I’m the firm believer of piracy is a service issue. Lot of time that piracy is rampant, it’s almost always due to accessibility issue, mainly cost in country with weaker currency. A $60 game will cost me about 15 days of food, that’s inaccessible for a lot of people in my country and frankly hard to justify, and if there’s not even an option for localisation of the price, whether people pirate or not, they basically leaving money on the table.
Steam used to be cool because everyone follow the sane pricing suggestion, but nowadays publisher decided to earn less money by charging more for their mediocre game, and then blame piracy for the lackluster earning.
I don’t pirate myself, i have very less time to game nowadays, but i don’t think piracy is an ass move, especially when cracked version run better than paid version due to stupid drm.
They’re often forced to equalize global prices because of sites like G2A. Even if they want to sell a game for the price of a Zimbabwean loaf of bread, G2A picks up a thousand copies of that and resells them in America, driving the global revenue down.
So, now no one in Zimbabwe gets cheap local prices because there’s no such thing as a “local” price. And the defenders of G2A use their own mental gymnastics to justify it.
I don’t trust the refund policy. If they have a so called refund policy why not force every published to add a 1-2 hour free trial instead? We should be able to try games and evaluate before the money leaves our pockets.
Try it, steam makes it so easy to refund stuff assuming you played less than couple hours and bought it fairly recently. And forcing companies to make trials isn’t as easy as you think. Some indie games still have trial versions but those are pretty much impossible to find in AAA titles as they obviously want people to just buy them and play past the return window.
Edit: Also on your post, who cares? Lot of companies certainly don’t have morals and do whatever they can to milk their users. If you don’t wanna pay for it then don’t, its better than not playing anyway. Buy something if you can afford to and wanna support the studio, especially indie studios who rely on that income to produce more games and the money actually go to the people who deserve it. I personally just grab a bunch of stuff on sale and play one when I feel like it, although a lot of them remains untouched to this date.
Tldr: don’t overthink it, do whatever works for you
They don’t really market their refund policy. And, I know they have a 2 hour playing window. However, what if you’re really into the game and you play 2.5h non-stop not realizing and they you decide to refund but can’t. Sometimes it can take up to 10 hours to actually evaluate if a game is good. Some games have tutorials which can take 1-2 hours if you read everything and play at a slow pace at which point you’re locked out of refund. I don’t support their refund policy at all actually.
Because the “default path” is different, a free trial would have way less conversion than the current system.
With a free trial you have to take an action to buy it. With a refund you have to take an action to be refunded.
Or they could do it like SaaS, where you’re automatically charged at the end of the trial unless you decide to cancel before… But that’s a bit convoluted and it wouldn’t bring much compared to the current system.
Personally unless it’s a dirt cheap game I do enough research before buying and I rarely have to refund. But I definitely refund if the game is not at the level of quality that I expected.
Don’t trust the software company to do what they have made legally sound claims to doing, and that hundreds of thousands of people have said they’ve done.
But do trust the script kiddies writing crackers not to install invisible keyloggers and ad trackers.
It’s pretty common for hardcore FPS gamers to switch their right click (which is usually ADS) from a “press and hold” configuration to a “toggle” configuration, meaning you just click to ADS, and then click again to release it. The idea is that you shouldn’t be constantly pushing down on you mouse while aiming, it creates drag and makes aiming harder.
Are you talking about remapping your mouse buttons to keyboard buttons? Seems like it would be difficult, but it’s plausible.
FPS players are beasts on their own next level where it comes to binds. They also rebind movement options like jump to mouse wheel and switch WASD to ESDF so there’s more surrounding keys and better pinkie access.
I hadn’t seen ESDF in FPS, I personally used to use it in WoW.
But mousewheel scroll is actually a great jump bind for when you precisely need to input the next jump action to time it with the end of the last. This is less an FPS thing and more a movement thing. Spacebar (or other buttons) will only work if you hit it at the precise time, while mousewheel is a lot more forgiving, since it is multiple inputs in quick succession, kind of like the rapid-fire macros. Like I suck at bhopping for example, but I could do some easy bhop sequences in cs 1.6 with scrollwheel, there is no way I would be able to with spacebar.
When I play FPS, I bind movement to SDF, jump to A and forward to the right mouse button. That allows me to control aiming and forward movement with one hand and to squeeze the mouse with the whole hand when shooting to avoid jerking. WASD is a silly scheme in any case, I don’t understand why it is a default.
Yes you are an “asshole” for stealing but also fuck these companies are so shit you shouldn’t care.
In a pure ethical debate its wrong but on a practical level I think its fine. Steam has a 2hr no questions asked refund policy which I feel is reasonable and so I don’t pirate unless I want to play a game and not compensate the people who made it.
If you play the game beyond what would be a trial/demo (equivalent of first chapter/level content), yes you would be. And the fact is, basically everyone is okay being an asshole, because the demographic of video games cannot ask their parents for thousands of dollars every year, at the rate they complete each game. Most video game pirates are either completionists, collectors or speedrunners.
I would say though the differentiator is video games that have practically stopped selling (pre 2007 and retro) and their companies that have gone bankrupt/defunct/extinct, in which case it does not matter at all, as the creators no longer earn money from the game.
Many unreasonable people that claim DRM is bad for performance, disguise the argument that all DRM is as evil and bad for performance as Denuvo is. Arguments need to be honest, so call DRM what it is. Masking arguments makes them weaker.
You might want to remember that there are also working grunts in that food chain. They already got paid to make the game, yes, but that was in the expectation of profit. If the game crashes, those execs will look for scapegoats.
Buying games feeds the vampires, but also the devs (even if only in scraps). In our current world, there’s not a whole lot of options outside of “only buy indie games” to both support developers and avoid filling the pockets of execs and investors.
A few people pirating games instead of paying for them isn’t a big deal, but it eventually turns into a “tragedy of the commons” issue like other forms of theft. Either the suppliers won’t be able to stay in business or they’ll work out ever more comprehensive (and invasive) prevention mechanisms. Remember when games were just the program on the disk and you didn’t need keys and an online connection to activate your copy?
If you’re buying games that are more than 3 months old, they do not. Bonuses are given for metacritic scores and launch quarter sales. They’re never given royalties.
there’s not a whole lot of options outside of “only buy indie games” to both support developers and avoid filling the pockets of execs and investors.
What’s wrong with telling people to buy indie games and pirate anything made at the directive of blood-sucking vampires?
Remember when games were just the program on the disk and you didn’t need keys and an online connection to activate your copy?
Remember when games were just some free software on Usenet that someone made because they thought it’d be cool, and shared because they were proud of it?
I didn’t say they were getting paid directly, but indirectly. Their employment and income - like all other working class grunts’ - depends on their ability to generate profit for their employer. If we deny the employer their profit, the employer will take that out on their grunts. Conversely, if we pay them, that money likely will end up sponsoring further developments which - guess what? - pays the developers for developing more stuff.
Much of our modern economy is centered around credit and debt. The developers are effectively paid as a credit, in the expectation that the profits will pay the debt. If it doesn’t, that will affect further credits.
And no, I don’t remember Usenet, but it sounds like that was a good time then. How do they compare to modern games in terms of entertainment?
Almost none of the profit made off AAA games goes to the people actually creating the game. They don’t get a bonus if the new Madden makes $10 mil more than the old one. You’re tossing hundreds at the CEOs and saying it’s worth it if the devs get a few pennies.
Many of them probably aren’t even at the same studio anymore by the time you’re buying the game.
Did you actually read my comment? They don’t get the profit from the old game. The success pays for them to develop new games.
Asked the other way round, if the game’s profit doesn’t pay the devs, what does?
The company employing them
Why does the company employ them?
To make money
So what happens if the company stops making money? A game’s profit doesn’t pay the past developers, but it does affect their future employment and income.
I’m not defending the exploitative system that bleeds us dry for the privilege of getting to temporarily benefit from the wealth they’ve already extracted. I’m not opposing piracy. I’m very much in support of OP’s strategy.
All I’m saying is that piracy won’t fix that system, because the ones most dependent on the game’s success aren’t the exec’s that’ll be hired elsewhere nor the investors that’ll extract their wealth elsewhere, but the devs whose employment and existence depends on their capacity to generate that wealth.
Attack the system at the top, but don’t drop the bottom.
mBank ma kartę “Visa Świat” (musisz mieć konto intensive, 30 zł/mc lub 0zł/mc jeżeli na konto wpływa 7k/mc, a sama karta Visa Świat kosztuje 10zł/mc) która ma podobne prowizje do Revoluta (Revolut chyba 0.57%, a ta karta 0.63%) za przewalutowanie
Fakt, że za Revoluta nie trzeba płacić 10zł/mc (zakładam że masz konto intensive i to się nie zamienia w 40zł/m bo tak mi pasuje do tezy), ale z tą kartą masz wszystko zintegrowane w Twoim banku - nie ma potrzeby przeciągania hajsu między Revolutem a faktycznym kontem. Czy to jest dla Ciebie warte 10zł/mc (40zł/mc) to inna kwestia
W mBanku jest też darmowa usługa wielowalutowa - można płacić kartą z kont walutowych, tylko trzeba je wcześniej sobie zasilić przy korzystnym kursie. Walut jest chyba tylko 10, ale jeżeli ktoś nie podróżuje daleko czy chce płacić w USD w internecie, to spoko opcja myślę.
With how directly Control tied into the Alan Wake universe with their DLC being completely centered around it I’d be really surprised if they wouldn’t go even further now
This is going to be an oddball suggestion, but quite a unique gaming experience, in my opinion: NodeCore
It’s basically Minecraft meets puzzling to progress through technologies.
The game is rather difficult. And it being so niche, there’s no wiki to tell you the solutions, except for actual Wikipedia, because somehow it’s relatively realistically modelled.
As such, it has this feeling of being the first human to figure these things out and I found it massively rewarding when I pushed through some of the more complex puzzles.
The whole game is completely free. Just download the Minetest engine/launcher and search for “NodeCore” in the Content-tab.
bin.pol.social
Aktywne