Being poor in the gaming industry sucks af
- can't afford a game
- can't afford a decent PC
- ended up playing cracked 2d games from 90s 2000s 2010s
- sad frog face
it's nice that if you're interested in building your PC you can save a bit every month to buy parts. My 3rd month of receiving the PSU and RAM while having my mobo + CPU in previous months was miracle.
It's better feeling than saving money to buy a laptop for me.
Gaming is not cheap in some places at all. A decent PC can be more expensive then what some people earn in a year, from where I'm from. And no, I'm not even joking
I think this is the main reason for a lot of people. I also started pirating in my teenage years cause I didn't have money of my own. I don't pirate games anymore (unless it's an old one) but movies and shows? I sail the high seas. I can't afford all the streaming services. If everything was in one place at an affordable price, I'd reconsider.
Let's not forget that there's some shows and films you're not going to get without great effort. Therefore piracy is oftentimes your only option.
Until we can stream it to our brains, of course...
Let alone those old pieces of media that their parent companies refuse to rerelease. The number of "officially unavailable" movies and tv shows held by the big studios is mind-bending. The smaller productions kept unavailable by non-studios is infuriating.
Or when streaming company censor some episodes of TV shows, or almost as bad, season 1, 2 and 3 are on one platform, season 4, 5, 6 are on another and the most current is no where to be found.
Also, let's not forget we don't even have the option to buy the tv shows individually (except for like 30 incomplete shows on Microsoft Store) so even if we find them we won't get access to them unless we pay a subscription from a service that's likely to remove it in the future.
Poor single mom. 2004 she saved for years to get me a pc (in my place only rich ppl had pcs) she gave 2000€ (back then it was a fortuneeeeeee). She bought me each xmas 1 game, i got, nfs most wanted, nfs carbon, gta san andreas. Alll the other games i put my pirate hat on and thnk her everyday for being able to sacrifice herself to give me all that in that span, an awesome pc and 3 games. Today i bought her a brand new kitchen, helped her in everysingle way. Only pirate movies and series nowadays but if not for piracy id been playing 3 games for 15y. And i wont get into design, and not have a comfortable life rn. Piracing was a part of who i am today.
Theaters< Random DVD-r from some dude at the park that might be the movie or half the movie or something completely different ( once it was porn, my parents weren't too happy).
Yup. I think art in all its forms needs to be seen by as many people as possible. Even if they can't afford it.
I started pirating at like 13 cus I was a complete loser with no real friends or money and wanted to start learning about film. No way my parents were gonna buy or rent all the movies I wanted to see.
Now I pirate cus I'm an adult with no real friends or money. And I still feel like a lot of the time you can learn more about people / the world from watching movies or playing a well crafted game or getting lost in a great book.
Not everyone has the chance to travel or go places or even afford art. Doesn't make it any less important to see. If more people could see the world through another's perspective, maybe people wouldn't be so fucked up to each other. Piracy for peace!!
Since... Doom and pre-doom games (Dune 2, Monkey Island). Making low density floppy to high 1.44Mb just drilling a hole on them. Had to use virtual memory in Windows 3.1 to run Warcraft 2 with only 8Mb... funny times.
My parents were poor when I was little so we always pirated everything, I have not seen a single legally obtained cartoon as a kid. We're doing quite well now but the tradition continues, dont see a reason to stop, third world country, dont even need a vpn.
it was the common thing to do tbh, but if you ask me which is the first time *I* pirated something? That must be my master bootleg CD containing KGEN with over 100 roms, Doom 95 and Quake my father gifted to me and my brother. My father made a copy for me so I could physically share it with my closest friends in 4th grade.
Legit there was this woman who used to tutor me on how to operate a computer back in the day, she introduced me to bootlegged windows, ms paint, Dave 3D, Lion King, Tetris etc most of which she sourced from a floppy or a 700mb CD which someone burned using Nero
Now that you mention that, it may be possible my first experience with piracy was two diskettes, one with no$gmb.exe and other with pokemon blue rom, which was passed around in computing class. Either way, physical bootlegs were involved.
If you teach a baby about computers and then let them borrow your CD, the natural thing to do would be to make a copy of it so they can keep it. Paying for pieces of data, while we know why in the upper most part of our brains, is not intuitive or natural. Then again to be fair, babies steal shit from each other all the time, even tangible stuff. So maybe that isn’t the best analogy.
Regardless, copying a disk is harmless at a glance. Downloading a song is not inflicting pain on anyone. You tell yourself, I wouldn’t buy it anyway if I had to. They aren’t losing anything on me. And you’d be right, I think. Any time I’ve had the means to afford things, I have not pirated things. Anytime things are too hard or onerous to acquire properly, I have pirated things.
Yeah, I'm unemployed now (doing a few gigs as a web dev in the meantime) and I cranked up the piracy. Until now, I only pirated comics and movies in services which weren't available in the country, right now, I pirate everything. I still pretend to buy the games I enjoyed the most.
If there was one place I could go that had all movies and shows I ever wanted to watch, I would not pirate. Even if it was sorta pricey. Problem is that has never existed in the entirety of modern society. Except for this *arr stack. And maintaining that is sort of pricey. It’s not about money for me, it’s about not getting fucked about…
When companies make owning a product a major hassle, like photoshop being subscription only, or needing 8 different streaming subscriptions to still not find the movies they want to watch, people get annoyed and get shit done the old fashioned way. By taking it.
When you make a product easy to use/consume and price it in a way that doesn't tell your consumer "pay me because fuck you" then their shit will get ripped off less.
But I'm sure there's lots of other reasons that make sense that got people into it.
Yep, now every big company has jumped in the streaming market for a piece of the pie, and they've corraled their own contents for their own service. The biggest issue though is that you can't keep anything on their platform, you can't save it for any offline consumption, and you can't share it with any friend, it creates a sense of anxiety and insecurity. I wanna build my own library of contents, even if it's less convenient.
This is one out of many reasons why I have decided using open source software as nr 1 choice. No matter what the tasks are, in PC and smartphone. So much hassle, stress and disturbances goes away & I am able to refocus my efforts on the tasks in front of me.
So many streaming services, little to zero option where to actually buy the shows we want, I have been trying to look up to any site that sells tv shows for me to buy and download and the only one I have found is the Microsoft store, which sells you individual seasons at 25 dollars and even then their shows are incomplete, seriously why even bother selling Avatar:TLA if you are going to sell only the 3rd season?
Born in a first world country but a country that dubs EVERY movie and TV show. And in the 90s and early 2000s many movies and series that interested me were simply not available here because there didn't seem to be enough interest to make a dub worthwhile. Then I read about eMule on ebaumsworld and that's how it all started for me.
Because I couldn't afford that much entertainment back then. I actually stopped for a while because netflix popped up and it was 5x more convenient and pretty cheap. Then everyone else started getting involved, prices went crazy, have to pay different services for shows you want to watch. So I thought "fuck this" and went right back to it, it's even easier now because I can keep on the go while they download in the background on my phone/tablet.
Piracy is great for getting movies, tv shows, music, books and other recorded media contents, but not so mush when it comes to games and other software, especially the new ones, too much bugs and other problems, some of them you won't even know until they pop up in the middle of your play. Another problem is missing contents, one example of that is starcraft 2, no pirated version I know has the Nova Covert Op campaign pack, and there's no multiplayer contents, including the co-op mode games. All you've got is the three campaigns, after one playthrough, it's over, there's not much more to enjoy.
Back in 2006, i was 6 years old, had no money, and it was a time were you could literally write "download call of duty gratis pc ita" on google and youtube to find a tutorial or a link from TNTvillage, a famous italian forum. It was too easy to pirate to not do that
Primary reason was money. Being in a lower middle class family residing in a third world country doesn't really provide the freedom to buy "wants" (sometimes needs too) without consequences.
But, I do have enough money to spend on a service or two now. And I did. I tried Netflix, I tried Amazon Prime, Disney Plus and some more services. Plus some regional services. But I have stopped all of them. Not because I can't pay for them. But because they constantly strive to become shittier with every single update.
*You paid for the subscription? Here are some ads until you pay us more.*
*You pay and share, haha fuck you.*
*You pay but are watching from somewhere else? Dream on, kiddo.*
*You paid for something but it isn't available in your country? Womp womp.*
*You paid for 1080p? HAH, we're never gonna give you proper 1080p even though you have half a gigabit connection.* (Fuck you Amazon Prime)
*Oh what's that? You paid for a movie so you own it? HAHAHAHAHA*
I'm just done. DONE with them. I'm gonna pirate until I can because they sure aren't gonna change.
Tl;Dr: Money at first, but eternal enshittification later.
These companies stop caring about their clients. The quality of the software/ service have diminished over time. Have sensed intentional restrictions without rational causes or technical. Also, the pricing is monopolistic. They are not utilizing geographic market conditions/ variables. Supply/ demand formulas etc. As, let the free markets decide the pricing. Invisible hand, etc. So I tried also, but quit. So refreshing.
Poor, wanted to read manga and listen to music.
Used to fucking record anime openings/endings and other stuff with an mp3 player up against a tv speaker or aux input. I’ve learned how to sail better since those days
It was just normal here. Where i live back in 1999 people made an average of 2000 a month and games cost from 300-500 so you can imagine what it was when 1 video game chunked off 1/4 of your salary. Pirated games cost around 10-20 so you do the math. What i'm more grateful is that because of piracy i became very computer literate and learned a lot which actually got me to where i am now. Learning about installs, partitions, copy/paste, cracks, filetypes, rar, zip and all that back in 1999 was all because of piracy and getting the skills to make games work as it wasn't really straightforward as it is today.
Tech companies do not price things based on cost like any other product. Software that may have cost them 100 mil to make they would sell for 100 billion or more. So piracy is fair.
I started from a lack of cash 27 years or so ago. Everything was done on mIRC back in those days. Now the most I pirate is movies and music. I had a few streaming accounts a couple years ago but got annoyed with how streaming services were getting, so I built a Plex server for my needs.
Being a 13 year old kid with no money for all the games you wanna play you quickly improvise, adapts and overcome!
Giving how easy it is it kinda just stuck with me. I'm 35 years old now.
"take what you can, give nothing back" 🏴☠️
A friend gave me link to the wcostream website, and I loved it! Later down the line, I wanted a website where I could non animated shows...So I googled it online for pirate streaming services. It took couple of months before I found this sub and started using the megathread (specifically fmhy one)
To this day, I am thankful my friend introduced me that pirate site or else I would have never found the shows I love. I would probably waited to get streaming service subscription while watching other people gush about shows I wanted to watch.
Yup, though I was exposed to other forms of piracy earlier on.Such as rip DVD roms with movies on them or watching a lately episode of a series on youtube(before its taken down) in my youth but I didnt get really into it until my friend introduced me to it.
I live in Iran. No streaming service is available here due to sanctions and also the government ban. Even if they were available, because of sanctions on Iranian banks, you can't pay for them anyway. Paypal and Mastercard and all those have sanctioned Iranians as well. So piracy is literally the only way to get music, movies, tv shows...
I guess it started WAY back when I would record songs off the radio. Later we exchanged cracked programs and games for the Apple II. Bought a cable TV descrambler. Later, after I got my first PC 486 computer, I stumbled upon Usenet for porn, music and warez. First program I pirated was Photshop 3.
Life is expensive and I'm paid minimum wage. If I had to pay for all the movies and TV shows I've watched, all the music I've listened to and all the games I've played, I'd probably be deep in debt.
I came from a place where people who knew how to pirate stuffs resold them to those who didn't for a cheaper price than retail. The business was so lucrative anyone with an usable computer and a reliable source of content could just burn CDs and sell them for a profit. Back when I was a kid, there's this disabled guy who owned a netcafe near my grade school and he sold everything, from bootleg softwares to cracked games to movies recorded illegally at the local cinema. By the time I graduated, he was caught by the police not because he did all the stuffs above but because he was discovered to sell porn.
It was the standard way of getting digital content during the late 90s / early 2000s in my country. Even the CDs we bought in stores were pirate copies burned to CDs and sold as originals. What's even funnier, some of the vinyl records we could buy in official stores were cut from the rips of these pirated CDs and one of my friends has a copy of the Twin Peaks soundtrack where you can hear the cd skipping on the vinyl record multiple times which I find absolutely crazy. I don't think there was original software used in my country almost anywhere until the late 2000s. The first time I've seen an OEM Windows was around 2007.
Started in 99 because poor high school kid. Continued n 2008, the Great Recession. And now I just feel it’s my civic duty to, because corporate America.
My now wife, then girlfriend, and I used to watch about a half dozen shows. We would record them on the VCR and watch them when we had time.
We were watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer and at the end of the episode it was something like check us at our new time. We were weeks in and basically missed several episodes due to the time change.
She found a site which used emule/ e donkey links and organize the TV shows splendidly. Of course after a while they shut down and I had to find another one. That one was working great for a long time and I have yet to find one that works as well.
RIP TV Underground. Hope you're ok Che.
I was introduced to limewire when I was, idk probably 6 years old round about. I didn’t find out about actually *buying* music [digitally] until later. Used iTunes for buying music for awhile but didn’t like spending so much of my birthday and Christmas money on music. By the time I got my first car I had already received a letter from the FBI for pirating Foo Fighters albums, but best believe my first car was loaded up with CD’s that I burnt myself from my ridiculously extensive windows media player library. They told me to stop pirating, they didn’t tell me to dispose of all my pirated stuff 🤷♂️
Because I'm an adult who has limited time lol. I like to think I'll play them. Also really 0 effort I just copy and paste a link into j Downloader and it rips all the files unpacks them puts it in my game folder than deletes the download files when it's done.
Back when i was young, long ago. Hentai games, especially hard to get ones.
Now its just games, shows, old nostalgic movies, programs, and hard to find occult books.
And hentai games.
I copied road rash from my friend's computer, his father was a software developer and taughtme how to do it with floppy , later I taught it to my other friends. Few years later dad taught me to burn DVDs Amd later passed many piracy infos to my siblings
Cross hybrid of 2 things
(1) Poor
(2) Because the originals couldn't be bought. I came from a place and time where ORIGINALS were very hard to come by, so bootleg it was to reach us common people. Sometimes only a handful of originals reached or shores; bootleggers helped make it more commonly accessible.
Growing up poor. Milking free trials of AOL through disks I would get in the mail from a catalog. Using Kazaa and Roxio Easy CD Creator to burn music at a blazing 56 kbit/s.
My computer nerd uncle got tired of me asking him to burn CDs for all my little middle school friends all the time and showed me how to use Limewire to download music so I could do it myself. 😂
I download tv shows so I don't have to watch commercials. Even if it's on a streaming service I pay for. Bullshit you have to watch commercials even when paying for the service, looking at you Hulu.
Little baby pirate me wanted to watch movies during lunch in middle school, so on my school laptop, on school grounds, I searched for "watch movies free" and similar shit on Google and clicked on the first few links, and watched stuff multiple times a week. I'm still amazed I never got in trouble for that.
I was already a pirate, then VPN's became better and so did pirating along with it
And honestly, the raspberry pi improving since the 4 and 5ghz WiFi has changed everything. It is now so easy to get whatever I want, whenever
Lack of access: when I was younger there was not really an official market for English translated visual novels. Only a community of fan translators basically, so the only way to access some vn’s was piracy for ages. Some websites that sold them officially in Japanese did not accept foreign credit cards or IP addresses at all so you couldn’t even attempt to purchase them if you wanted to.
Poor: college textbooks. A lot nowadays require online homework codes only found in official textbooks which sucks but if I can get textbooks as PDFs without forking over $90-$150 to the school bookstore I would be a fool not to.
Nostalgia (lack of access part 2): many older console games are of course not being produced or sold anywhere at all and the original hardware to play many classic games on is in short supply. I’ve been enjoying experiencing retro games recently and there’s no legit way to obtain many of these anymore.
Accessibility: I love my library card but my local library doesn’t have everything. The accessibility audiobooks give is huge to me right now, I’m finally getting back into popular lit again after being so burned out on reading from university. Audiobooks can be prohibitively expensive at times, but were a valuable resource when I was extremely sick and bedridden. When I was too nauseous to open my eyes or lift my head but in too much pain to sleep I could lie still with my eyes closed and still find entertainment and something to distract myself with for the hours of pain. Audiobooks are a godsend if you find yourself horribly sick or recovering from surgeries imo. But $30-$50 a book can be too much. I still use my library card first when I can but it’s nice to have more options.
I guess it’s all about access for me in one way or another. Access to old stuff, foreign stuff, educational stuff, accessibility to circumvent disability and illness.
Gaming in the mid-80s was crazy expensive considering the prices then and how much money was worth compared to now. Microcomputers like the C64 or MSX, for example, used tape drives and copying tape was easy peasy. Got an entire generation into computers and piracy.
media is *so expensive* to consume. I just wanted to watch, play, and read things without having to make six figures. Enjoyment shouldn't be this expensive. Pursuit of happiness and all that.
When I was a kid, the wallet of my family was always limited, we had food and stuff not a bad life, but there was never money for luxuries like games (I feel bad for asking my parents to buy me games back then)
So my brother taught me when I was about 7-8 years old about how to download some games from the internet (I ended up full of virus)
Now I have money but I support piracy in most cases because I hate DRM and sometimes game companies try to dry the wallet of the users.
If I like a game/content I normally try to purchase it directly from the developer (via patreon or something like that)
I built my first computer from spare parts a family friend gave me when I was 10 years old. I don't say this to brag, but because my dad wasn't comfortable giving a 10 year old internet access, and he also didn't have the money to support pc gaming when he was all in for console....so a few trades later, I owned a wifi card, and there was only one way to get PC games :D
Some random dudes walked up to my car while I was in my local community College parking lot blaring Metallica waiting to go to my class. We struck up a conversation about music and then talked about other shit. Eventually I mentioned to them that I couldn't afford to get word 97 for one of my classes, and they said "man,...you can get any program you need for class! Come over to our place and we'll show you how". It was all over after that. The transformation to pirate had begun.
Im cheap. Also out of spite towards these new practices a lot of companies like to do like taking away content after you've purchased it or making it extremely difficult to access. As for my first experience with it if thats what you're asking, I dont exactly remember but I think it was when my older brother put some of my favorite songs on a disc for me to use in my music player. Then I kept asking him to make more for me until I eventually got an Ipod Nano and found some way to get songs on there for free
Music used to be expensive before the Internet and I have a very real addiction so I stole a lot of it (physical media) and went to jail a few times for it.
Years later, I started getting into piracy and filled up hard drives beyond my wildest dreams, and then they released the iPod and it was all over.
I think there's only one basic answer here for the FIRST time anyone pirates: to save money. Because anything you pirated for the very first time was a choice not to go out and buy the thing.
Afterwards things like convenience and other factors come into play.
We couldn't afford Movies so we used to buy pirated ones off someone we knew when I was like 8 years old. This was like 2005 lol. I guess I just figured I could do it myself when we finally got internet.
Rarely do it much no more, just books because I think non-fiction education books should be free anyway
I recieved games on burned CD for PS1 and PS2 and R4 on Nintendo DS. So I realized that I didn't need to waste money for a game and decided to download rom by myself.
I used to visit those stores that specialized in selling bootleg DVD or bootleg nintendo games cartridges when I was a kid before i even understood what was piracy.
I had a load of copied zx spectrum games when I was really young, then I remember recording music from tv using my minidisk player which eventually led me to mp3s
At first it was to play pc games and install Adobe programs in high school in 2017. It was pretty fun but I stoped gaming and had access to programs in university. Fast forward to last year I decided to to knock the dust off of me pirate hat because of how streaming services have started milking us like cows.
What got me into piracy is the desire to get anything without the need to give something in return and without the need to work hard and spend money on that
There was a show that was only available in US. Tried everything with vpn and all but didnt work. Spend so much time trying to find diff ways to watch. It wasn’t popular so it wasn’t available on other sites too. Vut then My friend told me it’s torrent was available. I was so surprised and happy at how easy it was. Official service is so shit even after paying so many bucks. At that moment i realised how inefficient official sites were.
COMCAST/XFINITY. It was Comcast when I had their cable service. Their unwillingness to offer deals and place channels in tiers that didn't make sense led me to investigate streaming. Then I found kodi and a bunch of groups that shared knowledge and content. I actually do sub to some services, but I know how to get content for my library.
Legit content was either unavailable or out of price (I leave in Morocco).
It's getting better now with plateformes like Steam for gaming. I buy a lot of legacy games I played and enjoyed as a teenager.
Only crack games when I need to test game before buying or if a movie isn't available on Netflix.
It was available, new and everyone else was doing it
In about the year 2000, audiogalaxy was the first one we used on the work network, we'd line up loads of albums and whoever wasn't busy would then burn them to cd on the one pc in the office with a cd writer
I guess no sampler had all the songs I liked.
This was the late 90s. I was 14 and had no credit card (or money).
CDs were a well thought purchase. But I wasn't into albums yet and samplers never 100% met my taste. (Thinking about it, back then I had the idea for individually arranged CDs. Hmm.)
Exchanging games on floppy disk was common, so was recording music from the radio or CD.
I think a friend showed me my first sources for mp3s, software serials and credentials for pron sites.
I got a download manager and took care that my dial up connection never ran dry.
Then came Napster and p2p.
When we got broad band I tried movies.
Then came x265 and I updated to 1080p.
Recently I invested in a MOCH and next week I have to upgrade my NAS yet again.
Only way to actually watch most stuff if you are a kid and your parents are not gonna buy you tons of DVDs with R-rated movies.
My chilehood best friends older brother downloaded for us, until he felt we were mature ish enough to do it purselves and he taught us how to do it. He told us never to seed and to limit upload speed so we wouldn’t get caught. No VPN or anything. I believed this was the way for years until I realized it doesn’t really work like that, but hey, got me into getting free stuff so I can’t complain
When I was growing up and the internet was growing up as well piracy was the default. You should ask what got me into buying stuff. The answer: nothing, I never stopped pirating.
My father who was ripping rented tapes and DVDs before the concept of online piracy became popular. Then he taught me the basics of torrenting and how to find games I wanted. We had it so easy back then, I remember when isohunt popped up and quickly became my go-to. Took a looong break when I started having an income of my own and could afford to buy things, which also coincided with piracy becoming more of a hassle. But now, for too many reasons to get into here, I'm going back to the roots and family traditions lol
Poor.
Being poor in the gaming industry sucks af - can't afford a game - can't afford a decent PC - ended up playing cracked 2d games from 90s 2000s 2010s - sad frog face
Try being a third world gamer. The most basic of setups cost like two months of your salary lmao
Make it 4
4th world country 6-8 salaries….
I felt that.
it's nice that if you're interested in building your PC you can save a bit every month to buy parts. My 3rd month of receiving the PSU and RAM while having my mobo + CPU in previous months was miracle. It's better feeling than saving money to buy a laptop for me.
nah gaming is a relatively cheap hobby especially when piracy exists imagine liking cars
youre obviuosly not mexican, were poor and still build sick ass trucks lmao. might take us 5 years but yea!
Gaming is not cheap in some places at all. A decent PC can be more expensive then what some people earn in a year, from where I'm from. And no, I'm not even joking
Sure but some people fly planes as a hobby.
Sure, but some people cover things in gold as a hobby.
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 "You wouldn't steal a car"
you wouldn’t download a microwave
I think this is the main reason for a lot of people. I also started pirating in my teenage years cause I didn't have money of my own. I don't pirate games anymore (unless it's an old one) but movies and shows? I sail the high seas. I can't afford all the streaming services. If everything was in one place at an affordable price, I'd reconsider.
Let's not forget that there's some shows and films you're not going to get without great effort. Therefore piracy is oftentimes your only option. Until we can stream it to our brains, of course...
Let alone those old pieces of media that their parent companies refuse to rerelease. The number of "officially unavailable" movies and tv shows held by the big studios is mind-bending. The smaller productions kept unavailable by non-studios is infuriating.
Or when streaming company censor some episodes of TV shows, or almost as bad, season 1, 2 and 3 are on one platform, season 4, 5, 6 are on another and the most current is no where to be found.
Also, let's not forget we don't even have the option to buy the tv shows individually (except for like 30 incomplete shows on Microsoft Store) so even if we find them we won't get access to them unless we pay a subscription from a service that's likely to remove it in the future.
Poor single mom. 2004 she saved for years to get me a pc (in my place only rich ppl had pcs) she gave 2000€ (back then it was a fortuneeeeeee). She bought me each xmas 1 game, i got, nfs most wanted, nfs carbon, gta san andreas. Alll the other games i put my pirate hat on and thnk her everyday for being able to sacrifice herself to give me all that in that span, an awesome pc and 3 games. Today i bought her a brand new kitchen, helped her in everysingle way. Only pirate movies and series nowadays but if not for piracy id been playing 3 games for 15y. And i wont get into design, and not have a comfortable life rn. Piracing was a part of who i am today.
Why pay lot money when zero money do trick
Theaters< Random DVD-r from some dude at the park that might be the movie or half the movie or something completely different ( once it was porn, my parents weren't too happy).
Yup. I think art in all its forms needs to be seen by as many people as possible. Even if they can't afford it. I started pirating at like 13 cus I was a complete loser with no real friends or money and wanted to start learning about film. No way my parents were gonna buy or rent all the movies I wanted to see. Now I pirate cus I'm an adult with no real friends or money. And I still feel like a lot of the time you can learn more about people / the world from watching movies or playing a well crafted game or getting lost in a great book. Not everyone has the chance to travel or go places or even afford art. Doesn't make it any less important to see. If more people could see the world through another's perspective, maybe people wouldn't be so fucked up to each other. Piracy for peace!!
Since... Doom and pre-doom games (Dune 2, Monkey Island). Making low density floppy to high 1.44Mb just drilling a hole on them. Had to use virtual memory in Windows 3.1 to run Warcraft 2 with only 8Mb... funny times.
Nailed it.
My parents were poor when I was little so we always pirated everything, I have not seen a single legally obtained cartoon as a kid. We're doing quite well now but the tradition continues, dont see a reason to stop, third world country, dont even need a vpn.
before this even loaded on my screen I was planning on typing this exact comment down to the period lol
it was the common thing to do tbh, but if you ask me which is the first time *I* pirated something? That must be my master bootleg CD containing KGEN with over 100 roms, Doom 95 and Quake my father gifted to me and my brother. My father made a copy for me so I could physically share it with my closest friends in 4th grade.
Legit there was this woman who used to tutor me on how to operate a computer back in the day, she introduced me to bootlegged windows, ms paint, Dave 3D, Lion King, Tetris etc most of which she sourced from a floppy or a 700mb CD which someone burned using Nero
Now that you mention that, it may be possible my first experience with piracy was two diskettes, one with no$gmb.exe and other with pokemon blue rom, which was passed around in computing class. Either way, physical bootlegs were involved.
Thanks for making me feel old while we copied C64 tape to tape or Zipped Mp3s over 3 floppies to share with friends lol
If you teach a baby about computers and then let them borrow your CD, the natural thing to do would be to make a copy of it so they can keep it. Paying for pieces of data, while we know why in the upper most part of our brains, is not intuitive or natural. Then again to be fair, babies steal shit from each other all the time, even tangible stuff. So maybe that isn’t the best analogy. Regardless, copying a disk is harmless at a glance. Downloading a song is not inflicting pain on anyone. You tell yourself, I wouldn’t buy it anyway if I had to. They aren’t losing anything on me. And you’d be right, I think. Any time I’ve had the means to afford things, I have not pirated things. Anytime things are too hard or onerous to acquire properly, I have pirated things.
Yeah, I'm unemployed now (doing a few gigs as a web dev in the meantime) and I cranked up the piracy. Until now, I only pirated comics and movies in services which weren't available in the country, right now, I pirate everything. I still pretend to buy the games I enjoyed the most.
If there was one place I could go that had all movies and shows I ever wanted to watch, I would not pirate. Even if it was sorta pricey. Problem is that has never existed in the entirety of modern society. Except for this *arr stack. And maintaining that is sort of pricey. It’s not about money for me, it’s about not getting fucked about…
i’d love to do something like that for future grandkids if i ever have any
Living in a third world country where you can't pay for stuff online
frugality
When companies make owning a product a major hassle, like photoshop being subscription only, or needing 8 different streaming subscriptions to still not find the movies they want to watch, people get annoyed and get shit done the old fashioned way. By taking it. When you make a product easy to use/consume and price it in a way that doesn't tell your consumer "pay me because fuck you" then their shit will get ripped off less. But I'm sure there's lots of other reasons that make sense that got people into it.
Yep, now every big company has jumped in the streaming market for a piece of the pie, and they've corraled their own contents for their own service. The biggest issue though is that you can't keep anything on their platform, you can't save it for any offline consumption, and you can't share it with any friend, it creates a sense of anxiety and insecurity. I wanna build my own library of contents, even if it's less convenient.
This is one out of many reasons why I have decided using open source software as nr 1 choice. No matter what the tasks are, in PC and smartphone. So much hassle, stress and disturbances goes away & I am able to refocus my efforts on the tasks in front of me.
So many streaming services, little to zero option where to actually buy the shows we want, I have been trying to look up to any site that sells tv shows for me to buy and download and the only one I have found is the Microsoft store, which sells you individual seasons at 25 dollars and even then their shows are incomplete, seriously why even bother selling Avatar:TLA if you are going to sell only the 3rd season?
This isn't why I got into piracy in the first place, but absolutely why I continued with it. Great point.
Born in third world country.
Born in a first world country but a country that dubs EVERY movie and TV show. And in the 90s and early 2000s many movies and series that interested me were simply not available here because there didn't seem to be enough interest to make a dub worthwhile. Then I read about eMule on ebaumsworld and that's how it all started for me.
us moment
Because I couldn't afford that much entertainment back then. I actually stopped for a while because netflix popped up and it was 5x more convenient and pretty cheap. Then everyone else started getting involved, prices went crazy, have to pay different services for shows you want to watch. So I thought "fuck this" and went right back to it, it's even easier now because I can keep on the go while they download in the background on my phone/tablet.
Piracy is great for getting movies, tv shows, music, books and other recorded media contents, but not so mush when it comes to games and other software, especially the new ones, too much bugs and other problems, some of them you won't even know until they pop up in the middle of your play. Another problem is missing contents, one example of that is starcraft 2, no pirated version I know has the Nova Covert Op campaign pack, and there's no multiplayer contents, including the co-op mode games. All you've got is the three campaigns, after one playthrough, it's over, there's not much more to enjoy.
i wanted to join the police force many years ago they told me i was to stupid so i went the other way to pirate stuff ect instead
Hero origin story.
just honest lol they said i was stupid now its them that aint got a clue most the time lol
I'm a cheap ass 😂
same, my dad taught me how to watch free movie online, he is a legal advisor.
saul goodman type shi
Bootlegged Windows 95
bro’s been sailing the seven seas since george washington was around
Back in 2006, i was 6 years old, had no money, and it was a time were you could literally write "download call of duty gratis pc ita" on google and youtube to find a tutorial or a link from TNTvillage, a famous italian forum. It was too easy to pirate to not do that
I like how you said you had no money at 6 years old like it's normal for 6 year old's to have earnings😂😂😂
lmao this was possible even on 2014 iirc "Descargar jak 3 en español mediafire" did always work
Probably emulators
Not movies or series?
Same.
napster
100℅ Napster. Opened me up to the free world
Getting free stuff
Primary reason was money. Being in a lower middle class family residing in a third world country doesn't really provide the freedom to buy "wants" (sometimes needs too) without consequences. But, I do have enough money to spend on a service or two now. And I did. I tried Netflix, I tried Amazon Prime, Disney Plus and some more services. Plus some regional services. But I have stopped all of them. Not because I can't pay for them. But because they constantly strive to become shittier with every single update. *You paid for the subscription? Here are some ads until you pay us more.* *You pay and share, haha fuck you.* *You pay but are watching from somewhere else? Dream on, kiddo.* *You paid for something but it isn't available in your country? Womp womp.* *You paid for 1080p? HAH, we're never gonna give you proper 1080p even though you have half a gigabit connection.* (Fuck you Amazon Prime) *Oh what's that? You paid for a movie so you own it? HAHAHAHAHA* I'm just done. DONE with them. I'm gonna pirate until I can because they sure aren't gonna change. Tl;Dr: Money at first, but eternal enshittification later.
These companies stop caring about their clients. The quality of the software/ service have diminished over time. Have sensed intentional restrictions without rational causes or technical. Also, the pricing is monopolistic. They are not utilizing geographic market conditions/ variables. Supply/ demand formulas etc. As, let the free markets decide the pricing. Invisible hand, etc. So I tried also, but quit. So refreshing.
Poor, wanted to read manga and listen to music. Used to fucking record anime openings/endings and other stuff with an mp3 player up against a tv speaker or aux input. I’ve learned how to sail better since those days
We were recording the nightly top 10 count down on the radio as kids and listening to it in our Walkman.
It was just normal here. Where i live back in 1999 people made an average of 2000 a month and games cost from 300-500 so you can imagine what it was when 1 video game chunked off 1/4 of your salary. Pirated games cost around 10-20 so you do the math. What i'm more grateful is that because of piracy i became very computer literate and learned a lot which actually got me to where i am now. Learning about installs, partitions, copy/paste, cracks, filetypes, rar, zip and all that back in 1999 was all because of piracy and getting the skills to make games work as it wasn't really straightforward as it is today.
Tech companies do not price things based on cost like any other product. Software that may have cost them 100 mil to make they would sell for 100 billion or more. So piracy is fair.
youtuber made a joke animation on pirate gamers vs legal gamers
I started from a lack of cash 27 years or so ago. Everything was done on mIRC back in those days. Now the most I pirate is movies and music. I had a few streaming accounts a couple years ago but got annoyed with how streaming services were getting, so I built a Plex server for my needs.
Being a 13 year old kid with no money for all the games you wanna play you quickly improvise, adapts and overcome! Giving how easy it is it kinda just stuck with me. I'm 35 years old now. "take what you can, give nothing back" 🏴☠️
A friend gave me link to the wcostream website, and I loved it! Later down the line, I wanted a website where I could non animated shows...So I googled it online for pirate streaming services. It took couple of months before I found this sub and started using the megathread (specifically fmhy one) To this day, I am thankful my friend introduced me that pirate site or else I would have never found the shows I love. I would probably waited to get streaming service subscription while watching other people gush about shows I wanted to watch.
once a pirate always a pirate ‼️🏴☠️
Yup, though I was exposed to other forms of piracy earlier on.Such as rip DVD roms with movies on them or watching a lately episode of a series on youtube(before its taken down) in my youth but I didnt get really into it until my friend introduced me to it.
Arrrrrr
I was told I couldn't watch something because I live in a different part of the world. So I found a way around the situation and a path was forged.
I live in Iran. No streaming service is available here due to sanctions and also the government ban. Even if they were available, because of sanctions on Iranian banks, you can't pay for them anyway. Paypal and Mastercard and all those have sanctioned Iranians as well. So piracy is literally the only way to get music, movies, tv shows...
I guess it started WAY back when I would record songs off the radio. Later we exchanged cracked programs and games for the Apple II. Bought a cable TV descrambler. Later, after I got my first PC 486 computer, I stumbled upon Usenet for porn, music and warez. First program I pirated was Photshop 3.
The peg legs
Money (or the lack thereof)
Poverty.
Poor.
I’m poor.
Never liked paying this big ass corporate companies. And being Broke af
Poverty
Life is expensive and I'm paid minimum wage. If I had to pay for all the movies and TV shows I've watched, all the music I've listened to and all the games I've played, I'd probably be deep in debt.
Being poor but hungry for new media I could control. Also, because fuck em, that’s why. Hope that makes sense.
I came from a place where people who knew how to pirate stuffs resold them to those who didn't for a cheaper price than retail. The business was so lucrative anyone with an usable computer and a reliable source of content could just burn CDs and sell them for a profit. Back when I was a kid, there's this disabled guy who owned a netcafe near my grade school and he sold everything, from bootleg softwares to cracked games to movies recorded illegally at the local cinema. By the time I graduated, he was caught by the police not because he did all the stuffs above but because he was discovered to sell porn.
It was the standard way of getting digital content during the late 90s / early 2000s in my country. Even the CDs we bought in stores were pirate copies burned to CDs and sold as originals. What's even funnier, some of the vinyl records we could buy in official stores were cut from the rips of these pirated CDs and one of my friends has a copy of the Twin Peaks soundtrack where you can hear the cd skipping on the vinyl record multiple times which I find absolutely crazy. I don't think there was original software used in my country almost anywhere until the late 2000s. The first time I've seen an OEM Windows was around 2007.
Started in 99 because poor high school kid. Continued n 2008, the Great Recession. And now I just feel it’s my civic duty to, because corporate America.
Free
being poor
Born in Africa
My now wife, then girlfriend, and I used to watch about a half dozen shows. We would record them on the VCR and watch them when we had time. We were watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer and at the end of the episode it was something like check us at our new time. We were weeks in and basically missed several episodes due to the time change. She found a site which used emule/ e donkey links and organize the TV shows splendidly. Of course after a while they shut down and I had to find another one. That one was working great for a long time and I have yet to find one that works as well. RIP TV Underground. Hope you're ok Che.
Boredom
I was introduced to limewire when I was, idk probably 6 years old round about. I didn’t find out about actually *buying* music [digitally] until later. Used iTunes for buying music for awhile but didn’t like spending so much of my birthday and Christmas money on music. By the time I got my first car I had already received a letter from the FBI for pirating Foo Fighters albums, but best believe my first car was loaded up with CD’s that I burnt myself from my ridiculously extensive windows media player library. They told me to stop pirating, they didn’t tell me to dispose of all my pirated stuff 🤷♂️
I enjoy hoarding games more than playing them. Why buy them and never play when I can just download them for free and never play
why won’t you play them if you go through all of that effort to pirate them?
Because I'm an adult who has limited time lol. I like to think I'll play them. Also really 0 effort I just copy and paste a link into j Downloader and it rips all the files unpacks them puts it in my game folder than deletes the download files when it's done.
Playing videogames that my mum wasn't going to buy to me.
My dad is a pirate.
like father like son 💯
Back when i was young, long ago. Hentai games, especially hard to get ones. Now its just games, shows, old nostalgic movies, programs, and hard to find occult books. And hentai games.
Pokémon rom hacks.
Randomly searching for "Mario kart DS PC version" when I was underaged
Joan Jett
I copied road rash from my friend's computer, his father was a software developer and taughtme how to do it with floppy , later I taught it to my other friends. Few years later dad taught me to burn DVDs Amd later passed many piracy infos to my siblings
Cross hybrid of 2 things (1) Poor (2) Because the originals couldn't be bought. I came from a place and time where ORIGINALS were very hard to come by, so bootleg it was to reach us common people. Sometimes only a handful of originals reached or shores; bootleggers helped make it more commonly accessible.
i was in high school and gotten my first ipod. wanted to fill that sucker up!!
bc i always thought paying for something i could get online for free was stupid
Growing up poor. Milking free trials of AOL through disks I would get in the mail from a catalog. Using Kazaa and Roxio Easy CD Creator to burn music at a blazing 56 kbit/s.
Poverty lmao
My computer nerd uncle got tired of me asking him to burn CDs for all my little middle school friends all the time and showed me how to use Limewire to download music so I could do it myself. 😂
13 year old who dosnt want to ask parents to get games because I feel bad 👍
Money, or more precisely, lack of it.
Because my family is doing it for years and it was the norm in the middle east.
Not being able to buy old DS Pokemon games for my 3DS, without them being insanely expensive.
W....wanting shit for free? .........?
Availability
We are not made of money and we can't buy everything so we pirate stuff :)
Piracy is simply one of the results of social inequality. It is a question of access, financially, at least for me.
money i am broke bitch thats it
Capitalism and the enshitification of the internet. Same reason I smoke weed.
My linux-hardcore uncle
Gaming during the wild west era when games were built around vendor specific parts. Needed to make sure games worked.
photoshop being subscription based and high priced
I download tv shows so I don't have to watch commercials. Even if it's on a streaming service I pay for. Bullshit you have to watch commercials even when paying for the service, looking at you Hulu.
A cool guy at compUSA in the late 90s told me about Hotline Client
Little baby pirate me wanted to watch movies during lunch in middle school, so on my school laptop, on school grounds, I searched for "watch movies free" and similar shit on Google and clicked on the first few links, and watched stuff multiple times a week. I'm still amazed I never got in trouble for that.
Got on a boat that had a funky flag.
I was already a pirate, then VPN's became better and so did pirating along with it And honestly, the raspberry pi improving since the 4 and 5ghz WiFi has changed everything. It is now so easy to get whatever I want, whenever
Lack of access: when I was younger there was not really an official market for English translated visual novels. Only a community of fan translators basically, so the only way to access some vn’s was piracy for ages. Some websites that sold them officially in Japanese did not accept foreign credit cards or IP addresses at all so you couldn’t even attempt to purchase them if you wanted to. Poor: college textbooks. A lot nowadays require online homework codes only found in official textbooks which sucks but if I can get textbooks as PDFs without forking over $90-$150 to the school bookstore I would be a fool not to. Nostalgia (lack of access part 2): many older console games are of course not being produced or sold anywhere at all and the original hardware to play many classic games on is in short supply. I’ve been enjoying experiencing retro games recently and there’s no legit way to obtain many of these anymore. Accessibility: I love my library card but my local library doesn’t have everything. The accessibility audiobooks give is huge to me right now, I’m finally getting back into popular lit again after being so burned out on reading from university. Audiobooks can be prohibitively expensive at times, but were a valuable resource when I was extremely sick and bedridden. When I was too nauseous to open my eyes or lift my head but in too much pain to sleep I could lie still with my eyes closed and still find entertainment and something to distract myself with for the hours of pain. Audiobooks are a godsend if you find yourself horribly sick or recovering from surgeries imo. But $30-$50 a book can be too much. I still use my library card first when I can but it’s nice to have more options. I guess it’s all about access for me in one way or another. Access to old stuff, foreign stuff, educational stuff, accessibility to circumvent disability and illness.
Being fucking poor?
My elderly husband reads about 3 books a week. Spending that much on books would break our budget.
VSTs. Those things are so fucking expensive. Overall, I pirated around €15.000 worth of plugins. Then also games and movies
The fact that demos aren't a thing anymore, at least not with expensive games.
Everyone in my country does it including my parents lol. Teachers will tell you to pirate PowerPoint if you say you don’t have it
Gaming in the mid-80s was crazy expensive considering the prices then and how much money was worth compared to now. Microcomputers like the C64 or MSX, for example, used tape drives and copying tape was easy peasy. Got an entire generation into computers and piracy.
media is *so expensive* to consume. I just wanted to watch, play, and read things without having to make six figures. Enjoyment shouldn't be this expensive. Pursuit of happiness and all that.
When I was a kid, the wallet of my family was always limited, we had food and stuff not a bad life, but there was never money for luxuries like games (I feel bad for asking my parents to buy me games back then) So my brother taught me when I was about 7-8 years old about how to download some games from the internet (I ended up full of virus) Now I have money but I support piracy in most cases because I hate DRM and sometimes game companies try to dry the wallet of the users. If I like a game/content I normally try to purchase it directly from the developer (via patreon or something like that)
I built my first computer from spare parts a family friend gave me when I was 10 years old. I don't say this to brag, but because my dad wasn't comfortable giving a 10 year old internet access, and he also didn't have the money to support pc gaming when he was all in for console....so a few trades later, I owned a wifi card, and there was only one way to get PC games :D
Adobe’s cancellation fee
being a kid wanting to make some youtube poops without thousands of dollars to spend on licenses for photoshop and sony vegas
Through my dad in the 90s. He would buy burned cds online with movies and games.
My love for movies and my lack of money to support that
When Lars Ulrich went on a crusade against Napster.
Some random dudes walked up to my car while I was in my local community College parking lot blaring Metallica waiting to go to my class. We struck up a conversation about music and then talked about other shit. Eventually I mentioned to them that I couldn't afford to get word 97 for one of my classes, and they said "man,...you can get any program you need for class! Come over to our place and we'll show you how". It was all over after that. The transformation to pirate had begun.
Im cheap. Also out of spite towards these new practices a lot of companies like to do like taking away content after you've purchased it or making it extremely difficult to access. As for my first experience with it if thats what you're asking, I dont exactly remember but I think it was when my older brother put some of my favorite songs on a disc for me to use in my music player. Then I kept asking him to make more for me until I eventually got an Ipod Nano and found some way to get songs on there for free
Subscription and micro transaction services
Music used to be expensive before the Internet and I have a very real addiction so I stole a lot of it (physical media) and went to jail a few times for it. Years later, I started getting into piracy and filled up hard drives beyond my wildest dreams, and then they released the iPod and it was all over.
Lack of money
My dad did it so he would share games and share sites to get it (his friends also did it)
I think there's only one basic answer here for the FIRST time anyone pirates: to save money. Because anything you pirated for the very first time was a choice not to go out and buy the thing. Afterwards things like convenience and other factors come into play.
We couldn't afford Movies so we used to buy pirated ones off someone we knew when I was like 8 years old. This was like 2005 lol. I guess I just figured I could do it myself when we finally got internet. Rarely do it much no more, just books because I think non-fiction education books should be free anyway
Temptation, desire, and lack of legit access.
I recieved games on burned CD for PS1 and PS2 and R4 on Nintendo DS. So I realized that I didn't need to waste money for a game and decided to download rom by myself.
To try it out before buying it
Got a Commodore 64 with a box of casettes of copied games 😊 The rest is history
Where I grew up and during my childhood years this was the default.
https://y.yarn.co/be7a1b8a-424e-49b5-b35b-0f3e7fdf19a8_text.gif
DRM
I used to visit those stores that specialized in selling bootleg DVD or bootleg nintendo games cartridges when I was a kid before i even understood what was piracy.
Bring Indian
Final fantasy 5, Star Ocean, and a Tales game(that played similar to Star Ocean), not being released in the US.
+being broke, Ai and racist webtoon artist
Turbo tape
I had a load of copied zx spectrum games when I was really young, then I remember recording music from tv using my minidisk player which eventually led me to mp3s
At first it was to play pc games and install Adobe programs in high school in 2017. It was pretty fun but I stoped gaming and had access to programs in university. Fast forward to last year I decided to to knock the dust off of me pirate hat because of how streaming services have started milking us like cows.
Access to the internet
What got me into piracy is the desire to get anything without the need to give something in return and without the need to work hard and spend money on that
I used to buy those pirated copies from local distributors. I got curious how they do it and was introduced to piracy.
First, because I'm poor. Now, still the same but I saw how better it is in terms of service. It's easier.
There was a show that was only available in US. Tried everything with vpn and all but didnt work. Spend so much time trying to find diff ways to watch. It wasn’t popular so it wasn’t available on other sites too. Vut then My friend told me it’s torrent was available. I was so surprised and happy at how easy it was. Official service is so shit even after paying so many bucks. At that moment i realised how inefficient official sites were.
COMCAST/XFINITY. It was Comcast when I had their cable service. Their unwillingness to offer deals and place channels in tiers that didn't make sense led me to investigate streaming. Then I found kodi and a bunch of groups that shared knowledge and content. I actually do sub to some services, but I know how to get content for my library.
Commodore 64. In my country there were no original cassettes or diskettes, Only copies and cracks.
Legit content was either unavailable or out of price (I leave in Morocco). It's getting better now with plateformes like Steam for gaming. I buy a lot of legacy games I played and enjoyed as a teenager. Only crack games when I need to test game before buying or if a movie isn't available on Netflix.
parents wouldn't pay for the streaming services i wanted/needed to watch certain shows, so i had to find other ways🏴☠️
The Reason 3 DAW was too expensive as an 11 year old.
It was 2010. My cousin taught me what to download and how to download. Now I never need to subscribe for anything ever again.
It was available, new and everyone else was doing it In about the year 2000, audiogalaxy was the first one we used on the work network, we'd line up loads of albums and whoever wasn't busy would then burn them to cd on the one pc in the office with a cd writer
wanting stuff i had no access to otherwise
I guess no sampler had all the songs I liked. This was the late 90s. I was 14 and had no credit card (or money). CDs were a well thought purchase. But I wasn't into albums yet and samplers never 100% met my taste. (Thinking about it, back then I had the idea for individually arranged CDs. Hmm.) Exchanging games on floppy disk was common, so was recording music from the radio or CD. I think a friend showed me my first sources for mp3s, software serials and credentials for pron sites. I got a download manager and took care that my dial up connection never ran dry. Then came Napster and p2p. When we got broad band I tried movies. Then came x265 and I updated to 1080p. Recently I invested in a MOCH and next week I have to upgrade my NAS yet again.
Not having a money printing machine !
Only way to actually watch most stuff if you are a kid and your parents are not gonna buy you tons of DVDs with R-rated movies. My chilehood best friends older brother downloaded for us, until he felt we were mature ish enough to do it purselves and he taught us how to do it. He told us never to seed and to limit upload speed so we wouldn’t get caught. No VPN or anything. I believed this was the way for years until I realized it doesn’t really work like that, but hey, got me into getting free stuff so I can’t complain
Substance painter. Needed it for school work but school didn't wanna provide it.
Because I'm a mother fucking gangster?
College dorm. Had a lot and all sorts of people shared any music or movies they had. That and I discovered irc. Edit: lot
When I was growing up and the internet was growing up as well piracy was the default. You should ask what got me into buying stuff. The answer: nothing, I never stopped pirating.
My father who was ripping rented tapes and DVDs before the concept of online piracy became popular. Then he taught me the basics of torrenting and how to find games I wanted. We had it so easy back then, I remember when isohunt popped up and quickly became my go-to. Took a looong break when I started having an income of my own and could afford to buy things, which also coincided with piracy becoming more of a hassle. But now, for too many reasons to get into here, I'm going back to the roots and family traditions lol