Under what circumstances is it morally acceptable to pirate games?

[Goku1992A]

Piracy is a controversial subject but it really depends on how you see it. Its good for game preservation as we are currently heading towards a all digital future where games get delisted such as MGS & physical copies are going up in price or the game is digital only and we have no way to play it.

Personally speaking Marvel Ultimate Alliance 1&2 on PS4 are no longer available. They were digital only & they were never dumped. I have these games on my PS4 on 8.0 FW & their is a demand for them. If a eggsploit is released soon as current news suggests. Would you sit on them or let everyone else enjoy them,

I mean the legal argument would be if you own the game... then you can back it up because there are homebrew apps that let you do that... but a large majority of the users on CFW just pirate the games. All backups basically comes from someone who bought the game and they posted it on the net.

Piracy is best used at your discretion. But never forget this it's no point of downloading a million games if you will never play them in your life because many people are guilty of doing that. That's why nowadays I lean towards of playing the games I own one at a time so I can enjoy them.

 

[FAST6191]

Devs and game creators do deserve to be paid for what they produced (unless it's some FIFA shit and they were forced to release the same garbage as last year, but that's the publisher's fault). When talking about devs, i of course included publishers and everyone involved in the game creation.
Take the example of retro games, Nintendo doesn't profit at all from let's say the first Pokemon games, and a legal ROM usable on any hardware will be way harder to find. In that scenario i feel like it's moral to pirate it.

Bypassing country censorship is always moral, even if it's just self-censorship.
Some games like Postal 2 cannot be bought in France for example.

TakeTwo took down re3 and all of its components, where it didn't include any of their copyrighted assets. They also cyber bullied the FiveM creators to get their service to close down. For those reasons alone, i definitely pirate new TakeTwo games, that's their punishment.

For different platforms, i was mainly talking about straight ports, not remasters or remakes. I consider FFVII and FFVII Remake to be completely different games. Though, it also depends on how much difference there is between the two versions, like i see no problem in pirating Mario Kart 8 Deluxe if you bought the OG Mario Kart 8 for example. Emulators mainly use what's been done in the open-source community anyways.

Companies profiting or not makes little difference in this; it is an unrelated non issue from those that would tell me second hand games are bad. Right of first sale means you in turn allow those to resell things so worrying about such matters is pointless.
Not to mention they do give you the option to buy various emulated versions.

RE3, by which I assume you mean the decompiled project, did contain their assets-- source code is assets. Some of the mod stuff is way more dubious though. As protest/punishment is a thing in other areas too.

 

[Kwyjor]

The downside of piracy you will never enjoy your video games because you have an abundance of them versus the guy who buy one game at a time and he beats them and repeat the cycle.

Except these days that can easily happen even if you stick to legitimately free games, giveaways, and bundles that are so cheap they might as well be giveaways.

People spend more time downloading versus playing games when they have a CFW unit which is why piracy is frowned upon.

No, I'm pretty sure piracy is frowned upon for other reasons – mainly the legal issue and the notion of depriving publishers of revenue.

But there is something to be said for the idea that if you spend all your time illegally downloading old games – even downloading them with the idea that you might play them some day, and then never playing them – you're less likely to be spending money on new games that you might imagine playing some day and then never playing.

 

[DJPlace]

my Reason is WHEN YOUR FUCKING POOR!! or you want to try a game before you buy it.

 

[Kopimist]

Companies profiting or not makes little difference in this; it is an unrelated non issue from those that would tell me second hand games are bad. Right of first sale means you in turn allow those to resell things so worrying about such matters is pointless.
Not to mention they do give you the option to buy various emulated versions.

RE3, by which I assume you mean the decompiled project, did contain their assets-- source code is assets. Some of the mod stuff is way more dubious though. As protest/punishment is a thing in other areas too.

Going after RE3 was wrong imo. Did it technically violate copyright law? Probably, but it still required you to purchase the original game therefore increasing sales for the game. Take two kind of shot themselves in the foot by going after that project as its really bad PR to go after a fan made project, especially one that requires you to buy the original game to play it

 

[HRudyPlayZ]

Companies profiting or not makes little difference in this; it is an unrelated non issue from those that would tell me second hand games are bad. Right of first sale means you in turn allow those to resell things so worrying about such matters is pointless.
Not to mention they do give you the option to buy various emulated versions.

RE3, by which I assume you mean the decompiled project, did contain their assets-- source code is assets. Some of the mod stuff is way more dubious though. As protest/punishment is a thing in other areas too.

Companies profiting from their work is the main issue with piracy, i really don't care about individuals not getting to sell the game as much, they didn't make it, and both will still get some sales anyways.
Companies don't always have an option for it besides original hardware, the Wii/WiiU VC was an option at the time, but it's not on the Switch for example. The Switch Online isn't really an option to get a real, permanent access to those games on the Switch either, they mostly sell you a subscription for the emulator, but that's also a temporary thing. And in my example of GB games, they're not even there. Sure, there's the option of unofficial emulators, which i like and use, but those will either require you to pirate the ROM or grab the original console with a rare-to-find cartridge dumper and a less-rare cartride of the game.

Re3 didn't contain any of the original code though, that's the problem. They basically took it down with no legal grounds to stand on. Some will say they're protecting their IP, but this doesn't give them any right possible, and really this attack is morally discutable at the very least, so yep, they're not getting any money from me, doesn't mean i will lock myself out of their content, Rockstar still makes great games and if there was a way to only give money to them and not TakeTwo, i definitely would.

 

[FAST6191]

Companies profiting from their work is the main issue with piracy, i really don't care about individuals not getting to sell the game as much, they didn't make it, and both will still get some sales anyways.
Companies don't always have an option for it besides original hardware, the Wii/WiiU VC was an option at the time, but it's not on the Switch for example. The Switch Online isn't really an option to get a real, permanent access to those games on the Switch either, they mostly sell you a subscription for the emulator, but that's also a temporary thing. And in my example of GB games, they're not even there. Sure, there's the option of unofficial emulators, which i like and use, but those will either require you to pirate the ROM or grab the original console with a rare-to-find cartridge dumper and a less-rare cartride of the game.

Re3 didn't contain any of the original code though, that's the problem. They basically took it down with no legal grounds to stand on. Some will say they're protecting their IP, but this doesn't give them any right possible, and really this attack is morally discutable at the very least, so yep, they're not getting any money from me, doesn't mean i will lock myself out of their content, Rockstar still makes great games and if there was a way to only give money to them and not TakeTwo, i definitely would.

Code taken from decompilations (and we have videos of them broadcasting themselves doing it) is treated as a derived work, which is as good as original code for these purposes. Functionally it is no different to saving a picture as PNG, applying a filter and going from there.

As far as don't really have an option then barring power concerns (not going to emulate NES on a SNES) then they do. Nintendo whines and stamps its feet a bit (there is a really nice GDC talk -- see "it's just emulation" and the followup for some more there). That would however fall under "they are free to hold it back to build the hype" though.

 

[Taleweaver]

Morally acceptable? Where's the fun in that?


I just consider myself the root of all evil when I pirate video games.

Its morally despicable, horrible, disgusting and wrong in so many ways it should be punished in quite some nasty ways.

...

I'm just gonna pirate a game I don't even care about now. It's how I roll.

 

[bazamuffin]

My old boss used to say "it's only a crime if you get caught"