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Comment by tpetrina | Hacker News Reader

This is just pure gold. When I was younger, I always pirated stuff because I didn't have the money nor the means. But today, my Steam collection is worth over a 1000 dollars and I buy more games I could play.

It hurts me when people my age (27) don't consider buying stuff they like. I mean, you are paying the creators of the stuff you like so that they can create more of it.

No one wants to work for free, why should we expect others to do it? Just because there is zero cost to digitally copy something doesn't mean that it was made with zero cost.

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As your steam collection cannot be resold doesn't it now have zero monetary value?

I stopped buying games when I realized I don't actually play the games I buy. Some are still in their cellophane wrapper.. I recently signed up to Playstation+. Surprised I didn't do it sooner. £40 a year. Access to 10+ games a month to download and keep while subscription is active. Not going to buy another game for a long while.

I have the same problem - I think it's down to impulse buys.. I have a lot of games on Steam I've never got down to playing as I've no time!

Why would I have to calculate the future sale of any game I buy into the price I pay for the game? I pay for the games so that the developers can continue making games I like for me.

Do you want to play more games from the creators of the games you've played and liked?

I too have a large collection of games that I will probably never play or finish. Doesn't matter though.

> When I was younger, I always pirated stuff because I didn't have the money nor the means. But today...

That's a familiar story, and a win all-round. It is said to be a main reason why Microsoft was very relaxed about pirated copies of Windows - young people who run a pirated copy of windows grow up to be workers who know windows and the business buys a seat (as they say).

That's a very long-term game; most games are made by short-term studios who don't survive long enough to reap what they sowed?

> > But today, my Steam collection is worth over a 1000 dollars

> That's a very long-term game;

Maybe, but it is working for some. The players who are copying today will be (largely) the ones who are buying in a few years time. The ones who are buying today are like the grandparent poster.

(Sidestepping "has cost" vs "is worth.") It sounds like you are saying "do as I say, not as I did." You choose to pay now, but not paying made sense for you in the past. I'd like to see everyone have the same opportunity. I think that's the essence of digital capitalism. No copyright needed, IMHO.

Copyright is still useful, say for someone who rips off your game and sells it as their own. I'd agree the extent it's been taken to is ridiculous though.

Quick question: Would you have bought games on steam over $1000 if the steam services would had been a bad one?

Or to put it in a other way, how much of that $1000 is thanks to steams services, convenience and marketing? Many people claim, including the CEO of steam, that steam is not competing with pirates. People pay for the services, which in turn get partially sent to developers to create more content to be used in the service.

I think that convenience wins over pirating. Just recently I bought Far Cry 3 after finishing the pirated version. What I discovered is that having DRM in the normal, paid version is completely annoying.

I would gladly pay for any service which offers one-click media consumption regardless if it was about games, movies, music, comics or some other.

It would be very interesting to see the age demographic of people that pirate this kind of thing. I used to pirate (allegedly) stuff when I was a kid too.

I think many people, regardless of age, pirate becouse of laziness.

Such a simple thing as having to fetch your credit card from your wallet, installing and registering on a game download service (such as GoG, Steam). If you are used to torrenting, if that is you normal way to get stuff like TV shows and movies, there is less _resistance_ to download the cracked version of a game.

I dont justify this, or think its good, just pointing it out.

Well, Steam is actually more convenient than torrenting. You don't have to search for the correct torrent, test it, trust it, and so on.

Find a game, pay it, download it, play it.

Hoping this was meant to be ironic. You pirated in the past when you didn't have the means but started paying when you could pirate instead.

Sounds perfect to me. Oh wait ... unless the game devs made a bunch of baseless assumptions that all pirates are lazy yuppies who have the cash for games but choose to pirate instead just to spite game developers.

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