this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2023
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Nope. I only pirate when media companies can't stop gorging themselves on billions of dollars in profit and shovelling shares and dollar bills down their greedy little throats.
It's not that I don't have the money, I've just had enough. When you had one of two streaming services and a Spotify and good prices on steam and whatnot, that worked.
Today we have preorders that eclipse 100 dollars, my streaming service bills are more than the cable bills they were supposed to be replacing, and now it's just more more more. We want more more more
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Two streaming services is less competitive than the 5 or 6 major ones we have right now, you can choose them a la carte in a way you never could with cable, and even if you felt compelled to have all of them at the ad free tier, you're paying less than cable and getting no commercials. Video game prices have lagged behind inflation, not even kept up with them, and the game you want will probably have a substantial sale 3 months after release anyway. It just seems like an incredibly thin premise to justify piracy.
I don't need to justify piracy to you. You are the one that's morally outraged here. Again, I have the money, it's not a poverty thing. It's a perception thing. When people act gross, I act gross in response. Plain and simple. You can try to defend these companies, some of which have larger profits than the GDP outputs of some countries, all you want. That's your prerogative. When companies put greed before the goodwill of the customers, which this is by the way, then I act shitty in response. That's my prerogative.
You were morally outraged enough to decide that this justifies piracy, but this is Capcom we're talking about, not EA. From what I can see, they're not making their money off of gambling mechanics like Ultimate Team. They're talking about raising prices on products that are generally seen as quality and charging what they believe those products to be worth, even saying that this will allow them to raise staff salaries to retain talent. I don't condone piracy, but I was asking you what line you believed they crossed when price increases are just inevitable for anything that costs money, and I personally don't really see any scummy business practices attached to this. Beyond that, I'd also argue that you have a greater effect on the market when you just don't pirate or play those games that offend you at all and instead direct your time and money to a game that could use it more. That means they make more of the latter and the former is less successful for doing something you didn't like. Word of mouth of the games you played and the lack of word of mouth for the ones you didn't has an effect on the market as well.
I agree you don't have to justify it, but I also feel like you don't need to glorify it either. I'm not morally opposed to it and jah knows I've don't some piracy in my day, but people who have to make a big statement about it as you've done above invite the arguments from people who are morally opposed.
Having 5 streaming services instead of 2 when they each have exclusive content isn't competition, it's just separate small monopolies. They hold the content hostage and you can't actually choose when you want to watch something specific.
It'd only be competitive if they all had the same catalogue or you didn't care at all what you watch, which I suspect just isn't a reality for most people.
They're all trying to have enough to watch to keep you subscribed all the time, which means they have an incentive to keep making more good shows. But there's no world where 5 streaming services will have something I'll want to watch every month, so it's pretty easy to just cancel until you've got a handful of shows to go through on that service. Then you subscribe for a month or two and come back later. That's way, way better than a local television monopoly like cable typically had, with channels you couldn't opt out of for a cheaper bill, that still forced commercials on you regardless of your exorbitant bill.
That's so convoluted that at that point I can just torrent the show. It's easier, faster, free and I don't have to wait for it or try to figure out which streaming service has it.
That's not convoluted in the least bit, nor is it faster or easier to torrent. If you somehow found out about a show but not which service it was on, there's justwatch.com.