Still surprised “Jorking with Gorkur” sells as well as it does.

To elaborate, how it worked for me is, when I published my book digitally, the store offered me to set a price for a “Library copy”. They recommend making this a higher price than the base copy, and then a digital library service will let people rent that copy out infinitely. Many authors take the default arrangement, since they’re just happy to have more people reading the work, BUT want to put a basic limiter on it (limited borrow copies) since we’re in the age of script kiddies, resellers, opportunistic collectors, etc.

This apparently varies by country. In countries where it’s not the case, the library system is not killing book sales or authorship.

Installing Linux on PS5 is an exploit as far as I understand it, and requires specific software versions that are already long outdated at this point. But PS5 already runs a Unix like kernel as far as I know. So yes, it would be possible to do it on them if Sony or Microsoft allowed it. Though I doubt they ever will since you could not run Playstation or Xbox games on Linux without huge investment from their side. It’s a solution for those looking to jump without the hardware cost, but I am a little anxious in recommending it since Sony full well considers it still their device. And Nintendo has recently shown they aren’t shy from just bricking banning your device from their services if they think you’re not using it the way they want, I would expect the same from Sony. But if you do it right, probably no way for them to find out. But you could never go back to it just being a Playstation 5 too. In the end it’s essentially the same path as my first proposal.

I also notice that when there is a discussion or video regarding modding a console, it’s to “preserve” its longevity rather than having a practical use.

I think that’s in part because it’s an attempt to tiptoe around the ‘red lines’ of console manufacturers. It’s trying to stay as inoffensive as possible so that it doesn’t get put into the same bag as emulators or third party tools to circumvent DRM.

EDIT: The switch example wasn’t bricked, but it was banned from using the official services, which isn’t much better, but still a distinction to be made.

Paid actor or just retard?

There’s clear data showing piracy almost never has a negative impact on sales. If anything, it’s usually a positive impact. And the exceptions to this are not video games.

Don’t kid yourself. The artists will get fired either way. Whether or not the game sells well will not change anything. Aside from the point above.

Anti-piracy advocates like you are the cancer of the gamer community. You’re doing absolutely nothing for the world, but spewing corporate propaganda that is based on nothing but the words of an ultra rich pedophile.

Your point being? I’m well aware these are because of piracy, it doesn’t change my point. If you’re a shitty company intent on abusing your customers to extract as much money from them, of course you’re going to find any way to do it and take away their forms of protest. But in the end, an artist still gets paid for whichever game they end up greenlighting, and not for the amount of copies sold afterwards. Hell they might not even get paid at all since these are the same kind of companies that would rather fire them for AI.

And for the not so shitty companies, they simply make sure people have no reason to pirate them, and there’s a hell of a lot more of those. They just don’t make unreasonable amounts of money, almost like that’s antithetical to treating your customers fairly.

Either pay the price asked because you want that game or movie so bad, or say the cost is too high and walk away entirely.

I don’t entirely disagree with this regarding newer content, and I personally don’t pirate that… but I will happily subvert a system of near perma-copyright that was never meant to exist, goes entirely against key concepts around copyright when it was first conceived, and only exists due to extreme regulatory capture. It has been perverted far beyond its intent.

7 years. Copyright was meant to last about 7 years. There was, at that time, an acknowledgment that culture belongs to society as a whole and shouldn’t be monopolized by one person, stifling innovation (I mean, Disney is basically founded on reworking others’ stories; would they ever have hit it big if they couldn’t have done that? Hard to say…)… copyright was seen as a sort of necessary evil to give an artist a few years of a legal monopoly to incentivize art creation.

That’s about the cutoff I use. If it’s older than 7 years, you’ve had your chance to make a buck. Even moreso today… 7 years is far more time today to actually exploit your monopoly, information is just so quickly disseminated. I tried to show my kid Charlie Brown Christmas this last holiday season… absolutely criminal that people can still gatekeep that for money, that kind of thing should belong to society as a whole. Zero qualms about going to the high seas for that kind of thing.

tl;dr I think the ethics of piracy are nuanced, but I absolutely do not buy the argument that the current law around copyright is ethical as it stands and as an unethical law, it should be subverted.

Not lots sadly. There are certainly some that have a big enough public profile to demand a share, but those are few and far between, and are often doing pretty well for themselves already. To 99% of the people in the industry the response to “I want to get a cut of the game’s profits” is “you can find another place to work then.”

I don’t entirely disagree with your bigger point. At some point you have to just step away from companies that are set on abusing you. But I don’t agree that it’s immature or skinflinty. That seems to be a rather uncharitable take perhaps lacking in understanding and perspective of why people pirate. There are pirates that take for the sake of it, but that’s not mostly the case. Piracy is trackable to a certain degree, and so it is feedback that people want to give you money, but are protesting your decisions. As has been said, piracy is a service problem. People tend to have no problem parting with their money in a fair exchange, and so they often don’t, even if they could.

Wanting to be treated fairly and not taking abuse is the opposite of immature in my opinion, how much it costs doesn’t even factor into it. Some fights you fight on principle. Too many people accept being taken advantage of in this world, making it worse for everyone else. And without those people piracy would also have been unneeded, because these companies often opt to not fix their issues and instead enshittify harder to squeeze more out of the people that keep paying.

There’s also a huge psychological aspect to it. Pirates often still bond with friends over games and those friends can end up buying, and pirates often still contribute to fan communities. Both of these are hard to let go of. They also happen to still help the original game stay relevant despite pirating, so yes, quitting entirely is more effective of a boycott. But also not being able to sell the experience to someone that has already experienced it is also more permanent, and allows that person to remain in their respective communities. Piracy just hits the sweet spot between quitting and no longer directly supporting, which is why people often end up there. And for creators that have to live under the thumb of executives that sabotage their success with hostile business practices, they would much rather you be there than somewhere else, while they try to improve the situation from the inside.

A bonus is not the same as a percentage cut of sales. Yes, bonuses exist and they can correlate with the success of a game in the best case, but they can (and also often) completely do not, plenty of stories of people getting laid off even if the game does well. These companies are so big they do not hold onto their staff as valuable assets, but as replaceable cogs. And it’s also why a lot of artists work on a contract basis and just don’t get any bonus to begin with.

And ‘to make up for extremely poor baseline salaries’… That’s not a thing as far as I know, and if it is where you are, it shouldn’t be a thing. It would be the game industry equivalent of tipping culture. Steal from workers ahead of time so you can punish them if the suits’ stupid business decisions don’t work out, awesome.

EDIT: Perhaps you’re referring to the fact that artists get paid badly at all, in which case, sure. But those bonuses aren’t to make up for that.

You’re talking about food. Everyone else is talking about video games here.

No, I know GOG provides plenty of DRM-free games, what I meant is, I remember something about Steam having a system to make games DRM-free in case they went under or something. Maybe it was something different or even misinformation, though.