This is self explanatory; to all who do not support the idea of ownership, there shall be no more funding, regardless of their game’s quality.
Advice:
buy from GOG, avoid single player games which require internet connection or 3 party launchers.
Repost from reddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/StopKillingGames/comments/1ugzirg/stoppayinggames/
It is not self-explanatory. You needed to explain it. On its face, it sounds like it’s saying to just pirate. I can get behind the message, but these three words aren’t it. I know that coming up with effective, catchy slogans is hard, but this one’s not going to do well.
Not pay and even if pirate don’t promote these games
If you’re endorsing piracy as a political stance in any way, I don’t see it gaining traction. People need to be paid for their work; especially those who built a product for you that’s meant to last and can’t be taken away from you. I don’t know how you convey that in a three- or four-word slogan, but I don’t think this one does it.
People need to be paid for their work
The dogged insistence that piracy of a corporate product impacts the pay of it’s employees neglects how the wage system works.
The wages only appear if the thing they produce creates profits for the corporation. If they continually produce something that doesn’t sell, they won’t have a job anymore. And I’ll raise you another part of this equation. If you pirated Assassin’s Creed: Shadows because you hate Ubisoft or whatever, that game will take somewhere between 35 and 65 hours for most people to finish, according to How Long to Beat. That’s 35 to 65 hours that you weren’t spending in some other game, perhaps a game that respects your values enough that you’d part with your money to play. Maybe that’s Kingdom Come: Deliverance II or The Alters or Knights in Tight Spaces; whatever your preferences are, there’s some other game that also didn’t get your money because you were playing that pirated game instead, and I picked those three examples because they’re recent and run a range of different developer/publisher models while still being DRM-free.
The wages only appear if the thing they produce creates profits for the corporation.
Would you take a job that requires years to complete and forego wages until it retails?
Nobody actually works like that.
No, they typically don’t. That’s more what startups do. In the corporate world, the schedules are amortized, but the money has to come from somewhere.
You’re right. It often comes from the previous game but if that game doesn’t do well then the chances of there being another are greatly reduced.
The wages only appear if the thing they produce creates profits for the corporation.
That’s entirely untrue. Plenty of people get paid to make games that flop.
Not for more than one or two games in a row.
Blizzard has been churning out flops for over a decade
Living in some fantasy land where never paying artists for their work magically results in them being compensated is pointless.
If you want to pirate, go ahead. I have. I don’t pretend it’s the “moral” thing to do.
never paying artists for their work
In a corporate setting, wages pay the artists prior to the games’ release. And the artists don’t see additional revenue after it’s release.
Well if single player game needs to connect to publisher sever to play then you don’t buy this game and piracy is just preservation. I’m not endorsing piracy, but not condemning it.
I agree with the first sentence, but that’s what I feel this slogan does a poor job of reinforcing.
People need to be paid for their work;
Then they need to quit fucking over their paying customers
Plenty of them aren’t. Pay them.
it already has traction
Gabe Newell on Video Game Piracy (Full Version, HQ) (2009)
Basically, if they (publishers) want money, they should stop being cunts to their costumers.
I am going to be frank, most people don’t care about piracy. You making it the crux of this issue is a red hearing and disingenuous. It is something a corporate shill would bring up.
Being frank, nothing will come of a movement about consumer rights if it looks like you just want to get things for free.
Listen, as long as we allow corporations to ruin culture we will never be happy. There is no magical world where we respect copyright and corporate rule and get what we want.
Your opinion is simply wrong for multiple reasons. That is okay.
Picture a neutral voter reading two different headlines. Importantly, picture the voter’s reaction. How they show support in legislative bodies is important.
1: Purchases of newer video games have gone way down. Consumers are reportedly pirating them instead.
“God, the younger generation is so incredibly entitled. People slave away on these things and they just want to steal them? Makes me think that ballot question they had about ‘Stop Killing Games’ was just about making them easier to steal. What pathetic thieves.”
2: Purchases of newer video games have gone way down. Consumers are reportedly buying many indie games instead.
“Wow, I should look into some of these ‘indie’ games if they’re so good. Sounds like there’s a lot of money in them now! If they spend that much on the hobby, I guess it makes sense they’d push that legislation about consumer rights.”
Picture actual headlines.
Gaming is pricing people out of the hobby
You don’t own what you purchase
The major players are using their monopoly powers to drive up prices
All the major studios that make the games you love were bought up and now are being shuttered
AI is replacing programmers and artists
Also, we ain’t winning this battle by convincing the poors to care about video games preservation.
What game company has monopoly powers?
I’m going to guess he’ll say all of them. After all, Squirrel with a Gun devs are the only ones allowed to sell copies of Squirrel with a Gun.
Steam currently has a 75% market share and has been engaging in price fixing for years now.
I can’t dictate whether or not you pirate; I just think you can help influence the world in a more positive way if you don’t. There are games made by people who worked hard and aren’t employed by a corporation. I would encourage you to buy from them, because you can show that you value their hard work and want them to keep doing it. Games have the good fortune of being more democratized than other media, so even if they have the lion’s share of the market, you can go on enjoying video games, even paying for video games, without giving those corporations the time of day.
You don’t have to explain to me, I already know. I said you were wrong and I meant it. There is not going to be a corporation that is not enshitified. Did you miss all of the independent studious being bought up and now closed.
They are destroying our culture and the best you can muster is buy ethically? We are far beyond that rhetoric now. Like I said before it is okay. You have not really thought about what is going on and there is no shame in that.
No, I didn’t miss the independent studios being bought up, nor did I miss the countless others formed in their wake and free from corporate control. I’m not ashamed that I have a realistic view of the world, and I find yours to be childish.
More independent studios to be forced to use corporate stores to sell digital merchandise that can be revoked at any time. The only person acting childlike is you playing pretend that this is acceptable.
I totally get it, you want to ride your high horse into the sunset. Do a us all a favor and do this. You don’t have answers, you just want the status quo and we are all tired of it already.
It is something a corporate shill would bring up.
This is such a pathetic, thoughtless dismissal of an argument.
First thing that is brought up is piracy and you think it is something other than what a corporate shill would say? The only thing that is pathetic is another bootlicker showing up to muddy the water with garbage.
At this point I think it’s safe to assume all large companies are evil and so piracy of any software/media/etc created by a large company is the moral thing to do.
Buy from GoG
Good advice
They really need to implement regional pricing, it’s just never going to take off in 80% of the world otherwise.
If buying is not ownership, piracy is not stealing.
Fuck em.
Piracy isn’t stealing either way, but this slogan is good. We need more people to pirate than ever before.
I’m going to be honest, this sounds like an astroturf campaign trying to reduce SKG into absurdity to harm it’s credibility.
This is list of companies who lobbied against stop killing games
Most of those are ones i already hate.
My childhood friend and a common acquaintance work at Supercell. I once asked them what they think about the moral issue of putting paid loot boxes in games for children.
They had never heard of such a controversy and didn’t understand why a fun and profitable feature would be somehow wrong.
Kinda telling that Valve aren’t on here. They also only sell a license to play a game, not the game.
Well technically and legally you always buy a license even with a game on physical media.
Well in this aspect gog is the best
that’s because it’s a company that’s mostly liked by people on lemmy (and presumably op), meanwhile those on their post are mostly hated. this post is just a way for people here to feel good about themselves for not buying the games they already didn’t care about by pretending it’s activism, but don’t you dare point out the shitty practices of the companies they like!!!
basically the entire video games industry* is based around the idea that you don’t own your games. this is obviously awful and needs to change, but i’m sorry, “just boycott the bad guys!!” won’t work when the bad guys is everyone, so to boycott them essentially means to stop engaging with gaming entirely. there’s a reason Stop Killing Games didn’t do a boycott, they did a campaign to get laws passed.
* except gog i guess, but they seem to like sending neonazi symbols to people’s inboxes so. pick your poison.
Not a valve fan but they don’t shut down their online services since they let people run servers. TF2.and CSGO are good examples. Hell, you can even use all the skins for free on private servers.
They claim to sell a license, but that’s a lie.
joke on you im playing retro games!!!
EDIT: but no seriously playing retro games is a great alternative then playing what’s new
Retro ps2 era or lower?
Lower
Rockstar should be added to this list.
Rockstar Games, Inc. is an American video game publisher based in New York City. The company was established in December 1998 as a subsidiary of Take-Two Interactive.
Take-Two is already on the list, and also covers 2K and Zynga.
So really the list should show all the subsidaries. Because there’s probably a decent number of people that don’t know.
You don’t need to list every company.
You know which ones are the big ones. If you see a “6” next to a game title, don’t pay for it. No indie game dev makes 5 sequels to a game.
I’m assuming this also applies to Consoles as well: Sony removed purchased movies from people’s Sony Pictures Core app. I wonder if, or when, they’ll decide to do the same to games.
If it does come to that: what are our options as console gamers (other than piracy)? Buying physical discs?
I kinda hate to say it, but consoles are designed with these companies in mind. The whole idea of locking the ecosystem to only companies Sony / Microsoft / Nintendo approves of and making the process to get in expensive, time consuming, and often hostile to creative autonomy, incentivizes exactly these kinds of companies to go all in, since they have plenty of money and know with a captive audience they will get more out of it.
Prices kind of suck right now, so there’s no easy solution. But the only real long term solution is to move to an open platform where you have the control, not them. And that’s going to require sacrifice, because the deck is stacked against you. Or if you have enough faith, for enough people to stand up when they need to. Because the power for you yourself to resist was intentionally already taken from you.
What would be an open platform for consoles?
I mean it really depends on what your wishes would be. If you’re thinking big and long term then someone could really go all in on capturing the console crowd with an entirely new console ecosystem. You could definitely simplify an OS like Linux to be a lot more to be more console oriented, such as what SteamOS is already trying to do for Steamdeck and the Steam machine. Even though that will be a balancing act with the openness of the system, since ‘making sure you can’t easily break this’ also makes it hard or impossible to break out of it in case of a change of heart.
But the whole thing with open systems is that they can do very similar things to other open systems. Which is why Linux and Windows (and sometimes Mac) are packed together under the same umbrella. So it would have to content with those three and provide clear upsides to developers, businesses, or players over those, which is hard. That’s part of the reason why the big businesses love consoles, because the freedom they take from players, double as tools for them to earn more money.
Most realistically in that route, would be for either Sony, Xbox, or Nintendo, to change their tune and go down that route instead. But that would require immense force from the players to offset the profit lost from changing the status quo. So it really isn’t that realistic sadly. Xbox wouldn’t do it anyways because it’s essentially already even more locked down Windows. Nintendo relies on their exclusives to sell their consoles. Sony would be least unlikely to do it but they recently stopped selling their exclusives on PC because (almost) nobody jumped ship back to Playstation.
The closest and ‘easiest’ jump in the short term is probably to small formfactor PC hooked up to your TV using eg. SteamOS. Controller support is pretty widely supported nowadays. And since most console game developers also develop for PC, you won’t have any issue missing out on your games unless it’s Nintendo or exclusives (but that’s probably another reason to jump too). With some technical knowledge you could do it without spending a single cent on Steam / Valve if that’s your concern. Since you could just run a Linux based system on a mini-PC or console formfactor with eg. Brazzite or another console OS lookalike.
That makes sense. Regarding your comment re:
“You could definitely simplify an OS like Linux to be more console oriented
I keep seeing videos on YouTube of people installing Ubuntu on their PS5’s - do you think this will gain traction with Sony and Microsoft and allow consumers to install a Linux distro officially like how Steam has SteamOS?
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.
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
brickingbanning 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.
This is pretty much impossible. I don’t think y’all realize how much space those corporations control.
It’s like trying to boycott Nestle.
You say that as if piracy isn’t just a few clicks away.
A better option is to buy games that is not included on this type of lists.
Fuck piracy. The artist is worthy of their hire.
The artist has already been payed by the time the game hits the shelf, sales only go to the people on top.
This is such an incredible level of magical thinking that most 12 year olds already grow out of.
What do you think happens with the artists if the game doesn’t sell?
What do you think happens to the genre if the game doesn’t sell?
People are complaining about live-service games, but holy fuck, can you not see that these are the direct response to piracy? You literally cannot pirate these games, because they require constant connection to the servers that verify if you have a license.
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.
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.
Please share! Would love to read about it!
There was a big study the EU commissioned to show negative effects of piracy on sales of various media. When it concluded that there’s no negative impact, the EU decided not to release it. The only exception in the study were recent big movie releases, which did see significant (about 5%) financial losses due to piracy.
Link: https://www.engadget.com/2017-09-22-eu-suppressed-study-piracy-no-sales-impact.html
In 2016, the Technology Policy Institute looked at 25 piracy-related studies to analyze the combined data. According to them, there was a negative effect shown in 22 out of 25 studies. However, they also noted that it’s a very complex question, and that the results were ‘economic theory inconclusive’.
When you take a look at these studies, you will very quickly notice a trend. They’re always published by big, very much pro-copyright corporations. They use vague terms and employ questionable methodology.
A study showing a positive impact of piracy on video game sales (but negative for music). Music and movies seem to be the most likely to actually suffer from piracy.
While it may be difficult to gauge whether piracy is overall beneficial or harmful to any industry, it seems to be quite clear that for video games specifically, it does not present any threat to sales.
Bonus: several successful studios are getting closed, and others will face layoffs. Because it literally doesn’t make a difference how well a game performs. If it’s a big corporation - layoffs will continue happening.
Your two statements have nothing to do with each other. Artists don’t get paid for the amount of copies sold, that’s executives and shareholders. Unless you’re talking about an indie company with shared ownership, which the companies in the post decidedly are not. Artists just care about their game being played and enjoyed, something the scummy practices of these suits actively prevents.
Artists don’t get paid for the amount of copies sold, that’s executives and shareholders
Sales numbers are the telemetry execs use when deciding what games to green-light.
Why do you think suddenly everybody was making live-service games? Battle Royale first, then hero shooters, and now extraction shooters? These games are reporting great income because it’s not possible to pirate them. Add MTX on top and suddenly everybody and their mother wants a cut.
Why do you think even GTA became a live-service game, even when it has a single-player story?
Why do you think more and more games have launchers that require people signing in to some accounts to verify if they made the purchase?
All the crap you people are mostly moaning about are a direct result of piracy.
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.
My point being: games and art are not necessities. Don’t be a little bitch, if you want to have them, pay for them. If you don’t want to support the company under which the game was made, wait for a massive sale on Steam or some such.
Giving “a shitty company intent on abusing your customers to extract as much money from them” is not done by pirating the game (which makes them try to extract even more money out of their clients), it’s by financially supporting the companies and creators who don’t do that.
Lots of creators get bonuses or royalties based on sales.
My bigger point is that piracy is bullshit. 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.
Pirating something you’re too much of a skinflint to buy is super immature “I want to have my cake and eat it too” mentality. People too spineless to make even a miniscule sacrifice for their beliefs.
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.
Sadly, the answer is probably that those creatives need to deprive the corporations of their products. Starve the beast. Hard to do that if you can’t afford rent, though…
I don’t mind people pirating ROMs or movies or music they’ve purchased previously and are no longer available in a reasonable manner. I do that myself from time to time. I don’t really “agree” with the concept of only buying a license instead of a copy, so I just see that behavior as addressing the obvious and IMO immoral imbalance.
I don’t have any sympathy for people who steal shit because they’re simultaneously unwilling to pay for it and unwilling to have the strength of character to walk away. I understand your points about social connections via game communities but I think that’s part of the cost of standing on principles. You can still stay in touch with friends from games without playing those games. I walked away from WoW and Blizzard in general for example due to their chain of bad decisions (like liquidating their QA and GM/CM staff in favor of chatbots that do a terrible job) but still occasionally touch base with people in those communities to see how they’re doing.
That’s fair. I just think like your second part, most people have their reasons like that. But you’re correct the culture does also simultaneously allow people that pirate just for free stuff to have it easy. But If the companies don’t like it, they can fix that. Currently to them it’s just the cost of doing business their way. People drove to Netflix and Steam in hordes when they made a service that was easier and better than pirating. Netflix regressed since then, but Steam still shows it’s possible. It just takes an industry as a whole willing to avoid the dark patterns that lead people to piracy.
It’s like trying to boycott Nestle.
Sooo, like… entirely possible with some effort?
“Some effort” varies widely on how privileged you are to have wide selections to choose from where you get your groceries.
Games are not groceries, the privileged are already the ones who are gamers.
We’re talking about food, not games.
You’re talking about food. Everyone else is talking about video games here.
I’m talking about how surprisingly complex it is to avoid a diversified corporation, using Nestle as an example. Is this really that hard to follow?
Except your point is entirely irrelevant when faced with the reality that video games, especially AAA video games, are a luxury item.
There’s a major difference between avoiding cheap chocolate and avoiding video game companies. I can’t believe that I’m even having to dictate this.
Edit: by the way, it isn’t hard to avoid Nestle products either
May depends on place, but I believe most of globe is fairly easy to avoid nestle, even with cheaper alternatives.
For games, until following most famous games, theres lot of alternatives to aaaa games, that are often way clearer of bugs on release date, often cheaper, and don’t require 5090 to work on medium details in 1080p. Few games like gta-clone, sims-like or diablo-like may be unique on their own, it would be even hard to ignore them in social/popculture aspect, so many gonna compare everything to few biggest. Still it is about paying them lot, preorders or throwing monies at worthless dlc day1 horse armors… We can ez avoid lot of that.
I’ve not purchased a nestle product in over a decade. Skill issue?
Honestly: doubt. “Nestle” is not only stuff that has their name on it
👍
I would never buy a car that I had to store in someone else’s garage.
I get the point but wouldn’t that practically be your garage at that point?
Mostly. But I fear the garage owner may change the locks one day.
ah, just pirate the keyz, kinda what i did anyways kinda
Should I feel bad for assuming any company’s name that ends in “group” probably do some heinous shit
Why ESL is bad ? They don’t make any games. They just do esports that promote gaming.
Why Sega is bad ? What did Bandai Namco ?
Only one Chinese company but no explicitly Tencent who owns Supercell and have 1/3 Epic Games, 1/3 Ubisoft it is just it’s brand name Level Infinite that means nothing.
No Scopely who owns Monopoly Go that alone makes $200M per month on gambling.
Any mobile gambling companies with micro transactions that are in fact casinos should be there instead of companies that just make AAA flops.
I agree with the thrust of this, but I have no faith in the resolve of the average consumer to make a difference.
The average consumer has pirated a videogame. It’s not hard to do. We only not do it because steam is slightly easier, and you lose online/achievements, and because it’s not morally right. However, that one last barrier has fallen.
If buying is not owning, using without paying is not stealing. There is no moral issue on pirating videogames, just do it.
(All of this only applies to big companies ofc)
