No, I will have to strongly disagree. Years worth of effort for hundreds of people go into a AAA Game, just like a blockbuster movie. The agreement then is, you pay somehow for the right to consume their effort. You pay directly to the game, or you pay a subscription service that then distributes its pot to the game according to their agreement, but you have to pay. That’s the social agreement. If you don’t, then you’re breaking the social agreement and you’re stealing, there’s really no justification for it.
Let’s say you somehow find that you pirating does not matter in the grand scheme of things, or might indirectly increase sales. It still does not matter. You are a part of an agreement that you should honor, not break, they didn’t hire you to market the game or to improve their sales.
Personally when I was a teen, I used to pirate games because my parents did not buy me any. Then I became a software developer. Now I can only sympathize for piracy if it’s for educational resources that uplifts you, kind of like Sci-hub. For games/ movies you need to think, do you deserve to consume years worth of effort that they put into it? Do you deserve to be entertained by their effort? In my eyes you only do if they willingly give it to you, which only ever happens if you buy or subscribe to a game.
While I also disagree with the 'memefied' version of the quote, the publishers where first to break the social contract, when they removed stuff from libraries which where 'bought'.
The wording in the stores is 'buy' not 'rent'.
yes they have some clauses in the 20 pages long AGBs, which makes it legally ok, but imho it's still a break of the (social) contract.
So, if I 'buy' product A on platform Z and it gets removed without any money returned and they expect me to 'buy' it again on platform Y, I wouldn't have any issues pirating product A
Or if I bought product B v 3.0 with an unlimited licence and they suddently stop the licence server tell me I can't use B 3.0 anymore but I can get B 5.0 as a subscripton, I'd be mad as hell.
I personally have issues where the publishers suddenly alters the deal afterwards. (and tell you that you should be happy they don't alter it further...)
The justification is that there is no social agreement. It's quite clear that the direction is moving away from even the possibility of ownership, and because of obscure reasons you don't care about, the original often becomes unavailable (e.g. music in a game or show being removed, or some aspect being censored, or the controlling entity loses interest in old material, or people lose track of who even holds rights). The law has been corrupted to last so long that if you wanted to share parts of your childhood with your descendants, you'd have to go through gatekeepers until your great great great grandchildren (i.e. never).
No one agreed to that any more than they agreed not to use marijuana. They were born into a world where others use violence to coerce them. As a software developer, I'd be quite happy if the law required all source to be put in escrow to receive copyright and then released into the public domain after 10-15 years, along with bans on technological measures to prevent people from modifying software. Likewise with putting masters in escrow for sound/video. Maybe even give them a full generation of protection (~25 years) since their work doesn't become obsolete and unusable like software. But the important thing is to receive a monopoly from society, you should need to give something as your part of the trade (e.g. source materials for the next generation to be able to use and add their own flavor to), and the goal should be to create cultural wealth for future generations, not to keep it from them. We can trade our rights to enable that, but not theirs; our children's rights are not ours to trade. Given that things are so one-sided, I can't imagine begrudging people at all for ignoring the "agreement".
Here's my two cents, not directed towards you, but to the discussion in general.
If someone wants to lease a product to you, and you would rather they sell it, that doesn't give you the right to pirate it. When the only way to buy a thing is to "buy" a misleading lease, piracy becomes more "permissible", as in people will blame you less for pirating it, but that doesn't make it morally good.
It's obviously a bad thing for the publisher to make it seem like you're buying something, then pull the rug out from under you. It's extremely misleading, maybe it should be illegal. It's definitely a bad thing, even if it's all technically there in the fine print that nobody reads. Pirating the thing in response to this is a situation where two wrongs don't make a right. It's debatable, sure, but it's morally gray at best.
No matter how you slice it, you're still depriving the creators/publishers/etc of the money they ask for in return for the thing you want. Maybe you don't like the publisher, maybe you think the platform is evil, but you are still taking what doesn't belong to you.
A big reason it's bad is the plain ol' categorical imperative. If everyone did it, there would be no more music, movies, games, etc, because the people making them wouldn't get paid. That's true regardless of how the thing is sold.
If you don't like how they're selling it, boycott it. That's fine. It's not like we're talking about essential goods like shelter or food. Most of the time, the discussion is around entertainment.
TL;DR Pirating is morally gray at best, but it is not 100% morally good, and I wish people would be honest about that.
The idea that there would be no more creative works without copyright is pretty obviously false for music (so many people enjoy making music that the only way it could disappear is if we evolve to no longer have ears, and even then it will probably exist in the form of deep bass that you can feel), and most likely false even for things like movies and video games. It may be the case that high budget works become extremely rare, but things like short films would continue to exist, and the existence of things like Spring or various total conversion mods show that even video games would continue. It is definitely false for things like business software, where people will pay for professional services to make their business more efficient.
On the other hand, there are plenty of interesting creative works (e.g. mashups) that are illegal today, and obviously they're being made without monetization. With new tools we even have people making things like Plankton from Spongebob singing Tool songs[0]. There would still be plenty of creativity in the world without copyright.
It's not obvious that we should prioritize the ability to easily fund high budget works over the ability of people to freely share their remixes and mashups, for example.
"Personally when I was a teen, I used to pirate games because my parents did not buy me any. Then I became a software developer."
When you're in an unfair situation, you are willing to break the rules to your benefit. But when you have wealth, suddenly only the wealthy "deserve" to be entertained, and all the poors need to know their place and follow the rules which disadvantage them.
Let’s say you somehow find that you pirating does not matter in the grand scheme of things, or might indirectly increase sales. It still does not matter. You are a part of an agreement that you should honor, not break, they didn’t hire you to market the game or to improve their sales.
Personally when I was a teen, I used to pirate games because my parents did not buy me any. Then I became a software developer. Now I can only sympathize for piracy if it’s for educational resources that uplifts you, kind of like Sci-hub. For games/ movies you need to think, do you deserve to consume years worth of effort that they put into it? Do you deserve to be entertained by their effort? In my eyes you only do if they willingly give it to you, which only ever happens if you buy or subscribe to a game.