Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

I agree we probably wouldn't get any more Assassin's Creed or Deadpool and Wolverine. Very likely those kinds of media would die out in a world where no one pays for media. I have a hard time saying that's a bad thing. We'd instead have more weird little indie projects, which are so, so much better in every way. But sure, if you feel morally queasy about "stealing" (it's not stealing, it's copying) from giant corporations who make artistically bankrupt crap, I'm not going to convince you otherwise, and it would be a waste of my time to try and do so.

Maybe I should point out here that sometimes I do go out of my way to pay for media (especially games) when I don't have to. I bought Dwarf Fortress on Steam, even though the devs give it away for free and I donated to them a couple times before they released it on Steam. They are living off the money people pay for Dwarf Fortress and I'm so glad they're able to do so. I also bought my sister a copy of Pathologic 2 she has never (and probably will never) play because I bought my copy on sale and loved it and felt bad that I hadn't paid full price to a dev team that put their heart and soul into the game and had it sell abysmally for some reason. (Side note, play Pathologic 2, it's good!) I bought the Celeste soundtrack from Lena Raine's bandcamp because I love it so much, even though it's extremely easy to find and I've actually lost access to my bandcamp account.

I guess I'm saying there's nuance here and I like it when actual artists who make good art are paid. It's just that in our current society, buying a DVD or paying for Netflix or paying for Xbox gamepass or anything like that doesn't benefit the artists, the vast majority of any money you spend to acquire media goes straight to wealthy executives and I just don't see anything wrong with not giving them more money than they're already getting.