You may NOT pirate Psp, Vita and PS3

[Fry Crayola]

4 hours ago, SweatyTravolta said:

I'm not gonna turn around and judge people who illegally download a game they have no other way of playing. 

 

Nor am I, for what it's worth. I don't have much of a moral issue with it, but I think it's important to make a distinction between someone being fine with their own action, and believing it to be their right. The general thrust of the negative responses from the likes of K, AlexW and me have been countering the latter belief rather than intending to shame individuals - something which I do agree would be massively hypocritical for just about all of us.

[Camel]

I can't get my head around this idea that anyone interested in buying Vita/PS3/PSP games would have bought them all already. Makes you wonder why they press Beatles albums in 2021. Surely everyone bought them 50 years ago.

 

I think it's unique to (or perhaps more prevalent in) video games, this assumption that people are only interested in the very latest releases and will have no interest in or will have already been through everything not current.

 

[MarkN]

10 hours ago, SweatyTravolta said:

If If those against piracy has never had a folder of NES roms on their PC, then they're liars.

You managed to pick one of the few systems I couldn't give the first fuck about. Never owned one. Couldn't care less about Nintendo games, even now. Think NES games look ugly as sin. I've not got a single one.

 

I've got ROMs for almost everything else mind. And yet I think on the whole I am against piracy (I worked in the games industry for 20 something years). It's such a grey question. Most of my pirated stuff is arcade ROMS and Commodore 64 games that I can't easily get in such an accessible format. It's an excuse, I know. There's a difference between that and ripping off something that's just been released. Even if the law doesn't recognise it, that difference is there.

 

Piracy does do genuine damage. Using the bits that don't do damage to waive that away is disingenuous at best. My position is that I'm a pirate and I'm completely in the wrong. I can't "own" the stuff I want with the law as it stands and be in the right. So I'm in the wrong. The law perhaps needs to change, but I'm not holding my breath on that one. I'll just live with being in the wrong on this one.

[Camel]

19 minutes ago, MarkN said:

You managed to pick one of the few systems I couldn't give the first fuck about. Never owned one. Couldn't care less about Nintendo games, even now. Think NES games look ugly as sin. I've not got a single one.

 

I'll just live with being in the wrong on this one.

 

 

[partious]

This subject and the inevitable wheeling out of the word "entitlement" always shows how throwaway a lot of gamers consider games when it comes down to it. 

 

As mentioned above, people don't assume that everyone who wants to watch a movie/read a book/listen to a song that came out in the 80s (or any other decade) did so in the 80s etc and anyone who wants to experience it now is clearly suffering from a bad case of entitlement and should enjoy one of the many movies/books/songs we've been blessed with in the past 7 or so years instead. 

 

Game studios are uniquely terrible at keeping old works consistently available and that's understandable enough in some cases, because of the difference in effort required to port a game to a new console vs rereleasing a movie on tape/dvd/blu ray/streaming etc. Less understandable with older formats where rereleasing involves drip feeding roms for an emulator.

 

 What's harder to understand are posts on a gaming forum that treat gaming history as uniquely disposable/worthless. Sure why would anyone care about games you can't buy/play anymore. Many of them are even "obscure" and therefore of even less value. Just get gamepass and be grateful for what you're given. 

[Sketch]

Nicely said @partious

 

I am genuinely astonished and incredulous that on a gaming forum - as opposed to say the comments section in the Daily Mail - that anyone would take the utterly bullshit stance of: piracy is always morally wrong no questions it is bad no matter what you say stop making excuses for the bad morally wrong badness of piracy which is always evil never right.

 

The person who says that is a bootlicker. Just because the government or people wearing powdered wigs say something, does not make it accurate or correct.

 

Or the utter bullshit nonsense phrase of of "check your privilege". You check yours motherfucker.

 

Yet despite this being a gaming forum I have seen multiple such posts. I kinda wish this forum allowed not just blocking other people, but the ability to put an invisible mark on them, so that 6 months down the line I will instantly be able to see: oh yes, this person's views are almost certainly wrong.

 

The answer here is simple:

If a publisher does not make a creation available to buy legally, then they forfeit all global rights to that.

 

They need to be punished so as to force them to look after their legacy. That is all they understand. Money, fines, loss of rights. Companies are not your friend, so stop licking their boots. These people come across as the same sorts of people who get company logos tattooed on them. Keep licking the corporate heel, they will totally reward you in the end.

 

Also someone said this is new territory. It's not really. Stanley Kubrick withdrew A Clockwork Orange after making it, and it wasn't available for like 20 years? My same rule would apply here: if you refuse to make it available, you lose your rights to it. Simple as that.

 

Once you make something creative, and make it available to the public, you do not then have the right to withhold it. Once it's out, it needs to stay out forever. No ifs, ands, or butts. If you have not got the money to maintain the infrastructure, fair enough. Just forsake your rights to it and allow the ecosystem to take over. Or just do not create stuff if you don't want people to experience it. I used to burn singular-existence paintings when I studied art because I loved the shrill cries of people who felt that to obliterate something unique was a crime. It is a crime. Or it should be. We should strive for a world where all is preserved and respected and maintained - resist the inherent entropy of the universe.

[Dudley]

I personally will very happily pirate something that is not available legally in the UK but I'm not particularly interested in justifying that choice to anyone else.

 

Although the argument "If you ever wanted to play them you should have bought the whole shop" seems a dumb one.  There's only 11 UK Master System games I don't have, but according to some I shouldn't be allowed half of them because I didn't buy them until this decade. I should have thought I might want a copy of Aerial Assault in 1992.

[Dig Dug]

I think it’s fair to praise pirates, hackers and collectors for preserving the medium out of their own time, efforts and pockets while also putting the burden of preservation and availability on the publishers and IP owners. 
 

This documentary I recently saw feels relevant to this thread. The Game Preservation Society in Japan are no strangers to the struggles of games preservation. In their case they are having to use engineering to restore and reproduce games which were originally released on cassette tapes.

 

In a way this is no different to what we have now with people creating copies of existing games. With Japan being as strict as it is on piracy however the society does seem to draw a very clear line on the issue. Their restorations are for private and non-profit purposes only. This means that while the games are preserved, their availability doesn’t change. They do not make physical or digital reproductions for the sake of putting these titles in the hands of the mass like many pirates do.

 

I think when it comes to topics like preservation the anger is often an issue of availability rather than preservation. Nintendo for example are criticised for not re-releasing their GameCube library on modern systems. However, as we’ve seen from past leaks, Nintendo perhaps more so than any other publisher in the world display a horders mentality when it comes to backing up and preserving assets, code and software.

 

In terms of preservation I think the medium is in a better place than it ever has been. Never again will we need AI to restore pre-rendered backgrounds and FMV’s for recent titles nor will we have the likes of Sega throwing away Panzer Dragoon Saga source code or Sonic 1 prototypes. I think studios know better now that remastering is a common practice. Could you imagine Final Fantasy IX with the original 4K backgrounds had square not binned them?

 

As consumers our biggest obstacle has always been and will continue to be availability. Things have gotten better but there is still a lot that needs to be done. The benefits of a multi-generational system like the Xbox Series is there for all to see and I think it is a direction we will see the medium move further towards in the future as long as the consumer pushback against discontinuing services continues to persist.

 

 

[Fry Crayola]

1 hour ago, Sketch said:

If a publisher does not make a creation available to buy legally, then they forfeit all global rights to that.

 

No, they don't.

 

You want them to, but that doesn't make it the case, nor mean that it should be the case.

 

I feel people like to use the word "publisher" here because it conjures up the image of the profit-driven corporation only interested in the bottom line, needlessly hoarding property without making it available, without setting it free to serve its purpose. It allows for a neat separation between the people who actually created something, and the people who control it. And morally, I don't have any problem with people pirating work owned by such an entity when the original creators are happy for it to be out there. If Jeff Minter comes out and says he's happy for people to just play TxK, then I say pirate away.

 

But the same rules that apply to the publisher, also apply to the solo artist who retains control, and that's where the blanket statement falls down for me. It creates the absurd situation where someone loses the right to control their work, because they attempted to assert that right. 

 

While it's easy to make an argument for continued distribution of something relatively benign like a video game, most of which have very little to say and very little to show, there is surely a point where the artist has put enough of themselves in a work that to lose control of it becomes personally damaging - the easy example being someone who sells nudes, deciding to no longer do so. 

[Sketch]

12 minutes ago, Fry Crayola said:

that's where the blanket statement falls down for me

 

I think we're in agreement that blanket beliefs are unsuitable for software, and this entire industry needs a more robust and well thought out framework. I put forward a blanket belief because I preferred the above to the current blanket view of: all piracy is bad.

 

Also, I'd like to point out a parallel situation to this. XBLIG. Since Microsoft shut down XBLIG, making the majority of games lost forever, I bought a modded X360 and began collecting lost XBLIG games. Including one excellent and extremely rare Japanese title which the author delisted years ago. Japanese XBLIG games were not properly archived by pirates due to using non-English fonts in the titles.

 

Anyway, @Fry Crayola pointed out that his XBLIG games were available on Itch.io, and as such I did not download the XBLIG edition out of a respect for it being available for sale. I never bought the Itch release either (mainly because I realised I was mainly just playing these XBLIG for the taboo sensation of the fact they were forever "lost"). My support of Jim Sterling's video is not because I want to avoid paying for items - it's because the whole concept, the idea, the thought of something ceasing to exist triggers something in me. I want things available. And if they're not, I want to see them. And if they are available, then as a creator myself I respect a creator's right to make money through sales.

 

As an aside, the Japanese Game Preservation Society is doing God's work, and it's sacrilege that the Japanese legal system is even more archaic than in Europe, hampering their efforts. Madness!

[Camel]

There have also been preservation projects in the West where the results haven't been made widely available. The C64PP project (preservation of original C64 disks by Pete Rittwage) started out that way although I think he released everything when he no longer wanted to work on it.

 

The lengths people go to in order to preserve ancient magnetic media is really 

[matt0]

If you count downloading ROMs for long gone systems or arcade machines then piracy has been a constant part of my gaming life from the start.

 

A stack of tapes of random BBC Micro games that were just always there (...my Dad must have got them off someone at his work?). ST and Amiga era disk trading (checksum errors! corrupted graphics! memory conflict crashes because the pirates' hacks only worked on a specific model of Amiga!). A big shared stack of pirated PS1 games in Uni. Terrible Warez compilations of mid to late 90s / early 00s PC stuff where all the games would be missing the CD audio and FMV sequences. And finally emulation from the late 90s through to the present day.

 

I haven't pirated current gen games since the PS1 generation and I buy a lot of games. I'll buy stuff that's commercially available when I could easily emulate it. I was still buying Wii U virtual console games in 2019. I'm still eyeing up a few titles on there now before the inevitable shutdown. I've bought stuff off GOG that I could play in my browser if I wanted to. "If a games worth playing it's worth buying" is a solid enough adage. None of this is intended as a justification - if I'm being 100% honest I don't really care about piracy - it was a constant when I was younger (apparently still is...?) and I'd be a hypocrite if I got too arsey about it now.

 

It makes more sense to me that it gets factored in as a reality of the industry from the smallest indie to the biggest AAA publisher, then trying to stand against the unstoppable tide of it and anti-piracy measures over the years have got in the way of paying customers more than pirates. 

 

Also it has a positive dimension where older games and preservation are concerned.

[Jerec]

Is there a safe and dummy friendly guide anyone can recommend for this?

 

My kids unearthed my old Vita and would like to have it.

[Fry Crayola]

Dumpster's thread in Retro will see you right:

 

 

[Camel]

5 minutes ago, Jerec said:

Is there a safe and dummy friendly guide anyone can recommend for this?

 

My kids unearthed my old Vita and would like to have it.

 

Surely your kids have already bought all the games before now?

[Sketch]

16 hours ago, Camel said:

Surely your kids have already bought all the games before now?

 

As a responsible parent he should also be regularly checking his kids' privilege.

[Dudley]

23 hours ago, Dig Dug said:

I think it’s fair to praise pirates, hackers and collectors for preserving the medium out of their own time, efforts and pockets while also putting the burden of preservation and availability on the publishers and IP owners. 

 

And actually this is a good point, for part of the next Yesterzine I play "Pepsi Invaders".  That was piracy, I don't own that game, I've never seen a copy of that game.

 

And that's not surprising, there were only ever 125 copies of Pepsi Invaders on the Atari 2600 ever.  They were all given out at one Coca Cola sales conference as a joke by management. I'm 20 of them hit the bin before people even left which would be a mistake since that game now goes for several thousand dollars, if you can even find one, the last copy on ebay was in 2013.

 

If it wasn't for the fact that somehow 1 of those copies survived and eventually found its way to someone who could dump it that we even know it exists much less be able to play it.

 

But that was, absolutely, piracy.

 

And virtually every Amiga/ST game you've ever played on anything other than an Amiga or ST was only possible because of the people who cracked them.

[Alex W.]

On 09/04/2021 at 09:01, Sketch said:

Nicely said @partious

 

I am genuinely astonished and incredulous that on a gaming forum - as opposed to say the comments section in the Daily Mail - that anyone would take the utterly bullshit stance of: piracy is always morally wrong no questions it is bad no matter what you say stop making excuses for the bad morally wrong badness of piracy which is always evil never right.

 

Quote

 

The answer here is simple:

If a publisher does not make a creation available to buy legally, then they forfeit all global rights to that.

 

They need to be punished

I don’t think anything like the former has been said. I did however say that hysterically reductive takes were thought-crushing nonsense, which would explain the absolute galaxy brain take you’ve provided in the latter. No matter your stance on software, we all recognise that this is a moronic take, the sort of thing that someone would make up as a straw-man argument to put in the mouths of people who defend breaching copyright, yes? TxK has been out of print for years now, does Jeff Minter immediately sacrifice all rights to his work?*

 

There are a lot of reasonably intelligent conversations to be had here and if you think you have a “checkmate, atheists” point to make that basically says we shouldn’t have a conversation at all, maybe don’t? Or post it, politely, and respectfully, then move on?

 

Also, because I’ve seen people make very specific arguments about it, it seems like we need to point out that redownloading does not end this year. We don’t know when it will. I’ve softmodded my Vita solely to download my entire collection to an SD card because Sony abruptly cutting it off seems no less implausible than them ending the Vita store in 2021. But if anyone wants to make a ten-paragraph essay with “if my memory card dies my games are gone” as one of the axioms they’re wasting their time.
 

*I am sure that Atari’s current rights holders, having already forced him to stop selling it, would love to be able to spend a pittance on a work-for-hire port to extant systems, package it up and sell it themselves.

 

The answers to these questions are neither “piracy is evil and cannot be permitted” nor “anyone who expresses a negative opinion about copyright violation is a fascist”.

[Alex W.]

17 minutes ago, Dudley said:

 

And actually this is a good point, for part of the next Yesterzine I play "Pepsi Invaders".  That was piracy, I don't own that game, I've never seen a copy of that game.

 

And that's not surprising, there were only ever 125 copies of Pepsi Invaders on the Atari 2600 ever.  They were all given out at one Coca Cola sales conference as a joke by management. I'm 20 of them hit the bin before people even left which would be a mistake since that game now goes for several thousand dollars, if you can even find one, the last copy on ebay was in 2013.

 

If it wasn't for the fact that somehow 1 of those copies survived and eventually found its way to someone who could dump it that we even know it exists much less be able to play it.

 

But that was, absolutely, piracy.

 

And virtually every Amiga/ST game you've ever played on anything other than an Amiga or ST was only possible because of the people who cracked them.

There is something beautiful about violating the copyright on a game that is, itself, a flagrant trademark violation.

[Alex W.]

I’m sorry, this just keeps bouncing around my head. You have a bunch of games that have been withdrawn from sale due to a decision by a third party, Sony. Most of those games are available on other platforms or as physical releases because they were published by wealthy, large-scale operations. 140 of those were only one one old platform because they are small, forgotten titles, or are from boutique publishers, or were self-published, and will be unavailable for purchase anywhere afterwards. And someone is so incensed at the prospect of not being able to buy these games that their solution is that the copyright holder of the game - not Sony who made this decision - should immediately lose all their rights in the product, as a punishment for something they didn’t do, a punishment that hits the wrong target and eliminates any incentive they may have had to bring their game back somewhere else?

 

Could people just stop being extremely stupid about intellectual property? Not saying that anyone is stupid, just that this topic seems to get everyone to immediately reach for their most emotive and least good takes.

[matt0]

I think what we already have is a good solution. If a game isn't available commercially, but it is by other means... You want to play the PSP Armoured Core games or something? Just download them. Sony don't give a shit. FROM almost certainly don't. Nobody (except Nintendo) really cares as long as you're not taking the piss and trying to charge money for access to ROMs or anything gross like that.

 

I'd like a mechanism for stuff to pass in to the public domain or for more publishers to make an effort to make older stuff available, either commercially or for free. And realistically I don't think everything can be preserved and as hardware decays over the years it gets harder and harder to get the exact original experience. 

 

But the current state of things is okay - the majority of games get to live on. The big obstacle to preservation is going to be GaaS, MMOs, and games that are frequently patched. Even then people are working on ways to curate and preserve these experiences too.

[Alex W.]

On the GAAS point, I think subscription services are an opportunity for platform holders to maintain and fund a back catalogue without those games necessarily having to sell in big numbers. With the caveat of course that your access to those games is at the whim of the service provider.

[Unofficial Who]

How many Sony fans will switch because of this?

 

Usually the glib answer is "not many" or "none" but this news has made us hold off on buying a PS5 and will probably be responsible to us moving over to X-Box.

[AlexM]

10 minutes ago, Unofficial Who said:

How many Sony fans will switch because of this?

 

Usually the glib answer is "not many" or "none" but this news has made us hold off on buying a PS5 and will probably be responsible to us moving over to X-Box.

I’m not going to ‘switch’, but as a PS5 digital edition owner this move doesn’t put Sony in the best light.

This isn’t the first bad move Sony have made, there are a number of PS4 games where the online services have been prematurely shut down (Driveclub & Gravity Rush come to mind, two games I’m not finished with), and why? 

 

I’m sure if I purchased an Xbox 360 I could still go online with PGR or Forza, a console from an earlier generation! 
 

“Play has no limits”, really? 

[Dudley]

4 hours ago, Alex W. said:

There is something beautiful about violating the copyright on a game that is, itself, a flagrant trademark violation.

 

Yeah I somehow doubt Pepsi gave permission and it does actually use their logo.

[Alex W.]

3 hours ago, Unofficial Who said:

How many Sony fans will switch because of this?

 

Usually the glib answer is "not many" or "none" but this news has made us hold off on buying a PS5 and will probably be responsible to us moving over to X-Box.

And how many Xbox owners would leave that platform these days?

[Clipper]

6 hours ago, Alex W. said:

 

TxK has been out of print for years now, does Jeff Minter immediately sacrifice all rights to his work?*

 

 

You couldn't have chosen a worse example. If his work is not available for sale Jeff Minter often says he is happy for it to be played/obtained. He says he wants more people to play his games hence the low prices. He hosted roms of his old games for quite a while when they weren't commercially available. In fact he is on record as saying (back in the day) that he wasn't bothered about people copying games only those that profit from it.

 

I would be surprised if he gave two shits about anyone copying and playing TxK now it is no longer available, in fact he would probably support it.

 

He doesn't sacrifice all rights to his work doing this.

 

Similarly I have no moral problem with copying every single game that is unavailable to purchase commercially. If companies want to leave money on the table because it isn't worthwhile them collecting it? Then that is fair game.

The worst thing would be for games to not be available to those who want to play them.

[Alex W.]

10 minutes ago, Clipper said:

He doesn't sacrifice all rights to his work doing this.

That’s exactly what the post I’m quoting said should happen to him for the crime of someone else blocking his game’s sale.

 

If you think that’s a good take you are off your nut.

 

Edit - Like, are there people that think that most  games go off sale because the copyright holder goes “ha ha, we’ll cut off the ability of people to give us money for work we already did years ago, that’ll show them”? 

[Clipper]

7 minutes ago, Alex W. said:

That’s exactly what the post I’m quoting said should happen to him for the crime of someone else blocking his game’s sale.

 

If you think that’s a good take you are off your nut.

He has no rights to TxK as it was tied up by "Atari" so your example is still not that great.  His only rights were to the actual piece of work that he was not actually allowed to sell anymore because the "rights holder" stopped him, taking away his rights to sell his own work! I would say that there is a good fucking case for "atari" to having lost all their rights as they are a zombie company who have about as much to do with creating "tempest" as I do.

Add to that he is probably perfectly happy for it to be pirated so people get to play it!

 

Do you think it is ok to pirate TxK?

[Alex W.]

52 minutes ago, Clipper said:

He has no rights to TxK as it was tied up by "Atari" so your example is still not that great.  His only rights were to the actual piece of work he was not actually allowed to sell anymore because the "rights holder" stopped him. I would say that there is a good fucking case for "atari" to having lost all their rights as they are a zombie company who have about as much to do with creating "tempest" as I do.

 

Do you think it is ok to pirate TxK?

I’m not asking whether it’s OK to pirate TxK, I couldn’t give less of a shit. I’m asking why on Earth Dudley Sketch thinks that when a game stops being available, we should punish (his word) its owners in the harshest ways possible, including losing the rights to the game (his idea).

 

Edit - Just to correct you, Minter is the copyright holder of TxK - that whoever owns the Atari name feels it’s a derivative or infringing work doesn’t eliminate that. Dudley’s mad fantasy would though!