This is self explanatory; to all who do not support the idea of ownership, there shall be no more funding, regardless of their game’s quality.
Advice:
buy from GOG, avoid single player games which require internet connection or 3 party launchers.
Repost from reddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/StopKillingGames/comments/1ugzirg/stoppayinggames/
Are the companies shown in the picture selected on what basis? Are they sorted for anti consumer practices or what? Bc like what did SEGA do
Segas been killing it recently, no hate from me
If TES 6 is good when it comes out in 20 years I might buy that, but Ive been doing an unintentional blacklist of these guys for a while now. Maybe it would be hard if they made better games.
If buying is not ownership, piracy is not stealing.
Fuck em.
I agree!
This is pretty much impossible. I don’t think y’all realize how much space those corporations control.
It’s like trying to boycott Nestle.
I’ve not purchased a nestle product in over a decade. Skill issue?
Honestly: doubt. “Nestle” is not only stuff that has their name on it
👍
You say that as if piracy isn’t just a few clicks away.
A better option is to buy games that is not included on this type of lists.
Fuck piracy. The artist is worthy of their hire.
The artist has already been payed by the time the game hits the shelf, sales only go to the people on top.
Your two statements have nothing to do with each other. Artists don’t get paid for the amount of copies sold, that’s executives and shareholders. Unless you’re talking about an indie company with shared ownership, which the companies in the post decidedly are not. Artists just care about their game being played and enjoyed, something the scummy practices of these suits actively prevents.
Lots of creators get bonuses or royalties based on sales.
My bigger point is that piracy is bullshit. Either pay the price asked because you want that game or movie so bad, or say the cost is too high and walk away entirely.
Pirating something you’re too much of a skinflint to buy is super immature “I want to have my cake and eat it too” mentality. People too spineless to make even a miniscule sacrifice for their beliefs.
Not lots sadly. There are certainly some that have a big enough public profile to demand a share, but those are few and far between, and are often doing pretty well for themselves already. To 99% of the people in the industry the response to “I want to get a cut of the game’s profits” is “you can find another place to work then.”
I don’t entirely disagree with your bigger point. At some point you have to just step away from companies that are set on abusing you. But I don’t agree that it’s immature or skinflinty. That seems to be a rather uncharitable take perhaps lacking in understanding and perspective of why people pirate. There are pirates that take for the sake of it, but that’s not mostly the case. Piracy is trackable to a certain degree, and so it is feedback that people want to give you money, but are protesting your decisions. As has been said, piracy is a service problem. People tend to have no problem parting with their money in a fair exchange, and so they often don’t, even if they could.
Wanting to be treated fairly and not taking abuse is the opposite of immature in my opinion, how much it costs doesn’t even factor into it. Some fights you fight on principle. Too many people accept being taken advantage of in this world, making it worse for everyone else. And without those people piracy would also have been unneeded, because these companies often opt to not fix their issues and instead enshittify harder to squeeze more out of the people that keep paying.
There’s also a huge psychological aspect to it. Pirates often still bond with friends over games and those friends can end up buying, and pirates often still contribute to fan communities. Both of these are hard to let go of. They also happen to still help the original game stay relevant despite pirating, so yes, quitting entirely is more effective of a boycott. But also not being able to sell the experience to someone that has already experienced it is also more permanent, and allows that person to remain in their respective communities. Piracy just hits the sweet spot between quitting and no longer directly supporting, which is why people often end up there. And for creators that have to live under the thumb of executives that sabotage their success with hostile business practices, they would much rather you be there than somewhere else, while they try to improve the situation from the inside.
Most AAA studios have bonus programs in place for sales up to around a year after release - to theoretically make up for the extremely poor baseline salaries. Artists do in fact get paid for the amount of copies sold.
A bonus is not the same as a percentage cut of sales. Yes, bonuses exist and they can correlate with the success of a game in the best case, but they can (and also often) completely do not, plenty of stories of people getting laid off even if the game does well. These companies are so big they do not hold onto their staff as valuable assets, but as replaceable cogs. And it’s also why a lot of artists work on a contract basis and just don’t get any bonus to begin with.
And ‘to make up for extremely poor baseline salaries’… That’s not a thing as far as I know, and if it is where you are, it shouldn’t be a thing. It would be the game industry equivalent of tipping culture. Steal from workers ahead of time so you can punish them if the suits’ stupid business decisions don’t work out, awesome.
EDIT: Perhaps you’re referring to the fact that artists get paid badly at all, in which case, sure. But those bonuses aren’t to make up for that.
May depends on place, but I believe most of globe is fairly easy to avoid nestle, even with cheaper alternatives.
For games, until following most famous games, theres lot of alternatives to aaaa games, that are often way clearer of bugs on release date, often cheaper, and don’t require 5090 to work on medium details in 1080p. Few games like gta-clone, sims-like or diablo-like may be unique on their own, it would be even hard to ignore them in social/popculture aspect, so many gonna compare everything to few biggest. Still it is about paying them lot, preorders or throwing monies at worthless dlc day1 horse armors… We can ez avoid lot of that.
I’m assuming this also applies to Consoles as well: Sony removed purchased movies from people’s Sony Pictures Core app. I wonder if, or when, they’ll decide to do the same to games.
If it does come to that: what are our options as console gamers (other than piracy)? Buying physical discs?
I kinda hate to say it, but consoles are designed with these companies in mind. The whole idea of locking the ecosystem to only companies Sony / Microsoft / Nintendo approves of and making the process to get in expensive, time consuming, and often hostile to creative autonomy, incentivizes exactly these kinds of companies to go all in, since they have plenty of money and know with a captive audience they will get more out of it.
Prices kind of suck right now, so there’s no easy solution. But the only real long term solution is to move to an open platform where you have the control, not them. And that’s going to require sacrifice, because the deck is stacked against you. Or if you have enough faith, for enough people to stand up when they need to. Because the power for you yourself to resist was intentionally already taken from you.
I would never buy a car that I had to store in someone else’s garage.
I get the point but wouldn’t that practically be your garage at that point?
Why is my no-buy list for publishers on m feed?
We need free software advocates to get a chance to step into this ring. If we could push for a requirement that companies release the source code for their game engines, and public domain them - while still allowing them to retain copyrights of content assets, it absolves them of the responsibility of having to put more work into ensuring the game remains playable, while still giving fans what they need to make it continue to be playable. It also means players would still have to buy the game to play it, unless a total conversion existed.
The main complication with that route would be 3rd party middleware. They could just be exempt from release requirements, but that would place a rather large burden on fans for having to make alternatives to that middleware to make a game playable.
Looks at list… oh neat I’m already doing this. Thanks indi games and GOG/steam sale
???
Steam sells you a license. You don’t own the game. You own a license to access that game from Steam.
Yes, yet they do respect that licence and customers… so far, we trust them mostly.
Once day, Steam may be gone from market, replace by another service, who knows, and our libraries be gone by turning servers down - there is a possibility. But I struggle to imagine Steam would delet a game from my purchases without refunds and without any really serious reason, like few others do.
Didn’t they have a system that makes all games DRM free if something like that happenned or somwthing like that?
That’s how all software, except Free Software, works. Most media as well (except copyleft).
The game is downloaded and installed on your machine.
It also is from the other vendors, other wise you could not play offline games aside from all games being very slow probs. They have DRM, you cannot play most games without a launcher (there are some games, most of my steam library is mostly DRM free but maybe cuz they were indie games) unless you crack it.
And requires authentication via Steam to launch. No steam, no game.
At least not unless third parties come up with a workaround.
There are many DRM free games on Steam that don’t require the Steam client to run once downloaded
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUAX0gnZ3Nw
Watch, learn.
I’m going to be honest, this sounds like an astroturf campaign trying to reduce SKG into absurdity to harm it’s credibility.
At this point I think it’s safe to assume all large companies are evil and so piracy of any software/media/etc created by a large company is the moral thing to do.
It really sucks but I think this is the case. I can’t even read an ebook half the time with proper ownership. It’s either Amazon exclusive and then I don’t own it, or it happens to go on kobo/humble bundle DRM free. Every now and again the author sells things direct DRM free and I’ll buy from them.
I’m not giving Amazon a penny for their ebook scam library where they can change anything on a whim. It’s some serious 1984 shit, they can change the contents of the ebook whenever they want.
You can de-DRM your kobo ebooks i think. They havent blocked pc downloads like amazon did.
I dont worry much about kobo, they havent tried to do anything egregiously anti-consumer to me
I don’t worry about kobo, but I can’t find everything on there. Since Dungeon Crawler Carl is only on Amazon it seems like he has a publishing deal with them or something. It just sucks I can’t actually buy to own those books without getting physical copies.
I get that. I just buy the physical book if kobo dont deal.
I think it’s weird that people are okay with libraries for books, but when it comes to video games I’m suddenly entitled and have a moral obligation to give artists my money.
Librarians don’t get dressed up in balaclavas and hit their nearest book store to get more books. No you’re not entitled to artist‘s work for free.
Do you think video game piracy involves knocking off a GameStop?
This is a bad argument. Many libraries do have movies, and I’ve seen several with video games.
People wouldn’t make movies or games if they didn’t get money for it.
What you seem to be after is called “slavery”.
You have to elaborate on how it’s a bad argument. The existence of games at libraries doesn’t contradict what I’m saying at all.
People argue it’s immoral to pirate games because the artists must be compensated, but no one says that about buying used media or loaning from the library even though the artist still receives nothing.
Both loaning and used sales are shown to increase new book sales, so why wouldn’t the same be true for games?
You said that piracy is a moral imperative under these circumstances, and I’m going further to say it was never immoral in the first place.
Also of note is that libraries can’t loan out games for which there is no physical copy, which means big publishers are actively killing library availability as well.
Authors do get payed from libraries.
Source: am author, get yearly royalties from libraries.
This apparently varies by country. In countries where it’s not the case, the library system is not killing book sales or authorship.
To elaborate, how it worked for me is, when I published my book digitally, the store offered me to set a price for a “Library copy”. They recommend making this a higher price than the base copy, and then a digital library service will let people rent that copy out infinitely. Many authors take the default arrangement, since they’re just happy to have more people reading the work, BUT want to put a basic limiter on it (limited borrow copies) since we’re in the age of script kiddies, resellers, opportunistic collectors, etc.
I love how you put Epic here
And not the much larger platform Steam, that does the same shit.
Typical brainwashed G*mer type shit
Epic makes popular current games. Valve is more of a retail platform. ffs a majority of indie devs rely on steam, boycotting them wouldn’t make sense.
Typical braindead type shit
So because Steam has a monopoly we can’t criticise them?
Typical brainwashed G*mer shit
Oh wait you’re that weirdo who censors gamer, 😅 phew, here I thought this was a real argument. Nice catching up man, keep it manic
Thank you for proving me right that G*mers are troglodytes that shouldn’t be considered real people
Gamer! gamer! gamer!
Sorry I know it’s scary
Care to elaborate?
Or just want the headline bs?
Elaborate on what exactly?
I know you G*mers are as thick as pig shit.
But I thought my original comment was pretty self explanatory.
Calling out the hypocrisy of boycotting Epic for doing the same thing Valve does.
What is this vague and undefined thing you keep claiming both companies are doing?
You can’t act smarter than the room then peacock when someone calls you out and provide absolutely zero substance.
Either defend your argument or let everyone see that you’re full of shit. Doesn’t matter either way to me.
Do you know what thread we are in?
Genuine question.
Because if you can’t figure out the context. Then G*mers are truly a lost cause.
all corporations are bad
I see this sentiment often: “All politicians are bad”, “All lawyers are bad”, but it can be very harmful. If one lawyer is crookedly making millions off of illegitimate patent trolling cases, the best person to fight them is another lawyer. If a politician is cozying up to corporations, the best way to fight them is a politician for the people.
On corporations, it sucks to admit, but our lives tie in with many of them no matter how much we try to limit ourselves. I could even see a woodsman living outside civilization being affected by air pollution and land rights claims. People still fall back to needing to buy food, housing, entertainment, even if we agree many evil companies abuse those needs. Supporting responsible corporations, where they exist (and they are not often advertised) can pull power away from the evil ones by showing that the ruthless steps are not necessary, and support workers and hence people; assuming that they’re paying employees well.
Declaring they’re “all evil” can garner some quick attention - but that quickly boils over into defeatist attitudes wherein people stop taking any sociopolitically advantageous actions like targeted boycotts.
Corporations are part of a structure of might which is called the machine. The machine consists of beatlings where each beatling is the authorities of a geographic area. Corporations sets up veins to the beatling and ensures it is beating, in exchange the beatling gives authority to the corporation. Thus there is a symbiosis between beatlings and corporations.
I believe we should move away from the machine towards horizontally run societies for instance through democratic confederalism. By doing this, we would move away from overproduction, natural slaughter, superficial needs, overexploitation, hierarchy, alienation, and towards natural closeness, the meaningful and connectedness.
The purpose of the machine is not to serve us, but to uphold itself and expand, but the only thing standing in its way is… People. So it creates mechanisms to encourage hierarchical thinking, subordination, coldness, distrust, fear, division, narrow mindedness and dehumanization.
When we horizontalize, people will be attracted to these new societal structures and abandon the machine. Thus removing the existential threats to humanity.
Rockstar should be added to this list.
Rockstar Games, Inc. is an American video game publisher based in New York City. The company was established in December 1998 as a subsidiary of Take-Two Interactive.
Take-Two is already on the list, and also covers 2K and Zynga.
So really the list should show all the subsidaries. Because there’s probably a decent number of people that don’t know.
You don’t need to list every company.
You know which ones are the big ones. If you see a “6” next to a game title, don’t pay for it. No indie game dev makes 5 sequels to a game.
