Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

Does a WoW subscription count? I've played on private servers for a looooong time, that alone would've been some 20+ months of sub.

It's tricky for me to estimate because the majority of my piracy happened around 2004-14, so lots of stuff I don't remember, plus some of the games I pirated back then I ended up buying later on at a discount (Jazz Jackrabbit, SupCom, UT2004, X3TC). I still don't own a legal copy of Age of Empires 2, so you can add that one to my debt.

Oh, that reminds me, if I add the many, many, MANY emulated roms to that list, boy, that'll be a lot of debt. Some 500 games times ~40 dollars average, that's 20k.

There are also the many anime episodes that simply didn't exist as available for purchase, so "at original price" I guess it'd be zero.

Depends, are we talking the highest retail price? Or clearance prices?

Let's take steam as an example, before steam existed I was a big pirate. Now that steam exists and it's so convenient I basically buy every game. But I only buy them after wish listing them and waiting until they get to like $5 or less. So I'm a bargain basement patient gamer.

For other things I'm the same way, so what would be the actual cost of a cheapskates pirate library? Flea market clearance DVD prices would be fair

None I think. I paid for all my streaming services that had these movies and shows and then have sourced everything else through originals or sources that were rentable.

This is that whole issue with defining ownership with digital media. Movies were called the greatest financial invention of America because they only had to make a product once and could sell it forever.
With digital media and technology increases we now have a much easier time owning our own copies.

This is likely literally what NFTs hoped to fix to make set revenue of of each digital file and also why they failed because they are so easy to copy anyways.

So, none, or an infinite amount, depending on if you ask me or a business major.

If I can't own it, I'm not buying it.

I only pirate what is unavailable.

And things that are supposed to be bad, like the new Snow White movie, which made me still feel robbed.

I’m like in like 200$ maximum

A lot. Though it's hard to put a price on some things because they're software for discontinued products ( old game consoles, Amiga software, etcetera ) and aren't sold as they were, even if some of them are still sold for other platforms.

Straight up piracy - probably only like $3k, if we're including backups of a personal physical media collection well over 20k.

Very little. I've always wanted to be paid for the work I do so I have always paid others for the work they have done for me. If I couldn't afford to pay for it, I didn't steal it instead.

everything up to 2006 was roughly 70K cad including stuff I never used, duplicates only counted if they were either games for different system/movies from different phys. media/given to friends. value of dollar was roughly accounted for as if it was bought when new.

A bunch of friends and I stopped pirating stuff when we started working and had no time for entertainment and we tallied everything up and checked each other's calculations and voted on if certain items could be included, etc., as a closure/end of an era thing. I was second place and top of our group was like 130K

current bounty is probably just whatever mcu films are on bluray and maybe 6 bluray volumes of whatever anime weren't on the netflix or amazon I'm mooching. Maybe like 8 switch games but I only played 2 and wiped it when I sold the switch, and 3 pc games but I only played 1 but I'll probably just go through my steam backlog if I ever have gaming time again in my life.

edit: I guess also some netflix shows while I wasn't mooching an account and some apple shows but no idea how to account for that.

Unclear. Cause I don't tell

Does it count if you barely watched/played it?

Pirscy has its negatives, anything ive spent money on ive been compelled to use, piracy ill build up a library of barely touched software, doing myself a disservice not learning/using them, but they feel less imporrtant if they can be gotten free, only really applies to the initial learning phase but most stuff I pirate I dont get past that phase

Enough to make me hate capitalism and inflation rates twice as much!