an eBay auction on right now for a sealed box copy starting at about $150AUD. If it isn't on GoG and you can't find it second hand (and really, $150 is absurd even though that's a special case being a sealed box) then I don't have a big issue with piracy in that case. The alternative is that the game dies off and nobody's got it.

As you say, physical media isn't durable. Data dies hard on the internet, sometimes the only reason we've got old games is because they're being shared about and preserved online.

[gundato]

Socialism? Are pirates socialists?

Here's an idea. If you got 50 euros to spend on a game each month, and you spend it every single month, is it okay to pirate games you could otherwise not buy because you spend all your available money on games?

The answer to that is the same as the answer to "Why should I buy a game when the original devs are dead and buried (most GoG titles)?"

Sales figures. Yes, one person doesn't make a difference. But, fortunately, nobody here is a unique snowflake. There are countless other people like us out there who will make similar decisions. So if you re-purchase Freespace every time you see it, sales figures and revenue will suggest "Hey, maybe we should make more Freespace-like games". And, you know, Freespace :p

Same thing with the mentality of "I wasn't going to buy it anyway". That may be true,or it may not. You don't know because you didn't truly make a decision. All you did was buy the top 50 euros of your wantlist and left piracy to pick up the slack.

As an example: A game like Space Rangers 2 vs a game like Freelancer. SR2 has the MUCH better value as it is very replayable with lots of different approaches and "non-linear" text adventures. But there are few rides in gaming more fun than Freelancer (the first time. After that much of the magic disappears). If I were looking for a game to buy, I would probably grab Freelancer. But, if I realized I might not be able to buy another game for a long time, I would grab SR2. Its Fun/Seconds for the first run is MUCH lower, but its levels of fun barely decay. Whereas Freelancer is REALLY fun at first, but decays rapidly on additional playthroughs (at least, for me).

[Moraven]

What do you think is the moral approach towards buying games you played when abandonware that have since become available on GOG? I played some years ago when the possibility of their being re-released seemed ludicrous. It's rather difficult to answer questions like "if they had been available for $5 when I downloaded them, would I have bought them", but these seem to be the sorts of questions that are relevant.

These days, given the success of GOG I think I would probably treat an abandonware download as a resolution to buy the game were it to appear on GOG.

GOG is more of a service. They work to get games to work out of the box on modern systems. There is a lot of games that I own that I picked up from there (tho in sales). Bullfrog classics, Alpha Centauri, Might & Magic/Heroes.

If I can find it new from the publisher, off to abandonware I go. Sad part in all this is the publishers easily overlook this market because it won't bring in hundreds of millions that a new Halo or CoD will bring in. They could easily get their money spent to put it up on digital (or let GOG do it) and have a easy revenue source for the many years to come.

[Moraven]

Socialism? Are pirates socialists?

Here's an idea. If you got 50 euros to spend on a game each month, and you spend it every single month, is it okay to pirate games you could otherwise not buy because you spend all your available money on games?

Buy it next month or in 6 months when you can allocate for the purchase. More than likely it will be cheaper anyway.

[Rovac]

in my humble opinion, it doesn't matter if the game is in Humble Indie Bundle it still available in various torrent out there.
But props to those people out there to support HIB.