I think overall that piracy is good.
It returns control over media, instead of being bound to specific platforms or stores.
It allows you to test things on your hardware, before committing to a purchase.
It makes it possible to recover old media that you physically lost.
It makes your media portable, able to copy it to a new device or hardware without being locked out.
It makes things sharable, able to give a copy to a friend to have them try it out.
But one thing I find difficult is just the sheer amount of things that exist nowadays.
I don’t know how you guys manage it, but I have more media on just my laptop (external drives and such excluded) than I could really enjoy in my lifetime. How to even make choice of what to watch, play, read, next?
I know, very much a first-world problem. But still, it boggles my mind.
I usually browse sites like MobyGames in search of games made by some of my favorite devs (as in people, not studios or publishers). Keeping track of their work and discovering new talent is what works for me, and I always end up buying whatever I truly wish to keep even if I make a patched backup of the games’ files anyway in case it wasn’t DRM free.
That’s actually a smart way to go about it.
How would you approach this with bigger titles that have hundreds of programmers though?
Do you search for the lead programmer and check what games they worked on?
Hey, thanks! I like reading and listening to interviews and finding out who did what. Sadly attribution is not always honored so it’s not always possible without insider info. Live service games are the hardest to keep track of but luckily I find them the least interesting. Devs I’ve spoken to also tend to mention their live service work as a dark period in their career.
A somewhat similar thing happens with movies and neverending series, but it’s usually easier to find who worked on lighting for a single episode than whoever programmed a funny looking NPC’s AI for a seasonal event.
I can imagine that part about live service. They probably have to spend way too much time on thinking about monetization and subscription and drip feeding content rather than just making things fun.