THE AGE OF GREED (Also known as Return of Piracy)

Today’s punching bag is going to be SONY. It is a little bit out of the blog scope, I admit. After all, the whole purpose of this place is for me to shine a spotlight on some precious indie games. And that is very much the core of the experience. But, if I am to be frank with you, dear reader… It is also a bit of a venting place for me to talk about Gaming as a whole. The Holistic Gamer experience. And if you do not live under a gaming rock, you surely heard that PlayStation is having a bit of a rough time recently.

And for good reasons, too. Corporate greed is the kind of greed they wrote about in the Bible. SONY not happy about having GTA6 exclusive to their console, not satisfied with endless price gouging on the back of Rampocalypse, not even content with having a strong player base counting in many, many millions decided to stop any flimsy pretences that they care about their customers. They postulated that it is time, at last, to abandon physical media and transform PlayStation into a fully digital environment.

Now you might think… well, okay? So what? Most games people buy are digital. Damn, the most beloved platform of all - STEAM - is ALL about having a digital library of games you don’t own, right? It’s all licenses and lawyer linguistics about renting a thing wearing a cloaked guise of proper purchase. So, what if SONY also wants to do that? What’s the big deal?

Well, there’s a couple points one could bring to the table. Let’s start with the most obvious one, which is Trust. STEAM, for all its faults, is a trusted and beloved platform with proven track record. It’s a company that’s privately owned, and so, they are still behest to the customers satisfaction, not the shareholders profit margins. Their Support is legendary to a point it is memetic. I don’t recall last time when STEAM had to apologize for leaking thousands of accounts personal information. And I don’t remember STEAM taking away games or any media from their customers… SONY, on the other hand, is guilty in all those fields. Horrible data breaches. Shoddy support that doesn’t care one bit. Removing hundreds of movies from their users’ libraries on a whim, with no refund of any kind, showing them a middle finger and cackling with glee.

Would you trust SONY in an all-digital future? Yeah, that’s a strong pass from me, bub. And that’s just one point! There’s more! Physical ownership is still a thing, plenty of players buy their disks to have their proud collections. Physical copies also mean having a properly deregulated market - why wait for the grace of PlayStation to offer a discount for a 10-year-old game on their digital storefront, when you can buy the same game in a bargain bin of your local big shop for a few dimes? Or resell your copy once you’re done with it? With a physical disc you still have SOME ownership of the game you bought. And that, of course, is a giant pain in the ass of the Greedy Ghouls at SONY, aching at the very fact that they cannot make you buy games at the rates they control fully and completely. That you still have some freedoms with THEIR games. Disgusting, really!

It is no surprise to me that there’s a lot of permissible atmosphere when it comes to blatantly ripping SONY off. When a new emulator is made, everyone cheers. When AnyPS5 got revealed, nobody really went ‘oh gosh, no, poor multibillion dollars corporation that hates us, who will think of them!?’. When Overdrive storefront allows you to use your jailbroken PS5 as the ultimate piracy machine, giving you free access to every single game on the platform, everybody clapped, nodded and proclaimed it to be good. You might think that it is malicious, malevolent, malignant! How can we be so celebratory of such illicit means that will surely hit the poor hardworking developers in the end!?

After all isn’t it a well-known thing that if you make a good game, your job is well secured, you get a promotion or a raise, a hefty bonus and a clap on the back? Surely any piracy is evil because we are hurting the people working tirelessly on delivering great games! It’s not like AAA would fire hundreds after having a successful launch. Furlough entire company after a smash hit. Cancel and close a studio after its game becomes critically acclaimed and well beloved. Right? Not like Battlefield 6 being the best-selling premium title of 2025 and EA having a round of layoffs after that. Not like SONY killing Bluepoint Games after they remade Demon’s Souls which was PS5 system seller. Bit Reactor released Star Wars Zero Company to great reviews and player reception but had to put most of the stuff on the forced leave of absence for a time. And how about XBOX owned Tango studio delivering Hi-Fi Rush - a hit, beloved by all, that made Xbox Game Pass a hot item - getting instantly shut down afterwards?

And you think Piracy can hurt them? Please. In current landscape of AAA it doesn’t matter one bit if the game is a flop or a huge hit - the people who worked on it will get fired, shoved away and tossed down an active volcano anyway, just so the greasy homunculus at the very top in their shiny suits holding their rotting innards together can shave a few numbers down on the yearly report excel sheet.

I am vehemently in agreement with the ancient statement of Gabe Newell considering piracy. That it is, almost always, a service problem and not a pricing problem. That most people pirate games mainly because piracy offers a better experience, not out of refusal to pay. I believe that, because I experienced it a few times myself in the purest form. I remember firmly when I wanted to play Assassin’s Creed 3. I eagerly bought it from Ubisoft (I was younger back then, more naïve, I would never commit such a crime nowadays) and got hit in the face with atrocity number one - uPlay. This piece of garbage masquerading as a launcher software barely functioned and tossed my way many, MANY obstacles before the game finally installed, got all its ‘patches’ and updates and whatever nonsense uPlay needed to stop throwing tantrum fits. Then I launched the game… and during one of the very first cutscenes the game froze and crashed. Nothing worked to fix it. I contacted Ubisoft so called support and they responded with an equivalent of “Lol. Lmao even!” and told me to wait for a fix. Pretty much the very same day I downloaded a pirated version of the game which worked instantly, omitting uPlay and had the bug patched out already. Imagine that.

I am not surprised Piracy is back. It’s just… better. Skipping the tedious bits, stripping games of bullshit, fixing errors and patching bugs that official releases can’t, for some reason. Bah, I admit I even pirate big games just to try them, because AAA is deadly afraid of giving out demos of their games. I know why, too, in my jaded heart. See, I love that in Indiesphere Demos are back and in force. Most indies I see drop demos because they are passion projects made with heart and soul, and their makers firmly believe in their vision. And so, they WANT people to play them, try them, sample them and hope to get the players hooked. Demo performs that glorious function it was always meant to be - a tantalizing morsel to hook you in.

AAA games can’t offer demos, of course. Obviously because the publishers know that they are offering a lukewarm or downright shoddy experience hiding behind expensive cinematics. A boring grey goo slop. You think WOLVERINE would sell well if it had a demo for people to find out about the Fart Gas and insane degrees of handholding beforehand? I doubt that. And since Big Companies offer no demos, I can make my own… by pirating their games, giving them a try free of charge. And if I decide I actually am having a real good time, I can with great munificence purchase the game to have it.

And what about emulation!? This text is already a bit of rambling, but it does seethe my trousers that SONY so blatantly lied that PS5 cannot be backward compatible because it was just impossible. Now we know it was a stupid lie, or rather a clever and insidious use of the terrifying Lingua Corporate. Impossible merely translates to unprofitable. PS5 could always run old games. We know, because now we have variety of PS1, PS2 and even PS3 emulators running on PS5 with no issues. Just put the old disc in and enjoy. If a bunch of enthusiasts can do it with a bunch of scraps in a cave, surely a megacorporation with endless resources could make that, too. But of course, they didn’t. because then they couldn’t sell you the same games back as shoddy remakes and remasters at premium, using nostalgia as the mine ingredient.

And so, I am not too shaken by the return of Piracy as a whole. We might sit down and talk about the ethics of it all day, but in my eyes it is a reaction. A rebellious act of the population that is getting more and more squeezed by the evil corporations. I remember the cycle too well to pretend this isn’t it. I recall how piracy went hugely down when Netflix first emerged, how nobody needed to torrent media - games included - because they were affordable, high quality and just good. And now that most services get worse and worse every passing month, it is a natural order of things that people, once again, seek better alternative. And Piracy is just sitting there, smoother and easier than ever before.