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. Do we count in-app purchases of apps I've modded or obtained pre-modded? Do we count the cost of films as one-off rentals/purchases, or do we count them as subscriptions?

If we consider games as buying one-off licences for them that I kept in perpetuity, it would be in the few hundreds, probably about £400.

If we include streaming, as a subscription service that I've used for the last decade roughly, then 10×12×£10 (assuming a tenner a month), we're looking at £1,200 saved for streaming.

However, at least 20-30 films have been downloaded by me personally, so assuming a cost of about a fiver per film (idk how much films go for these days), we're looking at another ~£700.

But also, we have to include ad-free YouTube as YT Premium. And even if we're to assume that YT Premium is anywhere close to the service I provide myself with, i.e downloading things I actually keep as digital files forever, it would still cost a lot. About 5 years of YT Premium would be (according to ChatGPT because I didn't want to research price increases), just over £800.

But I've also watched both Netflix and Disney+ exclusives, namely Squid Game and The Mandalorian, so I guess streaming would've been much more expensive?

Also, we have about a year of Spotify, which ChatGPT (easier to give more accurate estimates) claims is just over £140.

Adding to that, apparently the cost of Netflix over the same period is just over £1,500, so that changes the total.

So far, £3500, not counting in-app purchases in modded games. If we count that (which is ridiculous cuz I would never spend that much money on games, even if I was a liquid trillionaire (meaning having £1T cash)), we'd probably be looking at something in the hundreds of thousands if not millions.

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

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.

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.

Does it count if you barely watched/played it?

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

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.

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

Unclear. Cause I don't tell