RIP Bullfrog (Theme Park, Theme Hospital, Dungeon Keeper etc.)
Think of who you're hurting before you consider piracy.
3 years ago by The Picard Maneuver to c/comicstrips
RIP Bullfrog (Theme Park, Theme Hospital, Dungeon Keeper etc.)
Westwood 😭
Yeah, EA has done more to hurt game devs than pirates have. "Salary means we don't have to pay overtime!"
True, but he plays for Bayern Munich now.
Or Nintendo:
"Stop pirating our old games!!!!!"
Okay, then sell me one of your old games.
"No."
More like: Nintendo, "here is an HD remake of that old game you wanted."
Fans, "We don't want to pay for old games!"
Fan: "I've been feeling like playing Super Mario Sunshine again lately. Do you happen to have this game?"
Nintendo: "Yes indeed, it is part of the Super Mario 3D Collection, which also contains Super Mario 64 with HD graphics and Super Mario Galaxy, also in HD and with added button controls."
Fan: "Nice! I'd like a copy of Super Mario 3D Collection."
Nintendo: "We only sold this for a short time after the 35th anniversary of Super Mario. So i guess you should've asked sooner."
Fan: "Well then. Now excuse me while i get an RCM-"
Nintendo: (cocks gun) "No you don't!"
It's impossible to pirate your own game tho. Why find an old cartridge and dump the ROM yourself if somebody already did it. The actual source code is probably somewhere in the shadowrealm, so nothing they can do.
More like: Nintendo, "here is a collection of old games that you have to pay for a monthly subscription in order to access."
Me: "that's really stupid, no thanks"
PS: it is possible to be a fan of Nintendo's and also think they are dicks about emulation and piracy and don't offer reasonable alternatives...many things in life are multi-faceted as such, and it's perfectly OK (and healthy ackshually) to acknowledge the bad in those we admire.
... so in your mind their attitude has nothing to do with IP, just the technology used to deploy it? Your statement makes no sense whatsoever
To add to what Skull giver said, the current retro market only exists because of the emulators that Nintendo has been fighting for over 25 years. There would be no SNES Mini console without snes9x or zsnes. Neither would there be a Nintendo e-shop for their old games on new consoles. The knowledge base to even make that work would not exist. Archiving old copies of games may not even exist.
Nintendo's position is highly hypocritical. They have benefited from emulation far more than they've been harmed.
I don't mind the HD remakes, but I do mind the constant obsession with releasing them over making a new game or, ye gods forbid, coming up with a new IP. That, and it'd be nice if they wouldn't leave several of them locked to dead on arrival systems (like the WiiU) which just creates the same problem all over again.
But what really gets my goat is locking all the Virtual Console releases onto the shop of whatever console they're on, so when that service inevitably goes defunct they're all lost again. Those old 16 bit games aren't changing, having content updates, or getting patched. And they're just emulating them anyway, so just put a whole bunch of titles on a Switch cartridge or something and let me play them in perpetuity as long as my Switch still functions. I will not pay $60 for Mario 1 again. I probably would pay $60 for the entirety of the first party library from the NES on a cartridge.
All my old NES, SNES, N64, and Gamecube games still work just fine, decades later. But there's stuff that was on the DSi and WiiWare shops that's just gone forever, and you can never get them back.
I don't trust a 3d printed gun, why would I trust a 3d printed car? But if I could make a car myself, I definitely would, even if I had to pirate the designs.
3d printed firearms have transformed into a whole cottage industry with all sorts of variations. The ones that are safest are essentially just stocks capable of holding the parts of a firearm. The ones that are completely 3d printed are still pretty sketchy and illegal to sell
Any firearm that you, a private citizen, manufacture, is illegal to sell.
You are not a licensed firearm distributor.
But, at least in most of the US, it is perfectly legal to manufacture them for your own use. You just can’t sell them.
You can sell homemade firearms you made for personal use and later decided to get rid of.
You cannot manufacture them for the purpose of sale, however.
that's true. I should have specified that a lot of the purchasable (fully and unquestionably in the right) stuff just sell CAD files for 3d printed parts, or print the parts for you. The more questionable ones sell ghost gun kits
The thing people forget is that 3d printing doesn’t just enable the direct manufacturing of parts, it also enables the manufacturing of tooling for parts that would never have been manufacturable at home otherwise.
For example, you can rifle a metal tube and form a chamber using electro etching and printed tooling. Or, you can make tooling to make magazine springs
The key point to be made here is that a fully plastic gun is sketchy but 3d printing has absolutely transformed the ability to make reliable and effective firearms at home without any off the shelf firearm parts
The same type of thing is happening in the car hobbyist world. We aren’t printing cars but people are using prints to make molds, form sheet metal, align parts for weldments and manufacture low stress plastic parts like intake manifolds.
reliable
Out of everything you said, this is the only thing that I disagree with, but it's the only thing that matters. I mentioned 3d printed guns because, if you don't use off the shelf parts, you really don't have any way of knowing how many rounds you can put through it before it explodes in your hand. Was there a tiny defect in your print? A misalignment or some debris in the print material? You're right that boring your chambers from stock is safer, but that doesn't make it safe. And that's a firearm you can inspect after each round.
A car has many critical components under the hood, especially when you use an internal combustion engine. That's a bunch of tiny explosions every second, and even setting that aside, you have the transmission, the brakes, the steering, the windshield, the stereo, any one of those could fail and kill you (or make life not worth living, in the case of that last one).
3D printing will continue to evolve and improve, but it will be a long time before I trust it enough to download a car.
I mentioned 3d printed guns because, if you don't use off the shelf parts, you really don't have any way of knowing how many rounds you can put through it before it explodes in your hand.
I mean. Ya kinda do. A broken receiver isn’t going to make the gun explode in your hand, it’s just going to cease being functional.
Was there a tiny defect in your print? A misalignment or some debris in the print material?
More importantly, the issue with small defects is sidestepped by good engineering and process control. Your statement applies to almost every sort of manufacturing. All materials have internal defects and a range of potential material properties. You account for this by applying a safety factor so that the design stresses are well below the nominal material properties. For a material with higher uncertainty on the properties you simply apply a higher safety factor
That’s why many 3d printed guns look like bricks when an injection molded receiver would be much more sleek in comparison.
A car has many critical components under the hood, especially when you use an internal combustion engine. That's a bunch of tiny explosions every second, and even setting that aside, you have the transmission, the brakes, the steering, the windshield, the stereo, any one of those could fail and kill you (or make life not worth living, in the case of that last one).
Home built cars have been a thing pretty much since the start of the automobile. People who home-build cars don’t typically build their own drivetrain. It’s just not worth the effort when donor engines from wrecked cars can be had cheaply and easily.
Usually the DIY fabrication work involves building the chassis, suspension components, body panels, etc. As I pointed out, you wouldn’t just print the chassis. You’d use printed parts as jigs to align the welds, build mold for composite pieces, etc.
Nobody is going to be printing a complete car in the conceivable future, but 3d printing can absolutely help you build a good and reliable car from conventional materials with greatly reduced effort and tooling costs.
3d printing has come a long way, both in materials and quality. especially as you step away from FDM or resin printers. I certainly wouldn't trust a rando facebook marketplace printer who bought a creality to make a quick buck... but I would trust my own prints- mostly because I know what the materials are, and know I'll check for good print quality. reality is, though, that about the most you can print right now is a half baked golf cart chasis. if you want it to be safe... you're going to have to add a lot to it, and at that point, you might as well just buy a damn car or something.
You wouldn't download a car, would you?
Movies studios now trying to download actors.
"Trying"?
They're working round the clock to develop CGI "actors".
Gonna be interesting when actors start being replaced.
Marcin Jakubowski is already doing this with Farming Equipment!
And when you download a car there's even a pimento taco -- a pimentaco -- in the glove box.
but I would in a heart beat if I could
with your 3-D printed heart
If I had a dollar for every car I downloaded for GTA4..
I'm fine spending money for a quality product.
Quality product. Not DRM-laden, always-online, unoptimized garbage that pushes microtransactions in my face. It's not a price problem; it's a service problem. If I'm going to get a shittier experience as a legitimate customer, piracy is the smart thing to do.
If you're concerned about DRM, just use GOG or Itch. If you're concerned about shitty games, do research before you buy something and just avoid studios like EA.
Don't underestimate the FOMO factor.
Avoiding a title is simply not a consideration for a lot of people—especially if it's shitty. They're important context for meme and conversation material.
I genuinely wish this was a joke.
Did "all digital" kill renting? Back in my day we had Blockbuster and gamefly, and we could buy used disks from gamestop and play 'em for a bit and return them within 7 days to "rent" them as well. I'm glad I'm all ROMs and flashcarts these days.
I'm pretty picky about what I get, so that idea didn't really come to me...
It won't change anything until people stop preordering games and actually wait for them to come out before shelling out a hundred bucks.
Pre-order and dlc is what has made gaming so awful lately. Game companies realized they can make a half-assed game and fill it with microtransactions and still make shit loads of money
The biggest issue with pre-ordering is the gaming community itself tbh. Even if an individual knows better intellectually, companies have people specialized to make advertising as engaging as possible. Most of us (I used to be one of them) simply do not have the tools, nor the idea, of how to mentally combat "hype trains" and thus get our expectations up praying that the game will come out good and satisfy us for a bit.
Pre-ordering makes zero sense for a digitally downloadable product, since it isn't scarce like physical products can be. Unless the company invents advantages that didn't need to be there, there's no benefit of being in the front of the queue, since eventually everybody can get a copy. Consumers are dumb...
Good old inability to delay gratification (google it, it's an actual behavioural trait) in the face of the pretty clear logic that almost all games (except some multiplayer ones) are actually better a year later than at launch day.
Mind you, the world around us pretty much tries to train us every single day to be like that: it makes for wonderful profit-maximizing mindless consumers.
Exactly. Companies know how to manipulate our dopamine high and keep on repeating the cycle of pre-orders and post-launch disappointment; while the game developers are laughing their way to the banks.
do research before you buy something
So instead of playing, I now have to do work to figure how to spend my miniscule available time on what to play to get the most out of said time.
I'm not mocking what you said. I'm just lamenting the state of gaming.
I'd rather invest my time figuring a smart purchase, than spend my minuscule available money padding some rich fuck wallet. I don't have much money or time, so I'd rather spend it on quality products and services than waste it on moneygrubbers.
No one's disputing that. The discussion is about how awful it is that we have to do that. It sucks that our miniscule time is even smaller because we have to now sift through the garbage first.
I don’t pirate indie games, small-budget movies, or music from unknown bands. I hurt major corporations specifically.
For some older indie games, piracy is the only way to play them. But otherwise, I agree with this.
True, but GOG doesn't have everything 🤷
You misunderstood. I meant that piracy is literally how many of games were saved. GOG started because some guys stockpiled pirated copies of games, then cracked and/or reversed engineered them to work on modern PCs. Eventually, they got the rights to sell some legally and GOG.com was born.
My point was that piracy isn't always bad because companies have no incentive to preserve their products after they've stopped selling. (See vintage ROMs)
Good exception.
Exactly.
They steal more than we can dream.
They just used their influence to legalize their grift.
Legality ≠ Morality
Especially in a horrendously unjust nation such as ours.
The phrase “Legality ≠ Morality” comes to mind several times a week. Too many people let themselves ignore ethics because they don’t think (or care) about the difference.
Indie games are better these days anyways. I just use AAA games as performance benchmarks lmao.
Or steal code from the community they're busy suing...
EA are definitely the bigger problem as far as I'm concerned though.
Oh for sure but for this meme about pirating old games, no one else is worse than nintendo imo
True.
Never pirate from indie developers. But for giant companies, pirating is a drop in the bucket for their revenue.
It's technically impossible to differentiate a legitimate key from an illegal key. They are usually created in batches to be distributed. So they are legitimate and exist way before the fraud takes place. By the time there's a charge-back on the purchase, whether the key is illegal or not is irrelevant. The damage is done, banning the user does literally nothing. The developer is still on the hook with the processing fees and the user already downloaded and installed the game.
Not only that, but those users thought they were buying legit keys, and expect support from the original publisher. Pirates never expect support.
Factorio devs literally said to pirate their game rather than buy from one of these reseller sites.
They would if they were easily identifiable. IIRC Steam might revoke them if the key is bought with stolen cards and their owners perform a chargeback.
Thing is for copyright law those keys are 100% legal.
EDIT: I explicitly said for copyright law. It's how users justify that "they are not pirating", except it's much worse because game developers need to deal with fees anyway after chargeback.
Fuck me what an insanely stupid comment.
But how will the US military get more cannon-fodder if people play Kirby instead of CoD?
If the military recruited based on Duck Hunt I think I'd be screwed.
I've rolled over the score counter on the skeet shooting half of the game. I did it to see if any bugs or unexpected behavior would crop up if you do, but nothing interesting happens. It just rolls back over to zero. Anyway, you give me a Zapper and I can hit just about anything.
That is some impressive dedication
Is it really a victimless crime to go to archive.org and download yourself a copy of the never before released yet still fully completed Thrill Kill for PlayStation? Of course not, you need to think twice about the company that canceled the game and any bonuses the developers were promised, and didn't even tell them about it, with the developers themselves having to learn about it from IGN.
Indie dev here. Do whatever you want
I used to make small games too for a little bit. Same.
Image Transcription:
A four-panel comic by mygumsarebleeding.
The first panel shows a person with short, black hair, wearing a black shirt with the EA logo on it. They are talking to a person with long, black hair who is wearing a red shirt and facing away, arms folded. The first person is saying "I'm so sorry honey".
The second panel shows the first person from the first panel speaking to two smaller people, both wearing red and sitting at a table with their heads in their hands and empty plates in front of them. The person is saying "I'm sorry my children...".
The third panel shows a close-up of the person saying "There will be no food tonight".
The fourth panel shows an even closer view of the person's face, lines under his eyes indicating distress as he says "Somebody pirated a game I made in 1995".
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Thank you, fellow human 🤖
More like Nintendo
I just spent the night on my first emulator playing F-Zero Gx. I'm so sorry children :(
That should have been the lead racing series for Nintendo.
Mariokart is just an arcade game with a racing theme.
They're going to go hungry now
Isn't that one of those games that's near impossible to find a hard copy of? I might be thinking of another one.
One of the games I grew up playing was Silent Service. For years it disappeared, then one day GOG brought it back from the dead because they secured the rights to publish the hacked pirated copy they had been sitting on since the cold war. Without piracy, the game would have just disappeared.
A shitty gaming studio that loves to ruin game franchises
How about we make a short list; Deadspace, starwars battlefront, Titanfall...
If it's EA then "skimmed profits off the top of" is probably more accurate than "made".
But you can feast on your sense of pride and accomplishment!
don't copy that floppy https://www.google.com/...
Gives me BL2 flashbacks. The hours I spent read-only farming for a perfect Pimpernel on that mission turn-in...
Devil's advocate: is the time spent playing a pirated retro game still a kind of lost revenue, since you could be spending your time buying and playing all their new shit? I say this as a long-time retro gamer who finally broke down and bought some new shit recently.
Make a better product then.
Going to work is lost revenue.
Yeah, game companies should be lobbying for UBI for everyone
I'd say no, because they don't own your time by default.
Odd contradiction. I support pirating when a person can't access media legally (whether due to financials or just dick-moves by corps). However, this is the same logic that writers are striking against with streaming and I sure as hell support them.
Which one?
Of course piracy preserves old games. Also piracy is not a problem when it is miniscule. The issue is when piracy becomes the norm, so that these companies will be pushed towards more locked systems (consoles exclusives) and abandon PC. Some may even call for androud style locking up on PC.
Google is already trying the latter with the Web DRM stuff they're trying to shove down everyone's throats (and why I stopped using Chrome and Chromium — I've been daily driving Firefox for a while now and replaced Chromium with Brave for when I need a Chromium browser).
Streaming happened after piracy…but then piracy still happens to keep streaming in check it seems. It’s like that looming ‘did you want to make some money or no money?’ Threat On the greedy distributors. Has absolutely fuck all to do with the artist.
Yes you will scream bloody murder about AI pirating from artists. Get it together lol.
So it's not selfish to repeatedly rerelease old games and charge full price for them? It's not selfish to never come down in price? Ever?
Whatever you need to tell yourself to justify your stealing.
It isn't stealing, nothing is being taken.
My legal right to distribute my works how I see fit is absolutely being stolen. I'm absolutely allowed to sell my work in limited quantities.
Nothing has been taken from you. You still own your work and can still use it and distribute it.
Whatever you need to tell yourself. That's not the law, and you are stealing my legal right to control my works.
How dare people "steal" a 30-year-old game that no one is selling anymore!
I do LFS for funsies. Please resort to more personal attacks because the reality hurts.
👌👍
That you don't know the difference between theft and copyright infringement tells us all we need to know.
Whatever little semantics you need to justify your stealing 🤷♂️
Cute.
When did I say I pirate?
Again, more sophistry and hubris.
Theft implies ownership. Even if you buy the game, the company or library host you bought it from doesn't consider it yours. So why would pirating a game be ownership, or "theft," either? Companies say what's in their best interest, money. Ownership, especially of digital media, is a social construct. Writing a file onto your disk is not stealing, as it implies limited supply. No product should have infinite profit, it should be relational to labor not money.
You are stealing my right to distribution. I've addressed this.
👌
Bingo. I steal shit once in a while. I don't delude myself.
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Comic Strips is a community for those who love comic stories.
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a game someone else made in 1995 which was later hostilely acquired by EA only to see it immediately fire all staff and shutter the studio
FTFY
save