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  #91  
02-17-2015, 04:13 PM
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  #92  
02-17-2015, 04:37 PM
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Except that the moral high ground in this instance would have been the people who neither bought the game nor pirated it. If you disagree with the decisions a business makes then it is certainly your prerogative to not support them financially; however you cannot then lay claim to their product while knowingly refusing to pay for it.
Very true. I've always maintained that pirating a game and calling it a boycott is like stealing a burger and calling it a hunger strike. You're still consuming the product, and therefore:

1) You're not sacrificing anything for your belief and thus don't make any sociopolitical impact
2) Since you're effectively gaining the product for free, you could argue it has a negative sacrificial value - basically the more convenient a choice is, the less likely it seems that moral principles are the actual reason you're making that choice
3) You're still basically a walking ad for the product you're enjoying, and so are still supporting the company responsible; albeit marginally
4) If the premise of a boycott was against the poor quality of a product, consuming the product voluntarily contradicts that. It effectively begs the question "How bad can it be, if you still want it?"

:
I've already supported the maker with my money, and he doesn't lose his money making another copy.
"I once bought a coffee from a shop, therefore I already paid for a coffee, therefore I can drink as many individual coffees as I want"

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Your no arguments are shitty arguments.
Oh, come on, that's just lazy. Less name-calling, more debating.

:
Also, digital stocks really have a bearing on this discussion after all.
"Digital stocks" don't exist. The concept of "stock" - i.e. a finite amount of products to sell - is simply inapplicable to the digital realm. Everything is infinite when you can duplicate it as many times as you want.

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You are blinded, do you? You completely ignored the case where somebody paid for it.
No, no I didn't.

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Regardless of whether you just don't want to pay for it now, or you never want to pay for it
:
you just don't want to pay for it now
Don't want to pay for it now = Want to pay at a later date

Or did you mean pirating something you already own a functional legal copy of?

:
The problem (one of them, at least) is not buying things I don't really want to, but I was manipulated by publisher's marketing/game footage (some games look cool and play tragic)/not very honest reviews etc.
Those are problems, but no-one pulls the money out of your hands. If you make an error of judgement and buy a bad game, that's still your mistake, and the bill sits squarely with you. Welcome to the adult world.

:
That's low, and you should know that I don't see that in such categories.
Then you need to start acting like it. Stop treating theft like the norm, and stop demonising legitmate purchases.

:
What mindset can you call that, other than a shitty, prejudiced debater?
"Everyone who disagrees with me is a bad person"


Last edited by MeechMunchie; 02-17-2015 at 04:49 PM..
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  #93  
02-17-2015, 04:47 PM
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  #94  
02-18-2015, 12:25 AM
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"Digital stocks" don't exist. The concept of "stock" - i.e. a finite amount of products to sell - is simply inapplicable to the digital realm. Everything is infinite when you can duplicate it as many times as you want.
And yet by the law you can't make more than one copy of a thing you bought, even for yourself, it's considered piracy then.

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Oh, come on, that's just lazy. Less name-calling, more debating.
You didn't give me any arguments in the paragraph I quoted, just the statement. I didn't even have anything to work with, and you're calling me lazy?

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Or did you mean pirating something you already own a functional legal copy of?
That's exactly what I meant. Paying before pirating, that's the case sometimes. I should have explained it more, I thought you'd get it.

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"I once bought a coffee from a shop, therefore I already paid for a coffee, therefore I can drink as many individual coffees as I want"
Come on, you can't compare buying food to buying entertainment. Do you suggest I should pay each time I listen to a song? You know, that applies to coffee, except it's "drinking" there.

:
Those are problems, but no-one pulls the money out of your hands. If you make an error of judgement and buy a bad game, that's still your mistake, and the bill sits squarely with you. Welcome to the adult world.
That's actually up to interpretation. I don't think it's my mistake, since marketing is a vile beast and can manipulate the consumer completely. Imagine you saw an advert of a banana in TV (weird situation, but plausible) and it made you want that banana really much because of it's banananess. You bought one wrapped in a way so you can't see what's in it (it's kinda shaped like a banana). You unwrapped it and it's a cucumber. Let's say you hate cucumbers. Was it really your mistake of judgement? I'd say no.

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Then you need to start acting like it. Stop treating theft like the norm, and stop demonising legitmate purchases.
I've never started. They're awesome. What made you think I hate that?

:
"Everyone who disagrees with me is a bad person"
That, except "provides statements without backup and is pretty closed-minded about them" instead of "disagrees with me"
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  #95  
02-18-2015, 12:40 AM
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And yet by the law you can't make more than one copy of a thing you bought, even for yourself, it's considered piracy then.
That's not how lots of digital downloads work, not any more at least. You can multidownload on Steam. You can multidownload from iTunes. Nobody has any problems with you making copies of digital content licensed to you, as long as it's for personal use. I'm fairly sure that's even reflected in the law over here, but I'd need to dig more to be 100% sure on that.

:
That's actually up to interpretation. I don't think it's my mistake, since marketing is a vile beast and can manipulate the consumer completely. Imagine you saw an advert of a banana in TV (weird situation, but plausible) and it made you want that banana really much because of it's banananess. You bought one wrapped in a way so you can't see what's in it (it's kinda shaped like a banana). You unwrapped it and it's a cucumber. Let's say you hate cucumbers. Was it really your mistake of judgement? I'd say no.
False advertising is a basis for a refund, not to mention immoral. If someone is advertising a product as something else and refusing a refund then you need to contact some kind of consumer affairs place and report it to them. Two wrongs, and all that.
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  #96  
02-18-2015, 12:51 AM
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False advertising is a basis for a refund, not to mention immoral. If someone is advertising a product as something else and refusing a refund then you need to contact some kind of consumer affairs place and report it to them. Two wrongs, and all that.
I think this touches upon a valid point* about how the process of getting a refund has become more complex over time though. Used to be you could just hand your game back to the store, but now digital storefronts have made it difficult to contact them and can decide to refund you at their discretion.

e: Not that this justifies piracy, but should call for better consumer rights. I recall the EU recently put stronger enforcement on digital purchase returns in place, but I don’t know if games storefronts have been affected.


*One which I tried to make about an hour ago but my wifi crapped out
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  #97  
02-18-2015, 01:23 AM
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If digital storefront owners don't have adequate contact forms, or are unhelpful providing information regarding refunds, then that kind of behavior needs to be reported. You can also not use those storefronts, if it's an ongoing problem. If there's no alternative way to buy the game, then piracy doesn't automatically become justified.
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  #98  
02-18-2015, 01:30 AM
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Fun fact: googling “how to return games on steam” returns a link to return physical merchandise bought at the Valve Store and a whole bunch of forum posts and news posts about how Steam doesn’t normally allow returns.
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  #99  
02-18-2015, 01:32 AM
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That's not how lots of digital downloads work, not any more at least. You can multidownload on Steam. You can multidownload from iTunes. Nobody has any problems with you making copies of digital content licensed to you, as long as it's for personal use. I'm fairly sure that's even reflected in the law over here, but I'd need to dig more to be 100% sure on that.
You're referring to games provided as a service, but you can buy them as a product too. In a box, without any sort of DRM (at least some/most of them)

:
False advertising is a basis for a refund, not to mention immoral. If someone is advertising a product as something else and refusing a refund then you need to contact some kind of consumer affairs place and report it to them. Two wrongs, and all that.
It's a long, complicated, frustrating process that in no way can guarantee you'll get your money back. And it's meant to be that way, because otherwise douches will abuse the system for their own profits.

The other point is that you can't really ask for a refund, because the game was bad (for example it was super boring). You can't measure that objectively, at least there aren't any standards about what makes the game boring and what doesn't. And that would be even more prone to being abused
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  #100  
02-18-2015, 02:06 AM
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You're entitled to digital backups of physical disk media in Aus as far as I know, and that's something that I fully support. Other than that... why should physical games be under any special rules? If you break your chair you buy a new one. Even then, don't lots of boxed PC games come with Steam/Origin/UPlay codes these days?

If a game doesn't live up to your expectations then that's life. I was incredibly disappointed by Diablo 3 on launch - that didn't send me on a tirade to never purchase a game without playing it first. If you're dissatisfied by the refund process then don't buy games! Nobody is forcing you to continue to play them. If you make the decision to subvert their systems and obtain them for free, no matter how dissatisfied you are, that doesn't make it ok. Given that you're taking something that isn't yours (we've already established why saying you'll pay later isn't adequate) I feel like you are the one who should be explaining why that should ever be ok, because I'm yet to see you put pen to paper on that.

Last edited by Phylum; 02-18-2015 at 02:11 AM..
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  #101  
02-18-2015, 02:34 AM
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No. If a game doesn't live up to your expectations then that's life.
That's life, and there are people who accept the life as shitty as it is sometimes, and there are people who try to change the life to be better that before. I am definitely not the former.

The goal of the developers is to make money from the player's entertainment. When somebody pirated a game he's not sure about and it turns out it's shit, what do you think he does with it? He won't play it anymore, delete it making the copy erase from the existence. He won't have any good memories of the game (The strongest memory would be "This game wasn't worth my money") and he definitely won't be entertained, thus the developers have failed their task. Should they really get money for a bad job? Does it matter that they worked hard if the result was below average? The outcome would be basically the same as if the game had a (equally bad [that's not always the case, e.g. Sonic 6 had a demo that was supposedly more polished than the final game, which caused a confusion and people thought the game is good because of it]) demo, yet you demonize it.

:
Given that you're taking something that isn't yours (we've already established why saying you'll pay later isn't adequate)
I do not agree with how you "established" that, it's more like taking for granted from the start. And by "later" I don't really mean long periods of time. It really doesn't take long to download the game and check if it's any good. Even if the subject doesn't have money to pay for it, let's say it's an African kid, who spent his all money for a cheap computer and he is basically broke and with no job, there's no scenario when he could give money to the developers. I imagine Phylum and MM standing behind the poor kid's back and shouting at him whenever he tries to get some entertainment, legal or not. Let's also say we still consider the situation where kid will actually pay, when he has any money.

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I feel like you are the one who should be explaining why that should ever be ok, because I'm yet to see you put pen to paper on that.
Well I think your feelings are wrong on that one. I don't need to explain that something that doesn't hurt anybody can be ok. Piracy is both, there are people who hurt and don't. That is a wrong with people, not with piracy. Demonizing piracy is like demonizing entire humanity for WWII. It's just groundless.
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  #102  
02-18-2015, 03:16 AM
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It's pretty obvious that some of you are spending a lot of time to justifiy something illegal. Guilty conscience ? It's childish to think that game developers are making games for free.

Last edited by Vlam; 02-18-2015 at 03:20 AM..
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  #103  
02-18-2015, 03:34 AM
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Do you guys consider playing game demos to be piracy?
Do you also consider using adblock while browsing the internet (youtube, websites etc) to be piracy too?
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  #104  
02-18-2015, 04:00 AM
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:
Even if the subject doesn't have money to pay for it, let's say it's an African kid, who spent his all money for a cheap computer and he is basically broke and with no job, there's no scenario when he could give money to the developers. I imagine Phylum and MM standing behind the poor kid's back and shouting at him whenever he tries to get some entertainment, legal or not.
I have pirated games. MM has probably pirated games. I would never chastise someone for piracy outside of a discussion like this. I know when I pirate something that it's bad, and I do it anyway. As I said, I don't count it as a particularly bad thing.

Why are you trying to villainize us here. I mean, this is a discussion for fuck's sake. And you're the one arguing on the side of TAKING THINGS WITHOUT PAYING.

If we're saying that it doesn't hurt anyone - what if I steal a coke from a supermarket? That would cost a few people a few cents, nothing major. It's not going to make or break paying their bills. I'm not going to make anything near a significant dent in the local supply of coke, even if I stole 100. Does that hurt anyone?
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  #105  
02-18-2015, 05:30 AM
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I feel like I'm wasting my breath (typing fingers) here. You still can't see my point despite I repeated it at least two times and explained the simplest way I can imagine. And I really don't like to repeat myself. Do me a favor and thoroughly read my previous posts in this discussion, you might finally find that I was never in favor of taking things you like without paying if you could pay for it.
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  #106  
02-18-2015, 11:14 AM
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:
If a game doesn't live up to your expectations then that's life. I was incredibly disappointed by Diablo 3 on launch - that didn't send me on a tirade to never purchase a game without playing it first. If you're dissatisfied by the refund process then don't buy games!
I’m pretty sure nearly every country in the world has laws stating that you are entitled to a full refund of a product within X number of days of purchase regardless of circumstance. Why should that not apply to digital goods?
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  #107  
02-18-2015, 11:25 AM
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One good reason is that games like Portal can be beaten in an hour and a half.
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  #108  
02-18-2015, 11:26 AM
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Yeah and I can read a book in less than 30 days, doesn’t mean I shouldn’t be allowed to return it at all.

e: Apple was forced to allow returns on iTunes in the EU, but they can still check to ensure people don’t play the system. http://www.theverge.com/2015/1/13/75...n-policy-abuse
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Last edited by Manco; 02-18-2015 at 11:29 AM..
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  #109  
02-18-2015, 11:29 AM
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You can return a book in 30 days regardless of circumstances?
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  #110  
02-18-2015, 11:40 AM
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OK, did some research and I’m not entirely correct. Businesses are legally obliged to offer a full refund if an item is damaged, not fit for purpose or (for perishables) out of date. Mea culpa, but “damaged/fit for purpose” can certainly cover digital products so the law should still apply.
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  #111  
02-18-2015, 11:48 AM
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In Poland you can return most items you bought in 2 weeks after buying without stating the reason. But you can't really do that with games anymore, they often have single-use online keys (e.g. steam codes) and the boxed versions are basically useless without it. Also, you can't return it, because it's no longer considered buying a product. It's gaining access to a service. You don't really "own" games you bought on Steam.
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  #112  
02-18-2015, 01:50 PM
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That's bullshit. If stores are telling you they can't give you refunds because it's a digital product, you can't take that. Again, there will be ways for you to report that kind of behavior. I want to make my stance on this perfectly clear - stores misleading consumers, and digital storefronts claiming to not allow any refunds is worse than piracy.
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  #113  
02-18-2015, 01:52 PM
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No no, I mean a case where you take a boxed game, tie the code found in the box to your Steam account and then go to store with just a box and ask for refund.
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  #114  
02-18-2015, 02:16 PM
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If they sell it to you, they need to be able to provide a refund. It doesn't matter that the box isn't worth anything, they still sold you a product. The expectation should be on them to chase it up with the digital distributor.
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  #115  
02-18-2015, 02:21 PM
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Yeah, but they won't take the game off your account, shops don't do that (can't do that?). If they provided a refund for just a box, it would be cheating a copy. When Steam games started getting popular, there were some cases in Poland when they gave refunds for boxes with used codes, and that caused a stir and now they just don't do refunds on that.

Last edited by Varrok; 02-18-2015 at 02:23 PM..
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  #116  
02-18-2015, 03:05 PM
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The expectation should be on them to chase it up with the digital distributor.
It isn't as simple as just giving you money back, no.
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  #117  
02-18-2015, 05:13 PM
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In the UK we have run into a few instances where digital games failed to be "fit for purpose" and the government stepped in to demand refunds, but frankly it doesn't happen enough, or quickly enough. More on that later.

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I recall the EU recently put stronger enforcement on digital purchase returns in place, but I don’t know if games storefronts have been affected.
Germany demanded under threat of embargo that Valve allow Steam customers refunds for non-functional games. Valve said "We give in, but just Germany." Whether they were crossing their arms and pouting is not recorded.

Seriously though, Steam's EULA says something like "Refunds will only be granted in territories where legally required".

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Do you guys consider playing game demos to be piracy?
No. If it's being legally distributed for free, go nuts. It's effectively being licensed to you for a cost of zero. It might still have distribution restrictions, though, so you might still be pirating it if you don't get it from an official source.

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Do you also consider using adblock while browsing the internet (youtube, websites etc) to be piracy too?
Probably. There's no EULA for the internet, so legally it's kind of eeehhh, but if a site was to put a clause in its Terms and Conditions page saying that ads must be enabled to use that site, you'd be violating that agreement by using an ad blocker. That might not be classified as piracy, but it's definitely a form of theft.

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And yet by the law you can't make more than one copy of a thing you bought, even for yourself, it's considered piracy then.
That's nothing to do with "stock". That's an anti-distribution law. It's a way of ensuring that only you can use the product you bought i.e. stopping people who haven't paid for it from using it.

Copyright lawyers aren't worried that you duplicating a game is going to deplete finite reserves of data. People aren't digging zeroes and ones out of a mine somewhere. "Digital stock" is a myth.

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You didn't give me any arguments in the paragraph I quoted, just the statement. I didn't even have anything to work with, and you're calling me lazy?
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I'm not entitled to an ebook just because I dropped my paperback in the sink.
... I'm sorry, I genuinely thought that statement was so obviously true that only some kind of moron would need it clarified.

The ebook and the paperback are two entirely seperate products, and the publishers are totally entitled to charge you as such. I mean, look at them. Hold a tablet in one hand and the book in the other. They are not magically linked, they're two entirely unrelated products that happen to contain the same information. Pirating a digital copy of a physical game disc you once owned is the same.

Arguing that digital copies don't cost anything to produce isn't actually true - distribution requires bandwidth, electricity etc. and actually costs a hell of a lot, it just works out as a fairly low cost per copy because you can produce so many. And it's not like physical copies are made to order; whether I buy a boxed copy of a AAA game, or leave it on the shelf, the publishers will still print another 20,000 discs tomorrow.

It doesn't mean jack shit what other purchases you've made. You're a customer, not a patron; you don't pay installments to the developers and acquire the rights to anything with their name on it. They charge one fee for one copy of one product. Those are their terms. Take them or leave them.

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That's exactly what I meant. Paying before pirating, that's the case sometimes.
That's a pretty rare occurrence (relatively speaking) and only really happens under extreme circumstances, like a DRM malfunction stopping legal copies of a game from working. I believe that a customer is always entitled to what they paid for - no more, no less - so if for some reason the publisher was unable to deliever that functional product to a customer, yes, I could condone that customer pirating a copy. ONE copy.

I don't think you can really say that kind of situation is representative of piracy as a whole, though.

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Come on, you can't compare buying food to buying entertainment.
CHALLENGE ACCEPTED

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"I once bought a coffee from a shop, therefore I already paid for a coffee, therefore I can drink as many individual coffees as I want"
See? I just did!

The point of the coffee analogy was to demonstrate how dramatically you've chosen to misinterpret how retail licensing works, by applying the same misinterpretation to Starbucks.

You're taking a set method of retail licensing (the agreement that purchasing one copy of media/coffee allows you to enjoy it for as long as you own it) and trying to bend it for your own convenience (purchasing one copy of media/coffee entitles you to as many more copies/coffees as you want for free).

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Do you suggest I should pay each time I listen to a song?
If you listen on an official YouTube channel, you already do. Your adview is in lieu of payment, meaning you effectively did 0.1p's worth of work and passed that on to Google, who passed it on to the channel owner. A few other companies operate on the same idea. It's just another form of licensing, and that diversity of options is good for the consumer.

The point is, they choose how they license their own products. Again, take the terms or leave them. If Starbucks wanted to charge people by the sip, they could. And as consumers, we'd choose not to buy coffee from them because that's fucking stupid.

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That's actually up to interpretation. I don't think it's my mistake, since marketing is a vile beast and can manipulate the consumer completely. Imagine you saw an advert of a banana in TV (weird situation, but plausible) and it made you want that banana really much because of it's banananess. You bought one wrapped in a way so you can't see what's in it (it's kinda shaped like a banana). You unwrapped it and it's a cucumber. Let's say you hate cucumbers. Was it really your mistake of judgement? I'd say no.
I actually really like cucumbers

That's not an example of manipulative advertising (all ads are manipulative), it's an example of outright fraud, which is not that same thing. Namely, the latter is a crime while the former is not. In the UK, the Office of Fair Trading exists in part to prevent "false advertising", the legislation concerning which has very long lists of very specific definitions, and is therefore not really "up to interpretation". Advertising bananas and delivering cucumbers is certainly going to qualify. A cinematic trailer clearly labelled as "Not In-Game Footage" will not.

Much as you might complain, adverts can, will, and probably should present their products with an unrealistically high level of polish. As long as they don't advertise anything as present in the game when it isn't, it's all legal and pretty much par the course.

Obviously national laws will differ, but my point that your purchases are your own still stands. You choose who you listen to, you choose what you buy, and are liable for your own misspending. Capital-letter False Advertising is a crime, the perpetrators are liable for the misspending of those they defrauded, and lawyers can and will get involved to prevent it.

Basically, if you think you've been mis-sold a product, take the company to court. If you don't think you'd have a good enough case, that's probably because it wasn't mis-sold, you just made a bad choice and want to blame someone else.

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I've never started. They're awesome. What made you think I hate that?
Every time I suggest you should actually pay for the things you want, you complain that you shouldn't have to.

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That, except "provides statements without backup and is pretty closed-minded about them" instead of "disagrees with me"
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I don't need to explain that [piracy] can be ok. Demonizing piracy is like demonizing entire humanity for WWII.
lol

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... let's say it's an African kid, who spent his all money for a cheap computer and he is basically broke and with no job, there's no scenario when he could give money to the developers. I imagine Phylum and MM standing behind the poor kid's back and shouting at him whenever he tries to get some entertainment, legal or not.
Life is far too short to go around harassing people for every selfish decision they make. If a starving man steals a loaf of bread, is he acting selfishly? Of course, he's visibly harming the livelihood of the baker. Would you stop him? Of course not. Because like I said before, society is based on the principle that we can all be a bit selfish sometimes without becoming an outcast.

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The goal of the developers is to make money from the player's entertainment... When somebody pirated a game he's not sure about and it turns out it's shit... he definitely won't be entertained, thus the developers have failed their task. Should they really get money for a bad job?
This is exactly what I meant about you thinking that paying for commercial products is optional. It's not.

It is not at your discretion whether you should pay money you legally owe to game developers. The terms of the transaction are not contingent upon your enjoyment of their product.

They don't sell you a box labelled "FUN" that you can return when you find that there was nothing in it. They sell you a copy of a video game. Their side of the deal is done when they deliver that. Grow up, and do your side.


Last edited by MeechMunchie; 02-18-2015 at 06:33 PM..
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  #118  
02-19-2015, 07:48 AM
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I can't believe people still argue about this. I'm not even going to try to argue the point that it is theft because it's so fucking obvious that it is, the only way you're going to think it's not is to build a self congratulatory wall of lies around yourself. And who can argue with that.
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  #119  
02-19-2015, 08:30 AM
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Instant pre-order for me, so no not going to pirate. I'm also in the the piracy is flat out wrong camp. The whole "to try it out" and what not seems stupid. Can I go to the cinema and watch a film, decide its crap and then get my money back? Nope.

If I was a game developer I would hesitate to release on PC due to piracy, no one could have pirated the PS4 version since that system hasn't been cracked yet.
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  #120  
02-19-2015, 08:45 AM
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Can I go to the cinema and watch a film, decide its crap and then get my money back? Nope.
There were cases the movies suck so bad that the viewers massively asked for a refund
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