I Learned to Play Games on Pirated Discs
Then I Spent Years Lecturing People About Piracy
I used to be embarrassingly loud about this. If you wanted the game, you bought the game. If you could not afford it, you waited for a sale like everyone else, or if you hated the company, don’t play the game at all. I said it from an ivory tower, in a tone that left no room for the person on the other side.
I learned to play games on pirated discs from a street vendor in Indonesia, before I could afford my first-ever legit copy, GTA IV, bought with my allowance.
The part that should have bothered me sooner
I used the cheap way in, and then told everyone else not to. For a while, I did not notice my privilege because the position felt principled from the inside. Principles are easy to hold when they cost you nothing.
So what actually changed me was not a moral argument.
Prices are global, incomes are not
Would you be surprised if what changed my views were numbers? Well, I thought the price of a game was a number. Not entirely wrong, but more accurately, it is a ratio, and the denominator is different in every country.
A team of researchers spent three years on this across six countries, and their report puts it plainly:
“High prices for media goods, low incomes, and cheap digital technologies are the main ingredients of global media piracy. If piracy is ubiquitous in most parts of the world, it is because these conditions are ubiquitous.”
That is from Media Piracy in Emerging Economies, edited by Joe Karaganis.
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Yes, regional pricing exists now. Storefronts here charge less than they do in the United States, and that is a real improvement that did not exist when I was a kid buying discs on the street. It may seem like prices get rebalanced in every country, but the wages did not.
What I thought the argument was
I thought the argument was about honesty. Some people pay and some people take.
Unfortunately, my moral story was a description of my bank balance. I was not more honest than the kid buying a disc for pocket change. I was later, and richer, and in a market that had started to price for me.
What I am not saying
I am not saying piracy is fine. I do not support it, I still buy my games, and I have no interest in being the person who explains where to get things. There are people who make that their whole identity online and I do not amplify them.
The report convinced me about pricing. It does not prove that piracy costs nobody a sale. It makes no estimate of piracy rates and takes no position on that question either way. Nobody has measured it well, in either direction. Anyone who tells you the number is quoting someone who made it up.
What actually changed
Two things:
I stopped sneering at people who cannot afford what I can afford. That is it. That is the whole shift. I did not discover a new principle, just put the cheap one in the closet.
I also stopped treating the subject as a character test, because the one thing the research does show is that enforcement is not what lowers prices. The only thing that reliably does is companies deciding to compete for customers who were never going to pay the old number.
If you are the version of me from a few years ago, typing “just buy it” at a stranger, I am not going to tell you that you are a bad person. I am going to tell you what I wish someone had told me. You are not making an argument. You are describing your own circumstances and mistaking them for a standard.
This is the kind of thing I now write at Beyond Default, my Substack. If you want the more personal stories instead, those live on my blog.
