I suppose if you want to get what you paid for you have to pirate it.
I bet breaking a verified game on Steam Deck isn't even covered by basic consumer protection.
I assume you could look up the manifests in steamdb and manually rollback in any game? Monster Hunter Rise at least shows what I think are past versions https://steamdb.info/depot/1446781/manifests/
That said, presumably the older version is covered by the older DRM which may cease to work.
Why is the default always pirating and not just skipping? It's not as if there aren't more games available out there than there is time to play them. Reward the developers/publishers who aren't being asses, and we might just get more of 'em.
EDIT: When writing this, I focused too much on piracy and not enough on "you've already bought this." My bad.
The product changes under you, and the only way to keep it working is piracy. Not ideal.
That said, why judge if they didn't buy it? The publisher decided to specifically ensure that they couldn't be a customer by specifically going out of their way to make it be incompatible with their hardware/OS. So the choices are skipping, or to receive a free, working copy from someone else, so they aren't using any of the publishers resources or affecting them in any way. Why is option 2 morally bad in any way?
> That said, why judge if they didn't buy it?
Because my paycheck (I'm a software dev), and the paychecks of millions of other workers, depends on people paying for such products. Pirating smacks of entitlement; it says that everyone is entitled to a product whether they pay for it or not. There's plenty of arguments that it doesn't really impact developers/actors/etc - I've seen most of them on HN - and they're just wrong. Those arguments are just crutches to help pirates believe they are behaving morally.
So why is option 2 morally bad? The truth is that piracy does impact developers, actors, writers, artists, and so forth. It disproportionately impacts those who work in the margins, who aren't EA or Universal or Disney. And the truth is that nobody is entitled to a product, even if that product is an IP and not a physical good, created by another person.
Anyways, that's my rant.
Why do people get so bent out of shape if you decide to download something from a willing third-party instead of going on a bike ride or playing with your cat? And why aren't you "entitled" to have someone willingly share something with you, given that it has no moral consequences to any other party? In my moral framework, you have a right by default to do anything that has no effect on others. I don't see how you could justify otherwise.
With respect, this is a logical impossibility since there is no way to prove that nobody who pirated would have purchased that same product if a piracy was not an option. Accordingly, there must be at least some harm to others.
Beyond this logical problem, there have been published studies done by "Danaher et al", "Aguiar and Martens" and others which show that purchases do increase when piracy is not an option. And no, these studies do not just rely on "every pirated copy is a lost sale", they look at specific data about how sales of music and movies are affected by the availability of piracy.
> Why do people get so bent out of shape if you decide to download something from a willing third-party
I covered that: my ability to survive (i.e. paycheck) depends on people paying for the product I build. Heck, if we step back and look at the macro scale, a good 40% of the US GDP depends on people purchasing things which can potentially be pirated (goods which rely on IP or copyright protections).
How much of that decision is driven by the ready availability of a pirated version of the product? If the answer is "not at all", then why pirate it, since the ability to use the product didn't matter in the first place?
> Why is it better to deny yourself the thing and go stare at the clouds because you don't "deserve" it?
Particularly when it comes to entertainment, nobody is born with an inherit right to someone else's labor. Copyright is just the legal manifestation of this as applied to non-physical products.
Even if nobody is "harmed" (I still consider this specious), nobody is entitled to a developer's game, an actor's movie, a writer's book. What they are entitled to is accessing those in ways the actor/developer/writer have approved. And if they don't have an approved method for someone, well, that's just lost revenue for them; it's not a pass to obtain the product by any means available.
As an aside, "go stare at the clouds" is just shy of reductio ad absurdum, since as I pointed out originally there are more games (not to mention other forms of entertainment) out there than there is time to play them. Much simpler to pick up one of those instead.
I'm not sure I understand what you mean. The non-pirated version frequently doesn't work for various groups of people. This whole thread is an example of that; the "legitimate" version of some game now refuses to run on Linux (they may fix this game, but others are permanently intentionally broken, and e.g. VOD streamers do similar things with their 4k streams, so it's the general principle that's interesting). Typically, this is an artificial limitation, and pirated versions work just fine or better. Regardless of the existence of the version that does work, you're not going to buy something that doesn't. Then, having already decided that, you have a separate question of whether to receive a thing that does work as a gift from someone else.
> nobody is entitled to a developer's game, an actor's movie, a writer's book
Sure, but if someone is willing to share it with you, then I'm still not seeing a reason why you wouldn't be "entitled" to accept it. I'm not seeing where the moral necessity for the author's approval comes in; they obviously didn't want anything to do with you, so they're not in the picture.
What entitles the author to be upset when someone they didn't want as a customer anyway gets a copy of their work? Where does the author get the right to say that no one else can give it to them? Fundamentally, I don't see a natural right to claim "I came up with that; everyone else needs to ask my permission to use it". We can create artificial rights to design economic incentives, but if someone doesn't even want your money, then why care about the artificial right?
> as I pointed out originally there are more games (not to mention other forms of entertainment) out there than there is time to play them
Sure, but art isn't fungible, and there are social aspects. Maybe someone isn't interested in Call of Duty 15, or any video game really, but all of their friends are talking about Monster Hunter Rise, so they want to be part of that. They can't buy it since the publisher decided to exclude them as a customer. I still see no reason in such a case why it would be immoral for someone to give them a copy that's been modified to work.
They could go do something else, but why is it the case that they ought to do something else if it makes no difference to anybody but them? Doesn't that seem controlling?
I swear, it's like some giant corporations actively detest their customers.