FBI says it's now seized "multiple" ROM piracy sites, claims downloads resulted in $170m losses in just three months
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These loss figures are always fun. Me pirating a game i would NEVER have played otherwise is not a 50€(with todays game prices, 80€) loss for the company. On the other hand there are games that i pirated first because i wasnt sure it would be worth it for me to buy it and then actually bought it when i decided it would be fun to play and wanted to support the company.
I got into the Age of Wonders franchise through a burned disc by our upstairs neighbour as a child. I have bought every game (except planetfall) in that franchise by now. I’d probably never have tried that game without said burned disc
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TPB is basically immortal. Any instance taken down can be back up in minutes. It’s a game of whack-a-mole you can never win.
Yeah, there’s dozens of mirrors up at all times
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Hey FBI thanks for letting me know about nsw2u cc I had no idea this thing existed…but now I do, so thank you.
seriously though I use the megathread and it has quite literally everything. literally the only good thing to come from reddit.
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I have torrented Mario Kart World one thousand times since it launched and have thus cost Nintendo 70,000 dollars. If I can keep up this pace, Nintendo will be bankrupt within the next year or two.
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I got into the Age of Wonders franchise through a burned disc by our upstairs neighbour as a child. I have bought every game (except planetfall) in that franchise by now. I’d probably never have tried that game without said burned disc
That’s the same way I was introduced to Half Life. Valve has made that money back 1000 fold
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I am broke af I would never have bought the game if I didn’t get it for free. So they lose nothing if it’s from me. Same for TV series and movies.
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The list of sites:
On top of Nsw2u’s closure, the FBI says its investigation - performed with the assistance of the Fiscal Information and Investigation Service in the Netherlands - had additionally resulted in authorisation to seize the domain of “multiple” other sites, including nswdl.com, game-2u.com, bigngame.com, ps4pkg.com, ps4pkg.net, and mgnetu.com.
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It also claimed these websites had seen cumulative downloads of 3.2m in just three months this year - from 28th February and 28th May - resulting “in an estimated loss of $170m”.
In other words:
- They assumed that every download was by someone who would otherwise have paid over 53 USD for it, which by itself is an absurd delusion.
- They described imaginary money that they never had in the first place as “losses”, which is a plain lie. You can’t lose something that you never had.
Given that both these blatant falsehoods match the propaganda that big media parasite corporations started pushing a few decades ago, it seems pretty clear who the taxpayer-funded FBI is working for.
They assumed that every download was by someone who would otherwise have paid over 53 USD for it, which by itself is an absurd delusion.
You’re wrong, your presumption assume one single person to download a single file he/she never ear about.
What’s most likely, people download ROMs for nostalgia, ie: something they, or their parents, bought them when they were children. So, if we assume someone download their “childhood library” which was already paid, of about ~30 cartridge (admitted the download is the right one, and didn’t required multiple download attempt); in the view of the FBI, that single person “stole” 3180 USD he/she paid ~20 years ago.
You’re not just supposed to lose the things you bought, you’re supposed to be fined (for attempt to play the product you already paid) with price updated to current industry standard.
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I am broke af I would never have bought the game if I didn’t get it for free. So they lose nothing if it’s from me. Same for TV series and movies.
Yeah… they’ve been playing tbis broken record for decades now, if.what they say was true, there’d be no muaic industry, no film and tv industry and no game industry by now.
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That’s brilliant. It’s a shame it will have no impact and the copyright mafia will continue their relentless assault until we are all microchipped at birth with neural inhibitors that physically prevents us from consuming digital material we haven’t purchased. Brain-implant DRM is the end goal.
The year is 2060. I’m getting ready to watch my favorite movie. I have no idea what it’s about; my NeuraLink prevents me from retaining unlicensed memories of someone else’s intellectual property. But Amazon tells me I’ve watched it over thirty times and given it an average of 4.7 stars over those viewings, which is crazy high; even stuff other people like I tend to rate under 3 stars. Apparently I’m snobby, or maybe some kind of pervert. Without more information about the content, I have no practical way of knowing. If you go on the dark web supposedly you can find forums where people will write descriptions of what they claim the films are like, but folks who have sought that stuff out consistently rate the films lower on subsequent viewings, so it’s probably not worth it. At least that’s what my AI assistant tells me.
