Me to. I don't see why I, as the legitimate customer should be punished because of the actions of the criminals. I will admit, I have pirated games, as pretty much everyone has. Pretty much all of them I now own legitimately. I don't want to pay for something that A.) May not work on my system. B.) Is buggy as hell. C.) Is bathed in DLC and almost impossible to play.
I changed to a thorough test approach when I paid a large sum of money for Heroes of Might and Magic V (I think) only to find out it required Uplay, so I downloaded it, 6 hours later it was done forcing me to patch and look at masses of ads, so I launched it eager to finally get into my game and BAM. Black screen bug. Wouldn't play. Still wasn't fixed 6 months later. Uninstalled it, deleted uplay, threw the CD out the window and never touched Ubisoft again.
I've had to crack several games I own because of draconian DLC, the most obvious being the original release of Assassins Creed. It was HELLISH.
That being said, now I have a decent paying job it's a bit less of a serious issue and I haven't pirated a game for several years. That and I have much less time to spend gaming anyway. When I was in school full time it was a big issue to spend 80 dollars on a new release however.
I also know people who use repack releases to save size, given they can sometimes shave the gigs needed well in half.
Well Ubisoft, their view of PC gamers is that everyone is a pirate. So they place a lot of DRM on their products through things like uplay... And other things that hinder the game and the PC in general just by having the game installed...
A recent example, Watchdogs... After running the game, uplay turns on something of which's exact purpose I don't know that stays on until your pretty much restart your PC... What it does is it prevents the usage of the mouse in other games. Though I think the trigger for which it locks you out of is that it looks through the files to see if it finds the words "Watch" or "Dogs" anywhere in them.
I'm only going to say it once; promoting digital piracy in any of its forms for any reason is strictly against site rules. Use this thread to discuss the ways piracy is or should be dealt with, but if I see any more talk about piracy being an acceptable consumer behavior I will have to hand out warnings.
Oh it isn't acceptable, don't get me wrong. Stealing is stealing is stealing.
There are a lot of people all over the place, especially here in Australia and in Russia as well that are trying to get past it saying that it ISN'T stealing if they use purely digital distribution because apparently, in the eyes of the law, stealing involves taking something from someone else so that they can't have it anymore. . . Which is crap. You're still stealing something. People have to work on this stuff, they need to be paid, equipment needs to be paid for, rent, power, ect ect. Companies expect to make money selling their product whether they distribute it digitally or in box form. Copyright laws usually cover this area with a massively wide net however. Those however vary from country to country.
It's an issue that's very difficult to tackle. In my opinion brutally oppressive DRM and using that Steam junk are not the right way to go about it.
@Dee, Do you have any insights my good man? You're working in the industry now, we know Beamdogs' stance, which is very reasonable and the way of many stuidos that aren't EA or Ubisoft. What would you do?
It should be mentioned that it is thanks to Beamdogs no DRM that my fiancee and I have bought 2 copies of both BG:EE and BG2:EE so we can play together, even though we didn't need to. The fact we could without hassle was awesome, so we responded in kind.
I recall Trent saying at some point that the reason Beamdog was founded was to provide a service that could compete with PirateBay, on the basis that the reason people use it is because it's a better service than a lot of other game distribution platforms.
On the broader scale, piracy is a crime of opportunity; if someone has the ability to take something for nothing, and especially if the likelihood of getting caught is minimal, that someone might choose to take it. A lot of people don't see the harm that digital piracy causes, and to me that's the piece that needs to be remedied.
Game developers aren't fat cat billionaires riding around in Tesla cars and private jets; for the broad majority of us, game development is something that we do because we enjoy doing it. Even for big studios like Ubisoft and EA, a loss of 10% in sales means a loss of 10% in available budgets for the teams working on the games you love, it means a loss of 10% of staff that might have been hired to work on the next big game, it means a loss of 10% of existing staff that worked really hard on a game that just didn't sell well enough.
More often than not, taking revenue away from a big corporation doesn't hurt the CEO; it hurts the employees.
So how do you stop people from doing that? I don't know. For me, the best solution is to enforce a strict "no piracy" rule on this site, and I've seen a number of other sites do the same, even if they weren't strictly gaming sites. If you send the message that pirates are not welcome to the discussion, then that sends a clearer message to the criminal than harsh DRM. It becomes less appealing to pirate a game when you can't talk about the game you pirated.
More to the point, that's why I have very low tolerance for people talking about piracy as an acceptable means of "sticking it to the man", or an acceptable way of "trying out the game" before buying it. It's not acceptable, ever, and as a community (not as an industry) I think we need to start holding ourselves to that.
Out of curiosity, how do you personally deal with quality concerns? It really sucks to buy content that is, frankly, bad. I dont so much mean bad as in the concept wasnt incredible, or the graphics are subpar. I mean releasing for sale very buggy products that REQUIRE patching from the get go, or an rpg with a story that is so plot holey that it eventually collapses into incoherence. I really hated buying a game and getting basicly nothing out of it, especially since developers arent going to give me back my money. I only have one console game that was essentially impossible to play, but I have bought several PC games that werent worth the disc they were printed on.
Piracey doesnt really help this situation, since as you note, you're really only hurting the footsoldiers (who probably wanted to playtest for a few months, but were refused), not the corporation proper. I dont pirate, but I also feel little interest in buying games. I generally felt at a certain point that looking for really good computer games was like panning for gold in sewer runoff. Not that I really spend on consoles either, my last console was a GC. Atm, I play old games and free downloads.
Also curious, but how do you feel about game reviews? These can make or break games, but admittedly arent stealing.
As a general rule of thumb, as long as a Studio can afford to pay a single actor 75 mils for a two hour role, I'm going to assume the Studio is very well off. It provides a situation where it is extremely difficult to feel any wrong in just watching their movies for free.
Just revisiting this because I thought of a documentary I watched recently on Netflix called "That Guy... Who Was in That Thing". If this is your attitude you should check it out.
Out of curiosity, how do you personally deal with quality concerns? It really sucks to buy content that is, frankly, bad. I dont so much mean bad as in the concept wasnt incredible, or the graphics are subpar. I mean releasing for sale very buggy products that REQUIRE patching from the get go, or an rpg with a story that is so plot holey that it eventually collapses into incoherence. I really hated buying a game and getting basicly nothing out of it, especially since developers arent going to give me back my money. I only have one console game that was essentially impossible to play, but I have bought several PC games that werent worth the disc they were printed on.
Piracey doesnt really help this situation, since as you note, you're really only hurting the footsoldiers (who probably wanted to playtest for a few months, but were refused), not the corporation proper. I dont pirate, but I also feel little interest in buying games. I generally felt at a certain point that looking for really good computer games was like panning for gold in sewer runoff. Not that I really spend on consoles either, my last console was a GC. Atm, I play old games and free downloads.
Also curious, but how do you feel about game reviews? These can make or break games, but admittedly arent stealing.
QA is important; when a game is buggy, it's hard to get any enjoyment out of it. I remember playing Assassin's Creed III and being incredibly frustrated when combat actions didn't behave correctly (which strangely is more annoying to me than when Skyrim just freezes completely and loses three hours of walking across the continent). As a consumer, it makes me more cautious about buying a new game; I'm more likely to wait until the price is reduced or the game goes on sale.
But really, there's no good way to deal with buggy games. Once you buy it, you hope that the developer will fix the bugs you care about. You could postpone buying the game until those bugs are fixed, but without playing it's difficult to say what bugs will really irritate you while playing.
When I'm feeling especially cautious about a new game, I look at customer reviews. More than the star ratings, I look at the kinds of things people complain about. If a game gets a lot of bad press because a few people encountered one problem that most people never see, I care less about that problem. (I ignore reviews that say "Don't buy this game" because I don't know what other games that person has played, and I don't know at what point this game stopped being fun for them).
Professional reviews are useful when I'm thinking about buying a new game and want to make sure it will be fun. Professional reviewers are a good resource because, generally speaking, if you follow them regularly you can get a sense of what reviewers like what kinds of games. If a reviewer likes a game, and I have a tendency to like the same games as that reviewer, I know that that game will be fun for me. On the other hand, if a reviewer talks about a lot of things they didn't like in a game, but those things are things that I actually enjoy, then that's actually pretty useful as well.
@Dee what happens with the "I pirated it to try it out" is that many games don't have demos nowadays. Also many games (this happens mostly on Mac) have the minimum requirements incorrect or just without information about several cases (for example, Orginal Divinity Sin said it only runs in OS X 10.8 and higher, while OS X 10.7 shares the same structure for applications), and very probably, if they game had a demo I could try (to see if it works or no in my computer, or in my mom's), I probably had bought it already. Some people would pirate it to try it out, instead of waiting to get a new computer or using someone else's computer to run the game (my computer's problem is the graphics card, it has an Intel GMA 950, and it had only 2 GB of RAM), but since I can't be sure if it works (if it uses libs from 10.8 it *won't* work, and this is the only exception of where it will and won't run), I won't buy it now (and play NetHack/BG/Angband/Dwarf Fortress instead).
@CrevsDaak That's part of what the system requirements are there for; to let you know what your computer needs in order to run the game. If you choose to try it out with a system you know doesn't meet the requirements, you're taking a risk.
Demos are great for that, but a demo also takes a lot of development time to create.
I remember when a lot of games you bought, at least here in Aus had a demo disk in them. That was great! My original copy of Morrowind came with a demo disc with the need for speed demo on it. Was great fun, eventually bought that to. Shame it doesn't run on Windows 8 but still!
Cutting pirates out of the community is actually a damn good idea. For me, it's being part of a community which means more then just playing the game. I wonder if there's an easy way to enforce legit copies without getting in the way of legitimate customers to much. Cd Key for official forums maybe? Without restricting the functions of the CD/digital copy you have bought but used just to sign up for forums?
I remember when a lot of games you bought, at least here in Aus had a demo disk in them. That was great! My original copy of Morrowind came with a demo disc with the need for speed demo on it. Was great fun, eventually bought that to. Shame it doesn't run on Windows 8 but still!
Cutting pirates out of the community is actually a damn good idea. For me, it's being part of a community which means more then just playing the game. I wonder if there's an easy way to enforce legit copies without getting in the way of legitimate customers to much. Cd Key for official forums maybe? Without restricting the functions of the CD/digital copy you have bought but used just to sign up for forums?
Bioware's forums require you to use your Bioware account in order to post; I guess you could run a check to see if a person has bought the game before letting them post. But honestly, that's a lot of police work for what should ultimately be a community effort. And it again feels a bit like punishing legitimate consumers for the actions of illegitimate consumers.
Bioware's forums require you to use your Bioware account in order to post; I guess you could run a check to see if a person has bought the game before letting them post. But honestly, that's a lot of police work for what should ultimately be a community effort. And it again feels a bit like punishing legitimate consumers for the actions of illegitimate consumers.
Yea! That's the biggest issue I have with most of these anti-piracy efforts. They tend to be a massive drag net that gets in the way of the people doing the right thing more then it does the pirates. Cracking games like Assassins Creed was the only way I could play a game I bloody bought. It required a constant internet connection which I didn't have at the time. Spending a lot of time overseas or in backwater bases made it hard to get access to a stable net connection at the best of times.
As I see it, the easiest way (In a conceptual sense) is to either have ISP's ban sites like Piratebay so they can't be accessed or have the operating system not run bittorrent programs. Yes, there will be work arounds, there always is, but I would say a lot of people wouldn't care enough to bugger around with their system.
Another peeve I have these days if being forced to run steam all the time. In fact a game I just bought from my local EB, Wargame: Red Dragon, didn't even have a bloody CD in the box, just a steam code. . .
Well, banning websites at the ISP level isn't good either, and sets a dangerous precedent for the cable companies. PirateBay in particular has extensive experience jumping from place to place to avoid IP bans, so that's no more effective than DRM, but with much greater implications for the free use of internet.
Again, I think the onus has to be on players and developers to say "No, this kind of thing is not okay." And then not use piracy to acquire or try out games--because when you do that, you're sending a message that piracy is acceptable in certain situations, which (much like the IP bans I mentioned above) is a dangerous precedent to set.
This is true, there's no guarantee it will stop there. What if they decide to ban the websites of every other ISP provider. . . wouldn't want you switching plans now would we. . .
It doesn't look like something that can just be banned and policed out of existence. There are a lot of people I know, including myself, who eventually grew out of it. As we got older and you begin to understand that it's not as simple as it looks when your younger and it does have consequences. That however is far from the norm I would say. Having a job also helped the issue a lot.
Customer loyalty is probably your best ally. Knowing that people WILL pirate your product but if you treat people well they will most likely respond in kind and pirates will be the minority. We did purely from the fact we weren't forced into buying 2 copies so we could LAN. We also didn't have to download another agitating third party program like the dreadful uPlay or Steam. Just pay, download and it's yours. Beautiful.
The supports also great, post a problem on the forum and it's answered usually in a few minutes. The community is awesome in general. Getting an answer out of Ubisoft on what the hell was wrong with my copy of Heroes of Might and Magic took several months and was utterly useless anyway.
I don't have much time for the argument that people don't pirate good games. I think piracy is more due to opportunity and ease than down to refusal to pay for poor qualify games.
I remember back in the day when I was at school we had a lot of time to play games but not much money - so if anyone of my circle of friends had a copy then essentially everyone had a copy. The better the game, the more we all wanted a copy. There was no online copy protection in those days - mostly codeweels which were very vunerable to the photocopier (or simply writing down all the codes).
To be fair we all spent most of our (very limited) free money on games anyway, but we still pirated where we could. After all, if we all bought different games, then we all got to play more. I'm not trying to argue we had any moral high ground - we realised it was wrong, but the risk of getting caught was basically nil. The people who did get prosecuted for piracy were those who were selling bulk pirated games, not schoolkids copying off each other.
These days I have a lot more money and a lot less time to play games. I can't remember when I last pirated a game - over 10 years ago at least. It's just easier to go out and buy a game I want than go to the effort of trying to find a pirated copy.
Long thread is long, only read the first few entries, so forgive me if something like this has been mentioned before.
First of all: I hate piracy. I think it's mainly hurting the artists/ creators out there. However, in today's globalized internet society, I often *have* to pirate media.
Bear with me here: I do not live in the USA nor in an English speaking country. We also don't have Netflix or something similarly useful (there are some other companies who try to be the German Netflix, but they fail hard, due to their tiny libraries of movies and tv shows. They are also never up to date.)
Most new movies and tv shows take *months*, sometimes even years to get here. I have to wait half a year for the newest Game of Thrones season to come out here and even then we only get the dubbed version (and dubs are not that great, let me tell ya). The BluRay/ DVD set of each new season comes out a week before the next season starts broadcasting. That is an entire year of waiting. Meanwhile, the internet gets clustered all over with spoilers. So I have to choose: Either Internet or no spoilers.
GoT is of course just one example, the same problem occurs with pretty much every other TV show I watch (My little Pony, Avatar, Doctor Who, etc.) Similarly to movies. The internet is full of spoilers for How to train your Dragon 2, yet the movie only comes out here *tomorrow*. And I already know many of the major plot points which is a HUGE bummer. Same happened with the Lego movie, Maleficent and a bunch of others.
This really really sucks. And yes, if I *do* pirate something, I do buy it as soon as it comes out here (if it actually does. Hello anime -.-)
With videogames, this luckily doesn't happen anymore, thanks to digital distribution. Unless we of course count South Park: The Stick of Truth, which got banned for over a month here because it was not properly censored -.- (and I actually pre-ordered it, which made it extra annoying)
It seems to me from reading this thread that some people use their shortage of disposable income as a justification for piracy (stealing). When I was growing up, having passed my driving test I couldn't afford a car but I didn't go out and steal one, I got on a bus instead and where there was no bus route, I walked.
As a smoker I like to think (maybe naively) that at least some of the huge amount of tax that I pay on my cigarettes goes towards funding some of the public services that we all benefit from in this country (the UK).
Customer loyalty is probably your best ally. Knowing that people WILL pirate your product but if you treat people well they will most likely respond in kind and pirates will be the minority. We did purely from the fact we weren't forced into buying 2 copies so we could LAN. We also didn't have to download another agitating third party program like the dreadful uPlay or Steam. Just pay, download and it's yours. Beautiful.
You've said some silly things in this thread, but this is the opposite. This is what the industry needs to understand and embrace.
In reference to the original 'your country' part, I am reminded how blank media (blank casette tapes, VHS tapes, blank diskettes, blank cds, even stuff like MP3 players) had a substantial tax on them in some countries, with the revenues going to companies that were theoreticly going to be pirated. Theoreticly, meaning even if you had legitimate use for these, you still had to pay what amounted to royalties. However, as a result, most instances of 'stealing' werent worth cracking down on, just the people selling illegal copies generally. So when record companies tried to crack down on file sharers, they really couldnt make any headway. Worked well until piracy resched the torrent stage, and people were dling vast amounts of stuff. This is kinda in flux lately, because of our willey nilley socially conservative government. Canada is a weird country, eh?
That's my honest opinion. A lot of the time I like to get at an issue I'm thinking about from many different angles. So it may seem like I'm flip flopping around when I just like to consider a problem from every different way people see it.
Comments
I changed to a thorough test approach when I paid a large sum of money for Heroes of Might and Magic V (I think) only to find out it required Uplay, so I downloaded it, 6 hours later it was done forcing me to patch and look at masses of ads, so I launched it eager to finally get into my game and BAM. Black screen bug. Wouldn't play. Still wasn't fixed 6 months later. Uninstalled it, deleted uplay, threw the CD out the window and never touched Ubisoft again.
I've had to crack several games I own because of draconian DLC, the most obvious being the original release of Assassins Creed. It was HELLISH.
That being said, now I have a decent paying job it's a bit less of a serious issue and I haven't pirated a game for several years. That and I have much less time to spend gaming anyway. When I was in school full time it was a big issue to spend 80 dollars on a new release however.
I also know people who use repack releases to save size, given they can sometimes shave the gigs needed well in half.
A recent example, Watchdogs... After running the game, uplay turns on something of which's exact purpose I don't know that stays on until your pretty much restart your PC... What it does is it prevents the usage of the mouse in other games. Though I think the trigger for which it locks you out of is that it looks through the files to see if it finds the words "Watch" or "Dogs" anywhere in them.
There are a lot of people all over the place, especially here in Australia and in Russia as well that are trying to get past it saying that it ISN'T stealing if they use purely digital distribution because apparently, in the eyes of the law, stealing involves taking something from someone else so that they can't have it anymore. . . Which is crap. You're still stealing something. People have to work on this stuff, they need to be paid, equipment needs to be paid for, rent, power, ect ect. Companies expect to make money selling their product whether they distribute it digitally or in box form. Copyright laws usually cover this area with a massively wide net however. Those however vary from country to country.
It's an issue that's very difficult to tackle. In my opinion brutally oppressive DRM and using that Steam junk are not the right way to go about it.
@Dee, Do you have any insights my good man? You're working in the industry now, we know Beamdogs' stance, which is very reasonable and the way of many stuidos that aren't EA or Ubisoft. What would you do?
It should be mentioned that it is thanks to Beamdogs no DRM that my fiancee and I have bought 2 copies of both BG:EE and BG2:EE so we can play together, even though we didn't need to. The fact we could without hassle was awesome, so we responded in kind.
On the broader scale, piracy is a crime of opportunity; if someone has the ability to take something for nothing, and especially if the likelihood of getting caught is minimal, that someone might choose to take it. A lot of people don't see the harm that digital piracy causes, and to me that's the piece that needs to be remedied.
Game developers aren't fat cat billionaires riding around in Tesla cars and private jets; for the broad majority of us, game development is something that we do because we enjoy doing it. Even for big studios like Ubisoft and EA, a loss of 10% in sales means a loss of 10% in available budgets for the teams working on the games you love, it means a loss of 10% of staff that might have been hired to work on the next big game, it means a loss of 10% of existing staff that worked really hard on a game that just didn't sell well enough.
More often than not, taking revenue away from a big corporation doesn't hurt the CEO; it hurts the employees.
So how do you stop people from doing that? I don't know. For me, the best solution is to enforce a strict "no piracy" rule on this site, and I've seen a number of other sites do the same, even if they weren't strictly gaming sites. If you send the message that pirates are not welcome to the discussion, then that sends a clearer message to the criminal than harsh DRM. It becomes less appealing to pirate a game when you can't talk about the game you pirated.
More to the point, that's why I have very low tolerance for people talking about piracy as an acceptable means of "sticking it to the man", or an acceptable way of "trying out the game" before buying it. It's not acceptable, ever, and as a community (not as an industry) I think we need to start holding ourselves to that.
Piracey doesnt really help this situation, since as you note, you're really only hurting the footsoldiers (who probably wanted to playtest for a few months, but were refused), not the corporation proper. I dont pirate, but I also feel little interest in buying games. I generally felt at a certain point that looking for really good computer games was like panning for gold in sewer runoff. Not that I really spend on consoles either, my last console was a GC. Atm, I play old games and free downloads.
Also curious, but how do you feel about game reviews? These can make or break games, but admittedly arent stealing.
But really, there's no good way to deal with buggy games. Once you buy it, you hope that the developer will fix the bugs you care about. You could postpone buying the game until those bugs are fixed, but without playing it's difficult to say what bugs will really irritate you while playing.
When I'm feeling especially cautious about a new game, I look at customer reviews. More than the star ratings, I look at the kinds of things people complain about. If a game gets a lot of bad press because a few people encountered one problem that most people never see, I care less about that problem. (I ignore reviews that say "Don't buy this game" because I don't know what other games that person has played, and I don't know at what point this game stopped being fun for them).
Professional reviews are useful when I'm thinking about buying a new game and want to make sure it will be fun. Professional reviewers are a good resource because, generally speaking, if you follow them regularly you can get a sense of what reviewers like what kinds of games. If a reviewer likes a game, and I have a tendency to like the same games as that reviewer, I know that that game will be fun for me. On the other hand, if a reviewer talks about a lot of things they didn't like in a game, but those things are things that I actually enjoy, then that's actually pretty useful as well.
Demos are great for that, but a demo also takes a lot of development time to create.
Cutting pirates out of the community is actually a damn good idea. For me, it's being part of a community which means more then just playing the game. I wonder if there's an easy way to enforce legit copies without getting in the way of legitimate customers to much. Cd Key for official forums maybe? Without restricting the functions of the CD/digital copy you have bought but used just to sign up for forums?
As I see it, the easiest way (In a conceptual sense) is to either have ISP's ban sites like Piratebay so they can't be accessed or have the operating system not run bittorrent programs. Yes, there will be work arounds, there always is, but I would say a lot of people wouldn't care enough to bugger around with their system.
Another peeve I have these days if being forced to run steam all the time. In fact a game I just bought from my local EB, Wargame: Red Dragon, didn't even have a bloody CD in the box, just a steam code. . .
Again, I think the onus has to be on players and developers to say "No, this kind of thing is not okay." And then not use piracy to acquire or try out games--because when you do that, you're sending a message that piracy is acceptable in certain situations, which (much like the IP bans I mentioned above) is a dangerous precedent to set.
It doesn't look like something that can just be banned and policed out of existence. There are a lot of people I know, including myself, who eventually grew out of it. As we got older and you begin to understand that it's not as simple as it looks when your younger and it does have consequences.
That however is far from the norm I would say. Having a job also helped the issue a lot.
Customer loyalty is probably your best ally. Knowing that people WILL pirate your product but if you treat people well they will most likely respond in kind and pirates will be the minority. We did purely from the fact we weren't forced into buying 2 copies so we could LAN. We also didn't have to download another agitating third party program like the dreadful uPlay or Steam. Just pay, download and it's yours. Beautiful.
The supports also great, post a problem on the forum and it's answered usually in a few minutes. The community is awesome in general. Getting an answer out of Ubisoft on what the hell was wrong with my copy of Heroes of Might and Magic took several months and was utterly useless anyway.
I remember back in the day when I was at school we had a lot of time to play games but not much money - so if anyone of my circle of friends had a copy then essentially everyone had a copy. The better the game, the more we all wanted a copy. There was no online copy protection in those days - mostly codeweels which were very vunerable to the photocopier (or simply writing down all the codes).
To be fair we all spent most of our (very limited) free money on games anyway, but we still pirated where we could. After all, if we all bought different games, then we all got to play more. I'm not trying to argue we had any moral high ground - we realised it was wrong, but the risk of getting caught was basically nil. The people who did get prosecuted for piracy were those who were selling bulk pirated games, not schoolkids copying off each other.
These days I have a lot more money and a lot less time to play games. I can't remember when I last pirated a game - over 10 years ago at least. It's just easier to go out and buy a game I want than go to the effort of trying to find a pirated copy.
First of all: I hate piracy. I think it's mainly hurting the artists/ creators out there.
However, in today's globalized internet society, I often *have* to pirate media.
Bear with me here: I do not live in the USA nor in an English speaking country. We also don't have Netflix or something similarly useful (there are some other companies who try to be the German Netflix, but they fail hard, due to their tiny libraries of movies and tv shows. They are also never up to date.)
Most new movies and tv shows take *months*, sometimes even years to get here. I have to wait half a year for the newest Game of Thrones season to come out here and even then we only get the dubbed version (and dubs are not that great, let me tell ya). The BluRay/ DVD set of each new season comes out a week before the next season starts broadcasting. That is an entire year of waiting.
Meanwhile, the internet gets clustered all over with spoilers.
So I have to choose: Either Internet or no spoilers.
GoT is of course just one example, the same problem occurs with pretty much every other TV show I watch (My little Pony, Avatar, Doctor Who, etc.)
Similarly to movies. The internet is full of spoilers for How to train your Dragon 2, yet the movie only comes out here *tomorrow*. And I already know many of the major plot points which is a HUGE bummer. Same happened with the Lego movie, Maleficent and a bunch of others.
This really really sucks.
And yes, if I *do* pirate something, I do buy it as soon as it comes out here (if it actually does. Hello anime -.-)
With videogames, this luckily doesn't happen anymore, thanks to digital distribution.
Unless we of course count South Park: The Stick of Truth, which got banned for over a month here because it was not properly censored -.- (and I actually pre-ordered it, which made it extra annoying)
As a smoker I like to think (maybe naively) that at least some of the huge amount of tax that I pay on my cigarettes goes towards funding some of the public services that we all benefit from in this country (the UK).