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Comment by nomel | Hacker News Reader

I've never experienced in the last 20 years of purchasing digital media. You can't claim it's common. I pirate when I literally can't give anyone my money, or after something like this happens. Before is just trying to justify not compensating the creators. I’ve seen so many studios go under, that I loved. I think supporting them is important, or we’ll end up with media made for the masses, that do pay.

edit: there be pirates in these waters!

edit: please include the third and fourth sentence in your comprehension of the above, before responding.

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I bought one of the wwe wrestling games for my kid on my xbox account. Few years later there was a new version he wanted. After playing it he wanted to play the old version. The studio had removed it from the Microsoft store because they wanted to force people to new version. Even though I owned it I couldn’t install from Microsoft store. I contacted support and was told I had to copy it from the xbox it was installed on. I never bought anymore games from that studio. That was years ago and now there are more and more examples of not owning what you paid for.

This is really common with any games that need to license a ton of things in order to exist. The contract for using a wrestler's wrestler's likeness usually has a time limit. As well as the songs they use for their intro/outro.

Racing games have this issue too if they use real car brands. You can't buy the previous Forza games or some old Codemasters racing games anymore because of expired licensing.

At least on Steam they're still available for download if you previously purchased them. No clue what the experience is in console or other PC stores.

From a user's perspective that is incredibly hostile. They push digital goods as more convenient than physical media but don't make it clear that you lose the right to download it after a certain time. That functionality is sold as a benefit but the limited time isn't made clear.

Ahhh while I've never had specifically purchased media disappear like this, movies that I want to rewatch do often migrate around from streaming service to streaming service, which is fine if you subscribe to all of them but is really a hassle when you start watching something on Netflix and then when you come back to it a month later discover it's not available anymore.

Sure, but that's not related. There's no concept of ownership with the library of a streaming service. I think that's well understood by the general public.

Sure it's well understood that it's a service fail and poor quality service leads to piracy.

You are aware services like that rose to prominence precisely because people decided to sacrifice ownership for rentals, right?

You didn't pay $10 for perpetual ownership of IASIP. You paid $10 for a month of access to Netflix or whatever service hosted that show. I still buy physical media or digital downloads of any work I want to keep for more than a month because I value it for those cases.

In the past people still would rent more than they owned. They just traded having to visit a store with a selection limited by physical space for an instantly available digital service.

But you'd never show up to a Hollywood Video looking to rent Terminator 2 and get told that it's a Blockbuster exclusive rental. There were Blockbuster exclusive movies, but they all sucked so it didn't matter.

Netflix Streaming gave bigger selection and instant access. You could get 15 minutes into a movie, realize it sucks, and you didn't have to drive back to the video store for a different one.

Nowadays the selection on any streaming service feels like 1/3 of what a VHS rental place would have. Sure there's more actual quantity, but it's like the $1 rental bin. Currently, if you pick X popular movie and Y streaming service, odds are you cannot watch it on that streaming service.

>There were Blockbuster exclusive movies, but they all sucked so it didn't matter.

I mean, it sounds like they simply learned their lesson. Or got more budget to publish such stuff. Same tactics but now more effective after giving what the audience actually wants.

Its certainly an interesting phenomenon. Hosting brick and mortar is crazy expensive so it makes sense to delegate that. Hosting servers is cheaper and way more scalable (mostly dealing with country laws instead of every single nuldijg regulation code), so it's no surprise studios want to self-distribute now that the barrier lowered.

I pirate loads. But if it's a small studio I always buy the BluRay in addition. If it's an excellent film or show but it's made by a large studio, I check to see if it's available on one of the streaming services I subscribe to, and if not, I buy the BluRay. Thought process being that it's the job of the streaming service to compensate the creators at that point (which a large point of the writer's strike was to ensure that they do.) If it's something I'm certain I'll only watch once, I just keep the pirated copy. It would be nice if there were some kind of, "I thought your movie was kind of trash but I got some amount of enjoyment out of it so here's a cup of coffee," Venmo-like service. Maybe every studio could just put up a Twitch stream that I could donate some bits to.

But this is all just to say that while I pirate loads, I do have a bit of a conscious about it. That said, stories like this are why I don't lose much sleep over it.

> "I thought your movie was kind of trash but I got some amount of enjoyment out of it so here's a cup of coffee,"

For me, this is a rental.

That seems pretty reasonable. Is RedBox still a thing? Can I rent a DVD and give it right back the next minute? Are there better methods to rent movies these days? I guess Amazon Prime exists.

If you buy a defective game on PSN and then get a refund, your entire PSN account is nuked. If you buy a game on Steam and the devs push malware in an update and you get a refund, your entire Steam account is nuked. An example of a defective game you can currently buy on PSN is Kingdom: Two Crowns. An example of a game whose developer pushed malware in an update automatically downloaded by Steam is Street Fighter V.

In the case of PSN, official policy is that defective games are refundable. They just make it impossible to reach anyone about this during the refund window. In the case of Steam, official policy is that devs are free to push malware to your device.

This sound more like an argument for companies needing to be punished for retaliating against refunds and chargebacks, more than an argument for piracy.

How else do you punish them if not by affecting their revenue?

Government regulation I guess.

But i feel "punish" is the wrong lens to look at this. It's hard for the individual to punish a corporation. Ultimately the goal is to maximize your own purchase so the best way to achieve that is to find a better product. Then that merchant grows based on their ability to serve the customer. In my experience, most companies tend to be punished not by people or competition, but by their own folly.

And if there really is no merchant serving your product for your price, that's a much larger discussion to have.

You can't punish them for something they haven't done, by pirating before they do it. There will be no correlation, so no feedback mechanism, in that scenario. What do you see as the signal they should pick up on? How will they differentiate it from "they pirate no matter what we do"? These are genuine questions.

Your account is nuked if you make your credit card issuer perform a chargeback, not if you request a refund and are granted one. I have refunded at least 10 titles on Steam, and my account is still there.

I wouldn't say Street Fighter 5 put out an update with malware. It did put out an update that opened up a kernel level vulnerability to unprivileged programs which is extremely bad and worth requesting a refund for. But I wouldn't say Intel sold me malware because my CPU was susceptible to spectre and meltdown.

Almost all PC games that utilized Games For Windows Live stopped working (new installs and reinstalls could no longer be performed) when Microsoft shut down the service, and AFAIK there are still a couple games that never updated to remove the reliance on GFWL DRM and can only be played by pirating.

That's a lot of games, including several notable big name titles: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Games_for_Windows_%E...

That includes GTA IV, Street Fighter IV, and Resident Evil 5.

Luckily Dark Souls got re-released on Steam without Windows Live. Until that point my purchased physical copy was unusable. Well, it's still unusable but at least the CD key got me a working version.

As I said, pirating after is one thing. Justifying the pirating with a possible future event that may not happen is another.

If the work to crack a game isn't done early on, it can become infinitely harder to do that work later, especially if there's a multiplayer component that needs to be reverse engineered. Being proactive about cracking, emulation, and piracy is the pro-social and pro-preservation of our culture/technology/heritage move here.

Cracking the game early is completely tangential to you supporting the developers of the thing you enjoy. I've bought games and then immediately downloaded the pirated version before. If you don't support the things you like, you're going to end up with the things that everyone else likes.

Justifying insurance with a possible future event that may not happen is another.

Sure but it's very much a minority point of view.

You can still download and use gfwl to play the games. At least I could play lost planet 2 the last time I checked.

Multiplayer on the other hand...

>lost planet 2

Only because Capcom had to put in extra dev work to make it work again after the GFWL shutdown: https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/qq3sq9/capcom_has...

Glad you asked. Steam stole my Dungeon Siege content. I doubt there is any language in their TOS that lets them do what they did to people who bought DS which came with the expansion Legends of Aranna, only to remove the expansion from libraries after some kind of licensing dispute. Zero refund.

There's a guide to enable the dlc again.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=11481...

> You can't claim it's common.

cough kindle... cough

Is it common? I only know of the ironic removal of 1984, and that was in 2009. I've got 500+ books in my kindle library and am not aware of it ever happening to me.

And to be clear, I wouldn't be surprised if it has happened again since, but I've never heard of any, so I agree with the GP comment's assertion that it isn't common.

I don't know if it's common, but I've seen enough of it that I don't trust companies with their practice. Also it goes both ways: Remember when Apple forced a U2 album on iTunes users ?

They didn’t “force” anything, they made it available to download if you wanted.

https://www.eonline.com/news/1071481/remember-when-apple-for...

If you haven't used Apple ecosystem stuff you may not realize, but there are many ways in which this album surfaces, such as simply pressing Play on your Apple Watch (without having specified any song)... I've accidentally played U2's music so many times since Apple "gifted" it to me, despite having zero interest in hearing that music at that time.

Nope. It was right there in my music collection where it doesn't belong.

Are you aware of any cases where they didn't refund [1]?

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18am...

I don't think that's the point. If the industry is going to regularly make me go through incessant cycles of purchasing, getting refunded, rebuying (for the same price?) then I'm going to pirate the content. What an absolutely absurd expectation.

I thought the point was ownership and how flimsy ownership lead to Piracy. Not a personal rant on how your bad customer service experience justifies your decision to pirate.

I don't care if people "steal" from billion dollar corporations. But let's not mince words and pretend it's some Robin Hood act of altruism. The companies already took that piracy into account on their budget book anyway; they won't change their ways over this.

That whole Gabe Newell quote about "piracy is a service issue" goes both ways. Piracy isn't always convinent and plenty of people don't wanna set up plex servers and search torrents and organize their library to get "the best experience". They just want to turn on device and play/watch/read seemlessly

So from your perspective it would be oke if randomly thieves enter your home, "take" some stuff from you and leaving behind a calling card so you can arrange to get paid for it.

This metaphor breaks down because you don't own the servers hosting the stuff in question. It's not your house to begin with.

And it's not my point at all in that comment. I'm just saying most 'thieves' aren't trying to prove they are good people by stealing like how piracy arguments oh so often go here. Nor trying to pretend they are archivist saving artifacts from disappearing off the face of the earth. They are either greedy, desperate to survive, and in a few rare cases a pathological disorder.

It's premium entertainment, and people either want to consume a product but dont/can't pay. It's that simple. and I'm not saying that from a judgmental POV either. I've done it quite a bit as a grade schooler.

The entire point is indeed that you can't own it. You saying it's not comparable because you don't own the servers is non-sensical. It's not like you can choose not use the servers. Well you can. You have to pirate it.

There's plenty (most of the) comments talking about ownership, I have nothing more to add on that topic. It's only tangentially related to my main point in that it's an argument used to defend piracy. And it's IMO a futile argument because people can't agree what "ownership" is.

For me, I try to find drm free copies of games when possible, or physical media when that fails. That's enough for me to feel "ownership".

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I simply wanted to talk about the internet attitude towards piracy in this thread. I've done it but I never boasted around about slaying some corrupt corporation by ripping an ISO off a disc, or simply finding a torrent.

No, I did it to either not pay for a game or to mod games with no native mod support. I'm not a good person to begin with and I don't pretend I'm a good person by pirating.

What? Unilaterally refunding a purchase I made years ago isn't "bad customer service". It's just a company being shitty and not caring. I am the party that acted in good faith and purchased the content! What are you even talking about?

Companies don't like refunding either in all fairness. And your phrasing makes it sound like this happens to you regularly.

I don't think "refund" is the best use of word here. That's usually a customer returning a product. And a company with bad refund policies tends to have bad customer service.

What good is that? If I buy a book or a movie I want to own it forever not until the company decides to take it back regardless of giving a refund…

Yes. When the old online Dominion lost the license to the Dominion card game, they didn't refund buyers with cash; they refunded the buyers with some kind of digital dollars to spend on their other unattractive products. So essentially every dollar spent on Dominion expansions was lost. Really soured me on the idea of purchasing online board games.

"We broke into your house last night and took that book off the shelf. But we left 20 bucks on the counter so it's ok!"

In the case in that link, the publisher was not legitimate. Amazon (literally) sold a pirated copy. They refunded, allowing you to buy a non-pirated copy. The alternative would be to swap it out for a copy from a legitimate publisher, but I assume there are laws around swapping goods out from under people.

> I've never experienced in the last 20 years of purchasing digital media. You can't claim it's common

I've never experienced a car crash, so they can't be common, why should I wear a seatbelt?

What he should have written is "I've never experienced it in the last 20 years of purchasing digital media, am not acquainted with anyone who has even though most people I know purchase digital media, and it is only been reported a handful of times".

Unless it happens a lot but doesn't get any publicity, which seems pretty unlikely as there are too many widely read forums where people it happened to would report it, and too many publications like Ars, Tech Dirt, The Register, Torrent Freak, and many others that would jump on any such story, we must indeed conclude that it is not common.

The important question is not if it is common but rather will it become common?

Discovery is part of Warner, which is currently being run by someone who will kill content for the tax write offs. He killed "Final Space" for a tax write off, cancelling future season and pulling existing seasons from streaming and sale. And last year they killed a movie, "Acme vs. Coyote", that they had completed and scheduled for release because they decided they'd rather write it off.

Because of that right now I would not buy any streaming content from Warner. In the specific case of Discovery it looks like they are just pulling it from other platforms so that it can be exclusive to services they own, like Max and Discovery+.

That probably means it is safe for now to buy Warner owned content through Warner owned platforms, but I'd worry that in the future they will decide to write it off and it will leave their own platforms too.

I can Google a car crash down to an exact street in my area with no problem. I'd need to Google pretty hard to fine another instance of a store delisting a video game and retroactively removing it from the buyer's library.

I can only recall it happening once before on steam, and it was due to malware on the now delisted game.

> I’ve seen so many studios go under, that I loved.

I've never experienced that in the last 20 years of purchasing digital media. You can't claim it's common.

I suspect you haven't checked. Or this means you only play big name (EA, Ubisoft, etc) games and only watch/read big studio content (Disney, etc). That's fine, but it's trivial to find lists of failed production houses, especially with games [1], with Embracer and Volition shutting down this year (as more examples significant to me). And, you might be surprised at the long list of movie studios [2].

[1] https://www.thegamer.com/failed-game-studios-best-games-meta...

[2] https://movieweb.com/famous-defunct-american-film-studios/#b...

It's not new that you do not own DRM uncumbered files. It's true that it was expected that you'll lose access due to drm server disappearing not pure deletion ...

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