Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

This is only half the argument we need to be making though, because if the disk is just a DRM unlocker then we still don't have real ownership and all these problems still exist.

At some point having a hard drive will become illegal.

Honestly if you don't see the inherent problem with:

I can pay money for a thing ->

Thing can suddenly vanish from existence ->

This is not theft, You are due no recompence ->

This is totally fine, actually.

... Just straight up, you have a mental disability if you think this is fine. You are cognitively impaired, you should not be trusted with any kind of decision making.

You're just telling everyone you are a-ok with being robbed, in some certain set of conditions... any exploitative person or entity that has any experience exploiting people knows that you just have to construct a narrative/experience where the conditions of being robbed that you will accept, slowly expand and grow over time.

You are telling the world you are easy to scam and trick. And in a world where you need money to continue existing, in the vast majority of cases... this is functionally suicidality or at least self-harm/self-destructive behavior.

This is a subsection of the Great Filter. If you can't pass this test, sorry, you're fucked, you are too stupid to persist much longer in your environment.

This is such a logically dubious position to attempt to maintain and argue for that I very truly cannot see another explanation for it other than... the person that holds that position genuienly is cognitively diminished.

If buying isnt owning, then piracy isnt theft

Like most people who aren't up in arms about this TechnicallyTee hasn't actually given it a seconds worth of thought. "Well I don't play games on disc" it's such a surface level retort. If you're not going to spend 10 seconds actually thinking about it, why have you bothered to make a comment?

there are so many amazing free pc games with no microtransactions, how are physical releases someones only way to play games?

Ownership is a lie we tell ourselves to cope with a world that is perpetually impermanent.

Somebody needs to invent a way to rip your entire library on steam to portable installation cartridges so you just plun-n-play them

The crazy thing is, there's no actual reason we can't own digital copies of the media. We could easily own the rights to a digital copy, the game and movie industry has just unanimously decided that they won't allow that.

trevor noah???

I remember handing a younger sibling my copy of Dragon Quest 9 when I was about 12-14, it was maybe the earliest memory of me truly understanding the joy of giving someone something I felt was special. I wanted them to get a bit of the magic I got from the adventures that game took me on. I would be so overjoyed when they would update me on their play through, remembering parts that stuck out to me, hearing parts they loved that I had forgotten about. Sure you can absolutely still experience that joy of giving a gift, my friend group buys steam games for each other all the time. But that was my 1 copy of the game (at the time), I remember them hesitating cause they knew how much I loved it. And I think that made the game mean more to them.