a game I made in 1995
a game someone else made in 1995 which was later hostilely acquired by EA only to see it immediately fire all staff and shutter the studio
FTFY
RIP Bullfrog (Theme Park, Theme Hospital, Dungeon Keeper etc.)
And Maxis (Sims, Spore) 😥
Westwood 😭
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Yeah, EA has done more to hurt game devs than pirates have. “Salary means we don’t have to pay overtime!”
Kane Lives!
True, but he plays for Bayern Munich now.
Or Nintendo:
“Stop pirating our old games!!!”
Okay, then sell me one of your old games.
“No.”
More like: Nintendo, “here is an HD remake of that old game you wanted.”
Fans, “We don’t want to pay for old games!”
Actually more like: “Here’s an HD remaster of an old game that we ported previously but instead of giving you the same price as that lets just charge $60 instead.”
Fans:
Fan: “I’ve been feeling like playing Super Mario Sunshine again lately. Do you happen to have this game?”
Nintendo: “Yes indeed, it is part of the Super Mario 3D Collection, which also contains Super Mario 64 with HD graphics and Super Mario Galaxy, also in HD and with added button controls.”
Fan: “Nice! I’d like a copy of Super Mario 3D Collection.”
Nintendo: “We only sold this for a short time after the 35th anniversary of Super Mario. So i guess you should’ve asked sooner.”
Fan: “Well then. Now excuse me while i get an RCM-”
Nintendo: (cocks gun) “No you don’t!”
Fan: ok, so let me just install EmuDe-
Nintendo: *shoots*
Leaving this here:
https://www.eurogamer.net/did-nintendo-download-a-mario-rom-and-sell-it-back-to-us
Nintendo has also committed piracy of their own software, by downloading a rom that a piracy group extracted and uploaded to the internet, so that Nintendo could then can re-sell the game back to us.
If Nintendo will sell me the old games I love, I’ll happily rebuy them so long as there’s no installed killswitch (sorry, “DRM”) that will take it away from me one day.
It’s impossible to pirate your own game tho. Why find an old cartridge and dump the ROM yourself if somebody already did it. The actual source code is probably somewhere in the shadowrealm, so nothing they can do.
More like: Nintendo, “here is a collection of old games that you have to pay for a monthly subscription in order to access.”
Me: “that’s really stupid, no thanks”
PS: it is possible to be a fan of Nintendo’s and also think they are dicks about emulation and piracy and don’t offer reasonable alternatives…many things in life are multi-faceted as such, and it’s perfectly OK (and healthy ackshually) to acknowledge the bad in those we admire.
Does that boot taste good? What would you do if you wanted to play, for example, The legend of zelda: four swords?
I just wanna play Wind Waker on the Switch. They already made a HD version! It will port across so easily… damn them.
Nintendo: “Emulators are piracy”
Nintendo, 15 years later: “Anybody want to buy our emulated games on new consoles?”
… so in your mind their attitude has nothing to do with IP, just the technology used to deploy it? Your statement makes no sense whatsoever
To add to what Skull giver said, the current retro market only exists because of the emulators that Nintendo has been fighting for over 25 years. There would be no SNES Mini console without snes9x or zsnes. Neither would there be a Nintendo e-shop for their old games on new consoles. The knowledge base to even make that work would not exist. Archiving old copies of games may not even exist.
Nintendo’s position is highly hypocritical. They have benefited from emulation far more than they’ve been harmed.
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You wrote so much about nothing. You’re obviously just being weirdly pedantic
I don’t mind the HD remakes, but I do mind the constant obsession with releasing them over making a new game or, ye gods forbid, coming up with a new IP. That, and it’d be nice if they wouldn’t leave several of them locked to dead on arrival systems (like the WiiU) which just creates the same problem all over again.
But what really gets my goat is locking all the Virtual Console releases onto the shop of whatever console they’re on, so when that service inevitably goes defunct they’re all lost again. Those old 16 bit games aren’t changing, having content updates, or getting patched. And they’re just emulating them anyway, so just put a whole bunch of titles on a Switch cartridge or something and let me play them in perpetuity as long as my Switch still functions. I will not pay $60 for Mario 1 again. I probably would pay $60 for the entirety of the first party library from the NES on a cartridge.
All my old NES, SNES, N64, and Gamecube games still work just fine, decades later. But there’s stuff that was on the DSi and WiiWare shops that’s just gone forever, and you can never get them back.
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“You wouldn’t download a car, would you?” … yes. Yes. I WOULD. Not that we can 3d print cars just yet. but I would in a heart beat if I could.
I don’t trust a 3d printed gun, why would I trust a 3d printed car? But if I could make a car myself, I definitely would, even if I had to pirate the designs.
3d printed firearms have transformed into a whole cottage industry with all sorts of variations. The ones that are safest are essentially just stocks capable of holding the parts of a firearm. The ones that are completely 3d printed are still pretty sketchy and illegal to sell
Any firearm that you, a private citizen, manufacture, is illegal to sell.
You are not a licensed firearm distributor.
But, at least in most of the US, it is perfectly legal to manufacture them for your own use. You just can’t sell them.
You can sell homemade firearms you made for personal use and later decided to get rid of.
You cannot manufacture them for the purpose of sale, however.
That sounds like a pretty massive loophole…
Why? What’s wrong with selling a gun you have made at home? It’s still subject to applicable law on private party transfers just like any other firearm.
IIRC, it depends on state law too. Some states permit local sales, feds would stomp on you if you sold to a non-resident.
Probably best to avoid the selling part altogether. Ruby Ridge and all that.
that’s true. I should have specified that a lot of the purchasable (fully and unquestionably in the right) stuff just sell CAD files for 3d printed parts, or print the parts for you. The more questionable ones sell ghost gun kits
It is illegal for them to print the guns for you (unless they have their FFL; and Manufacturers license; and they NICs check you, and engrave a serial number, company name, and location of manufacture in accordance with ATF rules.) And the “ghost gun kits” are 80% complete lowers, which you have to mill the remaining bits yourself or else it is subject to all the above rules as well.
They can sell the .stl files though, or freely offer them.
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The thing people forget is that 3d printing doesn’t just enable the direct manufacturing of parts, it also enables the manufacturing of tooling for parts that would never have been manufacturable at home otherwise.
For example, you can rifle a metal tube and form a chamber using electro etching and printed tooling. Or, you can make tooling to make magazine springs
The key point to be made here is that a fully plastic gun is sketchy but 3d printing has absolutely transformed the ability to make reliable and effective firearms at home without any off the shelf firearm parts
The same type of thing is happening in the car hobbyist world. We aren’t printing cars but people are using prints to make molds, form sheet metal, align parts for weldments and manufacture low stress plastic parts like intake manifolds.
reliable
Out of everything you said, this is the only thing that I disagree with, but it’s the only thing that matters. I mentioned 3d printed guns because, if you don’t use off the shelf parts, you really don’t have any way of knowing how many rounds you can put through it before it explodes in your hand. Was there a tiny defect in your print? A misalignment or some debris in the print material? You’re right that boring your chambers from stock is safer, but that doesn’t make it safe. And that’s a firearm you can inspect after each round.
A car has many critical components under the hood, especially when you use an internal combustion engine. That’s a bunch of tiny explosions every second, and even setting that aside, you have the transmission, the brakes, the steering, the windshield, the stereo, any one of those could fail and kill you (or make life not worth living, in the case of that last one).
3D printing will continue to evolve and improve, but it will be a long time before I trust it enough to download a car.
I mentioned 3d printed guns because, if you don’t use off the shelf parts, you really don’t have any way of knowing how many rounds you can put through it before it explodes in your hand.
I mean. Ya kinda do. A broken receiver isn’t going to make the gun explode in your hand, it’s just going to cease being functional.
Was there a tiny defect in your print? A misalignment or some debris in the print material?
More importantly, the issue with small defects is sidestepped by good engineering and process control. Your statement applies to almost every sort of manufacturing. All materials have internal defects and a range of potential material properties. You account for this by applying a safety factor so that the design stresses are well below the nominal material properties. For a material with higher uncertainty on the properties you simply apply a higher safety factor
That’s why many 3d printed guns look like bricks when an injection molded receiver would be much more sleek in comparison.
A car has many critical components under the hood, especially when you use an internal combustion engine. That’s a bunch of tiny explosions every second, and even setting that aside, you have the transmission, the brakes, the steering, the windshield, the stereo, any one of those could fail and kill you (or make life not worth living, in the case of that last one).
Home built cars have been a thing pretty much since the start of the automobile. People who home-build cars don’t typically build their own drivetrain. It’s just not worth the effort when donor engines from wrecked cars can be had cheaply and easily.
Usually the DIY fabrication work involves building the chassis, suspension components, body panels, etc. As I pointed out, you wouldn’t just print the chassis. You’d use printed parts as jigs to align the welds, build mold for composite pieces, etc.
Nobody is going to be printing a complete car in the conceivable future, but 3d printing can absolutely help you build a good and reliable car from conventional materials with greatly reduced effort and tooling costs.
3d printing has come a long way, both in materials and quality. especially as you step away from FDM or resin printers. I certainly wouldn’t trust a rando facebook marketplace printer who bought a creality to make a quick buck… but I would trust my own prints- mostly because I know what the materials are, and know I’ll check for good print quality. reality is, though, that about the most you can print right now is a half baked golf cart chasis. if you want it to be safe… you’re going to have to add a lot to it, and at that point, you might as well just buy a damn car or something.
Most dashboards in cars are already 3d printed.
You wouldn’t download a car, would you?
Movies studios now trying to download actors.
Unions stepping up to the at for us all.
“Trying”?
They’re working round the clock to develop CGI “actors”.
Gonna be interesting when actors start being replaced.
Open source cars, let’s go!
Marcin Jakubowski is already doing this with Farming Equipment!
Borderlands lets you download a car, that’s the second best way of getting a car in the game
And when you download a car there’s even a pimento taco – a pimentaco – in the glove box.
but I would in a heart beat if I could
with your 3-D printed heart
Hey, don’t knock it. My head lays down a sick dun step, some reggae and this weird steel drum Tropicana thing I’m pretty sure they ripped off some 90’s on hold music cover
If I had a dollar for every car I downloaded for GTA4…
I’m fine spending money for a quality product.
Quality product. Not DRM-laden, always-online, unoptimized garbage that pushes microtransactions in my face. It’s not a price problem; it’s a service problem. If I’m going to get a shittier experience as a legitimate customer, piracy is the smart thing to do.
If you’re concerned about DRM, just use GOG or Itch. If you’re concerned about shitty games, do research before you buy something and just avoid studios like EA.
Don’t underestimate the FOMO factor.
Avoiding a title is simply not a consideration for a lot of people—especially if it’s shitty. They’re important context for meme and conversation material.
I genuinely wish this was a joke.
Did “all digital” kill renting? Back in my day we had Blockbuster and gamefly, and we could buy used disks from gamestop and play 'em for a bit and return them within 7 days to “rent” them as well. I’m glad I’m all ROMs and flashcarts these days.
I’m pretty picky about what I get, so that idea didn’t really come to me…
It won’t change anything until people stop preordering games and actually wait for them to come out before shelling out a hundred bucks.
Pre-order and dlc is what has made gaming so awful lately. Game companies realized they can make a half-assed game and fill it with microtransactions and still make shit loads of money
The biggest issue with pre-ordering is the gaming community itself tbh. Even if an individual knows better intellectually, companies have people specialized to make advertising as engaging as possible. Most of us (I used to be one of them) simply do not have the tools, nor the idea, of how to mentally combat “hype trains” and thus get our expectations up praying that the game will come out good and satisfy us for a bit.
Pre-ordering makes zero sense for a digitally downloadable product, since it isn’t scarce like physical products can be. Unless the company invents advantages that didn’t need to be there, there’s no benefit of being in the front of the queue, since eventually everybody can get a copy. Consumers are dumb…
Pre-ordering has the illusion of value. When you pre-order chances are it gets you into the game before others and with extra stuff to boot. That could be an advantage that could snowball. Or atleast that is one of the rationalizations that can be made. Saldy, even assuming that is true, it wouldn’t matter since the game tends to be shit/unplayable at launch.
The pre-orders that technically are worth anything are those that give physical baubles/items that could contain value to some individuals. But right now? yeah pre-orders are scams.
But speaking personally now, the feelings can be so damn strong that you create “logical” reasons to pre-order and then end up lamenting at the idiocy or full commit to sunk cost fallacy.
Good old inability to delay gratification (google it, it’s an actual behavioural trait) in the face of the pretty clear logic that almost all games (except some multiplayer ones) are actually better a year later than at launch day.
Mind you, the world around us pretty much tries to train us every single day to be like that: it makes for wonderful profit-maximizing mindless consumers.
You can look up delayed gratification all you want but the majority of American consumers will never actually understand it.
In all fairness, graphing that only makes sense in inflation-adjusted dollars, which judging by the legend isn’t the case (the seasonal adjustment only smooths the differences between quarters).
Mind you, I still expect it will keep it’s shape in the last few years, but it might show the current point as below the 2009 peak (not that it makes it any better).
Sorry, I used to work in Finance and am a bit of stickler for clearity in Financial and Economic figures :/
I’m not an economist but anecdotal evidence that I’ve picked up from a number of different sources in the last couple of years lends me to believe that consumer debt is pretty darn high. This is from the Federal Reserve and what else is an average schmuck supposed to look at?
Exactly. Companies know how to manipulate our dopamine high and keep on repeating the cycle of pre-orders and post-launch disappointment; while the game developers are laughing their way to the banks.
do research before you buy something
So instead of playing, I now have to do work to figure how to spend my miniscule available time on what to play to get the most out of said time.
I’m not mocking what you said. I’m just lamenting the state of gaming.
I’d rather invest my time figuring a smart purchase, than spend my minuscule available money padding some rich fuck wallet. I don’t have much money or time, so I’d rather spend it on quality products and services than waste it on moneygrubbers.
No one’s disputing that. The discussion is about how awful it is that we have to do that. It sucks that our miniscule time is even smaller because we have to now sift through the garbage first.
Imma get downvoted for that but even Epic has loads of DRM free games… there’s plenty of choice to buy DRM free games these days…
i really want to use gog but they don’t offer regional pricing.
like for example factorio is 8$ for me on steam but 36$ on gog. Skyrim is 40$ on gog and 17$ on steam.
I don’t pirate those either. I just don’t waste my time with them.
It’s probably not even made by EA but some company that made good game before being acquired by EA
I don’t pirate indie games, small-budget movies, or music from unknown bands. I hurt major corporations specifically.
For some older indie games, piracy is the only way to play them. But otherwise, I agree with this.
This is literally the genesis of GOG.
True, but GOG doesn’t have everything 🤷
You misunderstood. I meant that piracy is literally how many of games were saved. GOG started because some guys stockpiled pirated copies of games, then cracked and/or reversed engineered them to work on modern PCs. Eventually, they got the rights to sell some legally and GOG.com was born.
My point was that piracy isn’t always bad because companies have no incentive to preserve their products after they’ve stopped selling. (See vintage ROMs)
GOG started because some guys stockpiled pirated copies of games, then cracked and/or reversed engineered them to work on modern PCs. Eventually, they got the rights to sell some legally and GOG.com was born.
Nice! Didn’t know that!
My point was that piracy isn’t always bad because companies have no incentive to preserve their products after they’ve stopped selling. (See vintage ROMs)
True.
Good exception.
Exactly.
They steal more than we can dream.
They just used their influence to legalize their grift.
Legality ≠ Morality
Especially in a horrendously unjust nation such as ours.
The phrase “Legality ≠ Morality” comes to mind several times a week. Too many people let themselves ignore ethics because they don’t think (or care) about the difference.
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Indie games are better these days anyways. I just use AAA games as performance benchmarks lmao.
I mean, I wouldn’t set the bar that low.
Should be Nintendo, not EA. Fuck EA and all, but at least they don’t kick up a big fuss when someone aquires games they don’t sell anymore.
Or steal code from the community they’re busy suing…
EA are definitely the bigger problem as far as I’m concerned though.
Oh for sure but for this meme about pirating old games, no one else is worse than nintendo imo
True.
Never pirate from indie developers. But for giant companies, pirating is a drop in the bucket for their revenue.
Then why don’t illegal obtained keys just become banned? As long as they don’t, You can’t expect customers to see any problem with them.
It’s technically impossible to differentiate a legitimate key from an illegal key. They are usually created in batches to be distributed. So they are legitimate and exist way before the fraud takes place. By the time there’s a charge-back on the purchase, whether the key is illegal or not is irrelevant. The damage is done, banning the user does literally nothing. The developer is still on the hook with the processing fees and the user already downloaded and installed the game.
Not only that, but those users thought they were buying legit keys, and expect support from the original publisher. Pirates never expect support.
Factorio devs literally said to pirate their game rather than buy from one of these reseller sites.
For what it is, a top down 2d factory game, Factorio rocks. Just wanted to add that in, it’s one of the more recent games that I managed to put hundreds of hours in before even getting to the finished achievement. Though I did use mods to make it worth that time as they make the chains pretty complex. To get to the end of vanilla isn’t overly difficult but I had over 150 before launching rocket due to trying mods and restarting but really that’s just the tutorial before you understand you want to launch so many rockets per minute to get bigger numbers.
Those devs always had weekly updates on what they were working on, fixed performance issues over the years and made a quality product. No this is not paid advertising but they are devs worth supporting overall.
This is not true, keys are unique therefore it is technically very possible to track their way of payment.
No there isnt. Find interviews from developers on this. They go deep and technical with the detail. They create the keys at a different time. Yes, they are unique. But they’re not associated with the payment, only to the user who claims them in a DRM platform. Only the retailer knows the payment details. If it’s a reseller with stolen cards, then no detail arrives to the developer, just a transaction then a transaction reversal. The developer doesn’t know which client owned the card that reversed the payment, nor which key was given by the retailer to the final customer.
Them not being associated to the payment is the dev’s or better the store manager’s fault and not a technical limitation. Tbh as a dev, i would try to make the store manager follow his responsibilities to properly keep track of payments.
Good luck with that champ. I’m sure you’re a special boy that you and you alone, will achieve what hundreds of small and large companies with whole teams of engineers and lawyers have not done in the past 15 years.
They would if they were easily identifiable. IIRC Steam might revoke them if the key is bought with stolen cards and their owners perform a chargeback.
Thing is for copyright law those keys are 100% legal.
EDIT: I explicitly said for copyright law. It’s how users justify that “they are not pirating”, except it’s much worse because game developers need to deal with fees anyway after chargeback.
Obligatory “but does piracy count as lost revenue?”
Piracy probably generates more revenue than it destroys.
Fuck me what an insanely stupid comment.
Piracy is usually a market problem. If I find something too inconvenient to access I’ll pirate it. Put it all in a convenient place and I’ll pay.
But also, piracy generates interest in something and makes it more popular overall, leading to sales.
What they’re really scared of is people doing other things instead of playing/buying their games they’ve only just made. This is why the emulator community became so strong. Play old 8bit and 16bit classic that have actual gameplay, are fun, dont have app-ads and in-game purchases, etc.
But how will the US military get more cannon-fodder if people play Kirby instead of CoD?
Switch to Duck Hunt?
If the military recruited based on Duck Hunt I think I’d be screwed.
I’ve rolled over the score counter on the skeet shooting half of the game. I did it to see if any bugs or unexpected behavior would crop up if you do, but nothing interesting happens. It just rolls back over to zero. Anyway, you give me a Zapper and I can hit just about anything.
That is some impressive dedication
Is it really a victimless crime to go to archive.org and download yourself a copy of the never before released yet still fully completed Thrill Kill for PlayStation? Of course not, you need to think twice about the company that canceled the game and any bonuses the developers were promised, and didn’t even tell them about it, with the developers themselves having to learn about it from IGN.
looking back i’m definitely guilty of pirating some indie games
Indie dev here. Do whatever you want
I used to make small games too for a little bit. Same.
Image Transcription:
A four-panel comic by mygumsarebleeding.
The first panel shows a person with short, black hair, wearing a black shirt with the EA logo on it. They are talking to a person with long, black hair who is wearing a red shirt and facing away, arms folded. The first person is saying “I’m so sorry honey”.
The second panel shows the first person from the first panel speaking to two smaller people, both wearing red and sitting at a table with their heads in their hands and empty plates in front of them. The person is saying “I’m sorry my children…”.
The third panel shows a close-up of the person saying “There will be no food tonight”.
The fourth panel shows an even closer view of the person’s face, lines under his eyes indicating distress as he says “Somebody pirated a game I made in 1995”.
[I am a human, if I’ve made a mistake please let me know. Please consider providing alt-text for ease of use. Thank you. 💜]
Good human
Thank you, fellow human 🤖
You wouldn’t pirate a car?!
I would if I could!
Speak for yourself
More like Nintendo
I just spent the night on my first emulator playing F-Zero Gx. I’m so sorry children :(
That should have been the lead racing series for Nintendo.
Mariokart is just an arcade game with a racing theme.
They’re going to go hungry now
