When did game developers stop hiring proper programmers?

after burner climax

If you buy GTA on Steam, you get a cracked version with features removed (they remove music from the game).

Why not just get the superior version, for free?

>enters into a bar
>asks for a beer
>bartender gives you a beer but asks you to give the bottle back
>you say that that's not how it should be for some reason so you just steal it from the counter

The beer is a consumable, data that can be copied infinitely at no cost is not the same.
And in your example the bartender would charge you twice for the same beer.

Enjoyment is not a product, the game is. Why do you get to decide how many times I'm gonna play the game? It's none of your business. You're practically telling me nobody in the whole world was playing a game like the original Warcraft 3 in 2020 and not a single new player would be interested in playing it ever after it. Do you really think this is the case?

A game isn't a replenished product. You buy it and it's yours. By your logic when a car manufacturer discontinues a model they have a right to take away every car of that model ever sold away from people who own them. It doesn't make any sense.

>I was talking about new players, which you mentioned
I mentioned it because you wanted to enforce a certain limit to enjoyment of a game. We have real examples of games that can't be acquired through legal means anymore, you seem to imply that it's normal because the publisher decided that the whole world in general has had their fun with the game and nobody should ever play it again. To which there is a solution - downloading a cracked copy that can't ever be altered. This is the benefit of owning a game.

No game was ever fundamentally changed in a way that your beer-to-cola analogy would make any sense, try it again.

They were already mentionned in the thread:
GTA trilogy and Warcraft 3 demaster

Your argument did in no way amend your shitty post nor did it have anything to do with mine. I buy every game i play (i dont consider trashy AAA games even worthy of pirating)
Piracy is a almost always a service problem

Video games aren't essential, therefore I don't need to support the companies making them.

No but I would copy them if I could.

>The bottom truth is that pirates depend entirely on people that buy games, so you're not only a parasite on the companies, but also on other customers.
That's what I call killing two birds with one stone. Both the industry and the paypiggies enabling it get what they deserve.

>There has been no cases of companies going out of business because of pirates
How would you even measure that in the first place? If everybody was a pirate there wouldn't be a gaming industry

>he/him

Right of ownership > Corporate forced DRM that serve no purpose but removing your ability to own it.

Warcraft 3, the GTA trilogy

>You can still play them offline if it's a single player game.
You clearly don't know what always-online DRM is.

Why must you add DRM to games? Why can't you simply trust your own consumers? Smells fishy to me.

So you're saying that if it's 2 games then it never happened and will never happen again? Can you tell me how many games there needs to be for you to say that it's a real thing that happens? Also
>trilogy
>counts as one game
Amazing hebrew logic there friend.

There's a risk of entropy in every single thing in the universe, data on physical CDs and the like were even more subject to being lost than digital media, what does that have to do with not paying?

What backup has to do with piracy? Piracy is stealing what was not given, in this case software

But it's easily removable. What does that have to do with downloading a pirated copy that you never paid? That's simply an excuse to get something for free right from the beginning. You pirates are too easy to refute. Truly the Black folk of gaming.

Making a backup IS piracy legally speaking.
The only difference is whether you paid money or not at the beginning.

>if servers are closing why would you want to still play it?
As said by a poster above, you dont get to decide when I want to play.
>You most likely never paid for them since the vast majority of multiplayer only games are free to play
Please, even whales cant keep a game alive if the suits deem a game not popular enough.
>You can use mods to keep playing. What does that have to do with not paying right from the outset?
In the case of online-only game, you'd need an entire private server, not just a mod.
Also you indirectly agreed with piracy here which was the entire point of the argument.

Literally every online-only game.

Riddle me this, Black person.
What happened to my Warcraft 3 version when Blizzard went full moron?

You didn't answer my question.
What happened to my version of Warcraft 3?

>alright it does happen BUT it's actually your own fault and I also don't consider any number of examples big enough to serve as a proof that it happens

But that line of logic only supports piracy as a protective measure. You copy your CDs to safeguard yourself from originals being damaged. You copy or upload your data in case of HDD failure. It's a sensible thing to do to protect yourself from rare events. Just like it's a sensible thing to do to pirate games to protect yourself from a "rare event" of a company deciding they can change the game as they see fit and prevent you from playing the game you bought. So that answers your original question about why it's important to own games.

>then make a private copy
This is illegal. A private copy of a game that can run without the seller authorizing it is for all intents and purposes a pirated copy that you've created yourself.

If you already made a breach of contract, what difference does it make?

And also supporting said practices.

>If you want the game, you buy it; saying you will pirate it because you don't support "said practices" is a poor copout to hid away the fact that you simply don't want to pay for the game
So how am I supposed to tell them I don't want these practices? By paying them and then complaining on some forum which they'll never read? Ha, good joke!
>And by pirating you make companies even more radical in their strategies to maximize profit.
You are coping out of your mind if you don't think companies wouldn't do this regardless

If I'm not going to play the game, why would I buy it? Not to mention, companies don't care about playtime, the developers may do, but the publishers that are in charge absolutely do not

It's not a breach of contract, it's straight up violation of law. It doesn't matter how you obtained your illegal copy. From the point of both morality and law it's the same thing. From a point of consumer of course it's more beneficial to not pay at all, I have no idea why this is even a question.
>You could obtain your illegal copy for free... OR you could pay money for it!
I mean sure we did that when there was no internet but that was two decades ago.

To the corporation it's the same thing. Paying money for the product doesn't magically absolve you of the crime of making an illegal copy of it. In company's eyes you're no better than any other pirate.

If you want to use this kind of logic, by making an illegal copy you're theoretically rob them of infinite amount of sales depending on its distribution.

You are contradicting yourself.
>if you pirate, companies miss out on potential profit
If I pirate I wouldn't have bought the game anyway, no profit is lost. But if you assume that a pirated copy is a lost sale then:
> If you pay for it but make a backup copy, the companies get their profit.
They get one sale from it, and then, if you assume that each pirated copy is lost sale, if you share it with even one person it's a lost sale for the corporation.
>but judge-san I PINKY PROMISE I will not share it with anyone
This won't fly in the court. A private copy means your use of it can't be controlled. For a game to become pirateable if first had to be bought by someone as well so you can argue that the company got their sale from them, then they simply created a private copy, so I guess there was no lost profit there?

If we're being realistic and not hypothetical you can't easily make your own backup of most games released in the last decade or two without using specialized tools since they have some for of copy protection. Only few people can crack those measures on their own and you have to use tools created by the pirate scene to circumvent copy protection which is against terms of use. The question "what does backing games up has to involve piracy" isn't really viable in the current state of the industry. There's nothing stopping you from downloading a cracked copy of a game you bought, after all. I personally do that with smaller games just for archival purposes and what do you know, I had my GTAs preserved way before the demasters came out. And even though I own GTA4 I would still download the normal non-cut version to play it instead of using the cucked steam one.