Fantastic Anti-piracy Statement

[Kman]

Lot of the posts in this thread actually made me want to gouge my eyes out so I thought I'd offer my own opinion on the matter. To start, I am most definitely a pirate. As some of you may have noticed with my constant spamming of the music thread, I listen to a lot of music, and to keep up with a hobby like that there's almost no way you can acquire all of that legally. If I actually paid for all the music I listened to... I'd be in a lot of debt.

Now, with that said, I really don't feel any shame in doing this and I don't think it should be any different if we're talking about games really. I know it's been said before, but piracy will never end. There is no way to stop it indefinitely, even if tons of new copyright laws were put in place that eliminated every illegal download out there, people would still find a way around it. Lending friends copies of games, bootlegging movies, etc. From here on out piracy is always going to exist. Period.

Now with this said, if I'm gonna be honest the only people who are at fault here are the companies that can't learn to accept this and adapt to it, but rather feel the need to stay set in a marketing scheme that's been long out dated. And really, there's plenty of ways to do this. For example, this record label: http://quoteunquoterecords.com/albums.htm . Everything they've put up on that site is free to download, with a simple Paypal link on the page of each band/album. And believe it or not, pretty much all of the bands that I actively listen that are signed to it get a decent amount of profit from it, enough at least to continue making music based off that marketing scheme alone.

In fact, the guy Jeff that started it up said since he's started putting out his bands stuff using this strategy they've started to make way more money and have gotten way more attention than they had gotten when they were relying solely on physical sales.

This is just one example of course, there are plenty more that apply to pretty much any sort of media that's "suffered" from piracy in the past. Kickstarter, for example. Pretty much anyone can put up their idea for a game there and raise more than enough money to make it based on donations alone, so really there's no reason for people to be complaining about not being able to get enough money to live or keep their business going. Sure, that's not a fix for piracy when it comes to gaming or other projects funded by it, but it shows that if you make good content people will be willing to donate.

So stop blaming pirates for game companies being too lazy to adapt. There are plenty of alternative ways to put out your games that work around piracy. Am I saying that pirating is completely ethical? No, not by a long shot, but it's never going to go away; if anything it's just going to become faster and more accessible. If companies can't understand that and learn to deal with that, well, tough. It's their own damn fault.