I’m using “business” here as a general word, you can think of it for any field: physical stores, indie developers, startups, etc…
How many times did this happen before? Every big company was once a small one. Google used to be the good guys at the beginning.
We’re currently seeing the old praised Proton starts its small pseudo-monopoly business in the privacy focused services field.
You might think you’re helping the world by putting your money in the “morally correct” place, but at the end you might be just helping a new greedy company to arise.
I had this thought after seeing the page of a indie game on Steam, it’s been a few months I’m pirating everything related to digital media, but then I saw this game from an indie developer that I wish listed in 2023, it got launched oct., 2025. As I decided to pirate everything I had a second thought on this one, “maybe I should pay for this one, it’s a good cause, this guy put some effort on it, why not?!”, the game currently has 802 reviews, which isn’t bad for a indie game.
But then WHAT IF? What if the game becomes popular? What if people start demanding more and buying a lot? What if the developer decide to start a small company to attend the people demand? And what if this company become the new average modern company adding paywalls, DLCs, cosmetics? What if they start abusing AI use to “boost productivity” and ship faster?
What have I done with my money?
Now I face this moral dilemma, should I pay for it or just pirate it like I usually do?
What’s the point of pirating if you’re going to be morally confused?
You either pirate or don’t. Why complicate it?
People pirate for a variety of reasons, but largely it comes down to “cause its free and I can” whether they accept that or not, but it is the truth.
And a lot of the time, people who pirated games, buy them because they wanted to support the developer anyways. They didn’t have this stupid worry that you have here as to whether or not it’ll be popular, it is because the experience was so great, it was worthwhile to buy it anyways.
It’ll only be a waste of money, time and effort pirating the game if the studio or a standout individual involved turns out to be a shitty person. Not because they’re popular, if a small game or studio is popular, then great, we all love to see it. It is until big corporation decides to stamp them out via acquiring or law-suiting them to death is when it is a problem.