The pirates are back - Anew study from the European Union’s Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) suggest that online piracy has increased for the first time in years. In fact, piracy rates have bee…::We analyze a new study where the EUIPO suggests online piracy is on the increase within the European Union.
Love how it doesn’t mention the fact that services are getting objectively worse content as they stretch thin, are increasing their prices across the board, and cracking down on password sharing which was previously touted as a benefit.
Guess what’s also been increasing? Prices.
Guess what also has refused to go up? Wages
Guess what also been increasing? The number of streaming platforms trying to out bid their competitors. You know what else is increasing? The number of streaming platforms going after account sharing and they wonder why people are going back to piracy. Piracy is king and no one will be able to stop it.
That’s what I’m worried about….billionaires will convince governments (who haven’t banned them yet) a “think of the children act” which will ban VPNs
I’ve started to pirate games again, which I never saw a reason to in 15 years. Simply because 2 hours refund window isn’t enough for the crap they sell now. Performance from hell and half assed story after you left the tutorial.
Gamepass kind of stopped me a bit on that, but it’s a subscription and only a matter of time till there’s competition with exclusives and increased price.
Games also got too expensive, there’s more competition than ever and I earn less money than my parents used to, I simply can’t pay that much, yet the games start to cost 90€ upwards. So even if I buy a key, it’s still 65€ or more, for an often broken game. No thank you.
Just wait, dude. Prices on games come down so fast, there’s really not much reason to pirate.
Not an option. I dislike spoiler and I need a new PC to play coop games with friends anyways. What’s the point of a new expensive PC if I play only old games? I also don’t feel like participating in gaming communities much, if everything has been discovered 1 or 2 years before me. No one gives a fuck if I find out some cool hidden features, if it has been discussed already and everyone can watch 1000 better YouTube guides. Playing on release is great entertainment for me and always will be.
I’m gonna be honest, for me, everything you said there is precisely why I like being a patient gamer. Can play all the games I want without spending as much on hardware or on the games themselves. Am playing the most completed and patched version of the game. Have heaps of resources available online to help me optimise my gameplay.
Tried crusader kings 3 on game pass, I liked the game but every tube after 30min or an hour, the windows drm would have a hiccup and close the game, ended up getting a cracked version, while still paying for the subscription, never had a crash again… fuck this shitty drm.
2015: Share your Netflix between four people, everyone pays $4 per month, have access to 80% of all online content. The interface is shit but you keep up with it because it is cheap.
2023: You pay $20 for Netflix, pay $15 for Disney, pay $15 for Hulu, pay $10 for Amazon Prime, $15 for Discovery, $15 for Paramount, $15 for Youtube, have access to 50% of all online content. The interface is still shit and you wonder why you pay for that shit.
Joe Average: 🏴☠️😎🏴☠️😎🏴☠️😎🏴☠️😎🏴☠️😎🏴☠️ and the interface is easier than ever.
My 2013 Highest-End Smart-TV barely works with Youtube and no longer with anything else. But Burning Series still works marvellous. Another thing: “Consuming” pirated content is not “illegal” in Germany. It is a violation of private property which the rights owner can sue in a civil court. But as long as you don’t use P2P services where you also upload - which would indeed be a fellony - he can not detect what you do and can not take any action against you - so One-Click-Hosters and Warez-Streaming is totally safe. And if the rights owner could find out about you he could at most send you a cease-and-desist-order with a one-time-fee of at max $100 because it is a minor incident. As far as I know there was never a user of Warez-Streaming who paid anything.
The only bad thing: DNS is nowadays filtered at the big Telcos and Providers which means I have to change the DNS inside my Routers to Cloudflare and Google. Which are a lot faster anyway.
TPB + VPN for many years now, just make sure that killswitch is on, got nabbed once by HBO, fortunately only got a nasty letter, nothing more
It makes me sad when I see people are still using TPB. It’s worth the extra effort to get into private trackers.