TL;DR at the bottom.
I started getting into torrents about 2 years ago, at the time I started out with downloading YIFY rips and x265 RARBG encodes. I didn't care about the quality at the time, I was just happy to get movies. But I also wanted stuff like Special Features, and while Tigole and the QxR team occasionally added them for some of their movies, it felt like something was missing.
Eventually I grew dissatisfied with encodes, and wanted to watch movies in the highest quality possible. I would have downloaded BDMVs, but no one seemed to be seeding them, or in the case of less-mainstream/obscure movies, they weren't on public trackers at all. (I tried downloading REMUXes from FGT, but they always replaced the PGS subtitles with UTF text subtitles, which I didn't appreciate.) So in early 2022 I bought myself a Blu-ray optical drive, set up MakeMKV, and bought the Blu-ray of the movie I wanted to rip. After that, I bought some more BDs to rip, and I started making my own REMUXes. Some time after that, I flashed my drive with the LibreDrive firmware so I could rip my 4K UHD discs too.
So anyway, my point is that the arguments that piracy is "bad for business" and causes companies to "lose money" are full of hot air. If anything, piracy is good for them and increases sales. There have been numerous occasions where I have wanted to download a REMUX and there were no seeders, and decided it would be easier for me to buy the disc and rip it myself.
So, the main takeaways are:
- Piracy isn't nearly as bad as the authorities say it is, and may actually increase sales.
- Create good-quality encodes.
- Seed all your torrents.
TL;DR: Started buying and ripping my own Blu-rays due to dissatisfaction with low-quality encodes and lack of seeders.
Same idea with video games. There are many game franchises that I never would have gotten into as a kid if I hadn't been able to pirate them. I usually still pirate games to try them out, and if I end up enjoying it or want features like online play, I might buy it during a Steam sale.
me too, but usually only with indie games, because triple a studios can go fuck themselves. but like Stardew valley costs $6, imma buy it
Command & Conquer was like that for me. I pirated Red Alert 2, but ended up buying it like six times via various collections. None of that would have happened had I not had that first pirated copy.
Yeah I used to game on console but I got a steam deck thinking I would pirate shit. Then steam sales hit me like a fucking truck.
Anymore it's a roll of the dice whether the game is functional to a point where you would enjoy it. Most publishers don't seem to bother with demos anymore (probably because their games are half broken) so we are largely left to create our own demos.