this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2023
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I can afford to buy or subscribe to services but at this point streaming is just more annoying than pirating. With pirating I can use my favorite player (mpv), maximize video quality (high quality blu-ray rips), watch offline, no bugs or buffering, instant seeking et.c. As for games I might pirate a game before buying it but usually I just buy it since it's convenient (unless it has intrusive DRM).
Even for 1080p media, playing locally with advanced denoising and upscaling to 4k is so nice, and of course just not having to deal with all the streaming caveats.
For games pirating it for performance testing is useful before you know you'll fully commit to it, although Steam let's you play for up to 2 hours and still get a refund, a lot of games will require you to play more of it to make that decision (looking at you, Starfield... I'm glad I didn't buy that one).
I agree with holding off on Starfield. Bethesda games are usually instant buys for me but this time I'll probably wait years before buying it. My love for Bethesda games is all about exploration and for some reason they replaced handcrafted story-filled landscapes with procedural generated ones? Hopefully modders make some cool content that is worth exploring in the future :)
At the risk of going off topic a bit, I am very confident that there will be a plethora of new areas with loads of content coming from modders as soon as the Creation Kit drops. With Skyrim, adding new areas was often slightly awkward because you had to make it a dungeon that would then maybe lead to a bigger, open area simply because the Skyrim "overworld" was relatively crowded already and it would easily risk breaking other mods that added stuff on the main area. But in Starfield there is so much empty space on the three dimensional galaxy map that it's virtually impossible that two distinct modders would choose the same exact spot for their custom solar system.
There's even some things you can do with a self-hosted media server that you just can't easily do with sreaaming services. For example, Jellyfin has a group sync feature where multiple users can join a group and when someone plays something, it plays for everyone. It works great for watching shows with friends remotely. I think Amazon Prime video has something like this but none of the others IIRC.