I watched a youtube video which talked about a 2015 study into piracy.

The study was conducted by a collaboration of movie, music, television, and video game studios.

Movie and television showed that the piracy rarely affected legit purchases. It did not help, but it did not harm.

Music had a slight negative dip, where sales among piraters sometimes prevented sales.

But video games is what was really special. They found those who pirate at least 1 game a year are up to 100x MORE likely to not only buy the game, but buy it in multiple forms. So maybe you bought GTA:V on release day on PS3.

Then a few years later you bought it on PS4. Then later on PS5. I think it's also on PC so throw that in too.

Only a pirate would love a game that much. And is probably pirating because it keeps their physical copy unopened.

It's similar with me. I have pirated games starting with my Amiga 500 in the early 90s, and still pirate today. But I am also one of the best costumers the game industry has (except in the categories MTX and cash-grab DLC, and I am very careful with early access titles). I own around 2500 games legit (not counting Systems other than PC), and nearly all of those games started as a pirated copy. Without pirating I would never be able to decide which games are worth my money and time.

If a game isn't well rated, I won't pirate it, and if it can't hold my attention, I delete it. If it's my cup of tea, I wait until the price point is where I perceive it as fair for the offering. That can be full price on day one too if is good! BG3, Nier Automata, Witchfire, Prey 2016 and a very long list of other games all got what they asked for.

If I see that a game is flawed, but the devs are actively working on making their game as good as it deserves to be (it helps if they have a good track record), I also tend to pay close to full price. If fixes come slowly or erratically, or they abandoned a game in an unfinished state before, I only buy after it is fixed, heavily discounted, or not at all.

Where is this idea that game developers are all rich coming from? Artists in the industry don’t get paid much better than a retail wage and programmers could double their salary outside it.

Why? If you know you'll play it it's only $30 now, almost certainly higher at release. The Early Access is running great for me (on Linux no less) and the closest thing to a "bug" I've found so far (3 hrs in) is that some of the voiceover doesn't 100% match the written text.

Seriously, it looks and feels excellent already. My understanding is that only a few biomes are finished, and they'll release more over time. But even the story beginnings are already solidly in place.

Pirated copies get updates just like any other. They just don't get automatic updates, like most storefronts provide. That's a feature of the store though, not the game.

the game itself still gets updated. download pirated game -> update drops -> wait unil someone uploads it -> download latest version

If its too niche you might have the situation where nobody uploads the updated version and waiting will just get you the same version as if you didn't wait.

repacks will generally use patch updates but I find it's easier and less bug prone to just use a steam emu or patched steam and just replace the steamapps/common/game folder each update

There are relatively few people who "crack" the games and the community around it is very verbal. Some people go deep on inspecting things, and if something gets found they're added to a list of untrusted sources. From what I've seen it's hard to get that trust back.

So yeah it's definitely a risk, but not a super dangerous one. Especially if you use Linux and a VM

Pirates vet things with lists of clean sites/trackers/tools etc. As long as pirates stick to those, they generally don't have to worry about malware. Such a list is not difficult to find.

Sure, it's possible for someone to get caught out by one of these sites or users deciding to turn bad, but that's only going to work for like a day. It's like kicking a hornet's nest in the pirating world.

Folks that hire games, how are you confident malware isn't being injected in the streaming software?

Don't download from a shady looking website, go to reputable sources. Fitgirl, Internet Archive, etc. Read the comments if the website has them, don't have to read thoroughly, just a quick skim to see if other people reported things and whether they're false positives. Don't download things before they've released, or download things for other platforms but "for Windows"somehow. Make sure what you're downloading takes up the kinda space you'd expect from that game, (don't download GTA V but it's a 40mb download).

Yeah, we basically rely on blind faith. Honestly I trust pirates to keep their stuff clean more than the developers and the publishers themselves who just so often inject the malware called DRM in the first place.

In many cases, legit games have more malware (spyware, DRM, rootkits, etc.) and the cracked versions remove it. It’s annoying to pay for a game and it won’t work offline because the company wants to collect your data, but the cracked version does work offline.

How are you confident the binary you install from the developer doesn't contain a malicious payload?

The issue is not that pirated executables might contain malware, but that people don't have a clue how to identify safe sources. As consumers we use corporate trust (reputable company). As pirates, we use social trust (scene, fitgirl, etc.) Neither method discovers malware.

I would suspect the market slowdown in VR purchases might be pushing some publishers to spend less money on it than when the Oculus Rift and Valve Index were fresh and new. Meta's relative dominance of the arena and it's tightly closed systems are also impacted by people who don't want to give money to Meta. If the Steam Frame is successful, we might see a turnaround on that, but currently I think the VR market has been stagnating a little under Meta's dominance. Zuckerberg abandoning the Metaverse entirely also is evidence of a market that exists but isn't large enough for most publishers to justify the extra costs to include VR support when they won't sell enough copies to offset those costs.

Thanks for working for a studio that sold their soul to a foreign publisher for $500 million and a $250 million bonus.

I don't think that's fair. Not everyone get to choose where they work.

You can hate mega corporations, CEOs and board members but most of the lower lever employees are not there by choice.

You should read up on the situation a bit more. Buying the game actually helps the people he tried to fuck. There's a threshold where the bonus gets paid out and Krafton actually loses money per sale for the next several million sales.