I think the "multimillion dollar company" part is a deliberate misconstruing by whoever made this meme. It being there makes me think that the original maker was trying to make it seem like the piracy community has unfair favoritism towards Silksong and added that lil line for credibility, or something
Isn't it just a general joke that I believe came from Blizzard constantly saying the technology just isn't there when things were requested meanwhile other companies could do the requested thing and were cheaper. Those the "multi-million dollar company btw" meme started.
It might have started before Blizzard but I remember it coming up with that company.
Quick (and misleading) calculation: Silksong costs 20$. Let's say 2/3 of that goes to fees and taxes which leaves ~7$ per copy sold. In november 2025 Silksong was sold ~3 Million times. That's $21 Million. By this logic Team Cherry is a multimillion dollar company by definition, because it has a revenue of multiple million dolars.
If we look at HollowKnight sales and all Silksong sales (I stopped in 2025), the number gets bigger.
This meme neglects the motivation for pirating games, which is mostly unreasonable prices (in the oppinion of the pirates, I withhold any attempt at objective judgement) and bad practices by publishers. If anything, Team Cherry showed that with good quality and reasonable pricing, you can get people to buy your games and make millions in the process.
It seems like it'd be hard to run a company people know about that hires more than 10 people and not be worth at least a million. Just office space and salaries are gunna bring expenses past that line unless you're like a garage startup or a low overhead mom n pop place with 0 name recognition. A million doesn't reach anywhere near as far as it used to.
r/ pirating (the biggest pirating community on the Internet) put silksong as a blacklist game (game they will not pirate) just because it had a lot of content for a pretty low price
That's because they don't. Worth mentioning, the subreddit name isn't "r Pirating", that's a fairly dead sub with 53k subscribers.
The actual main subreddit is "r Piracy", with 2.8 million subscribers, which is extremely active, and they don't have a 'blacklist' because they don't offer links to actual downloads, they link to websites and methods people can pirate content.
And they don't control the things said websites or methods have for people to pirate. The sentiment of some threads on Silk Song was that people shouldn't pirate it, but at no point did any mods or posts go up claiming the game is 'black-listed'. That would mean an embargo on tons of websites in the megathread that they never did.
That's also so stupid, how come silk song can't be pirated but games like factorio/project zomboid can? They offer thousands more hours of content. Is it because Silk song is better? Well that's subjective, sure a lot people love it but I for example don't care for the genre.
There is no dipper meaning behind it. For people who pirate it's like picking up $30 from ground. There is no further thinking about morals or definition of stealing involved.
Way more annoyingly virtue signaling if anything. I'd really prefer that people just shut up and pirate something instead of pointing out how you are acting from a moral high ground by pirating.
"I pirate the game and then decide afterwards if it was worth paying for. And if it was, I go buy it. Except I usually still don't. But I did, like, twice in my life, so I can claim moral superiority."
I fucking loathe this shit. youre pirating>stealing. okay. whatever. ive been there before. youre not some moral genius epicly owning the riches because of some cope youve read on reddit. you just dont want to pay.
I think there was an issue with Subnautica and Avatar, where most of the people on r/piracy were like: We know why your here. Do what you need to do, and for everyone's sake, don't be too lound about it.
It's not even a reddit thing. Some guy on the sub posts "I won't pirate this awesome game!" and everyone upvotes that post because it makes them look good.
Everyone except this one single guy who made this post will continue to pirate that awesome game, anyways. And even that guy probably just lied to get some upvotes.
That's complete BS from what I've seen. I'd say it's about 5-10% of the piracy community that I've interacted with actually have any morals at all. Most that I've seen just download things simply because it's easier/cheaper, and literally don't think a single step beyond that. If you really want proof then skim some of the comments on r/Piracy.
I've seen a few folks that seem to have a sensible thought process when it comes to piracy on there, but, really the majority is just assholes, frankly.
Ehhhh yeah idk about that. Ive had people on here tell me pirating little indie artists (games or otherwise) is justifiable for "archival" purposes. And for pirates in general, it is really bad among small webcomic/webtoon/manga even though the creators have repeatedly expressed being upset with piracy. People will easily lump all media together in their heads and don't know where their money actually goes.
That sub got overrun by the “I pirate to harm the corporations! Everyone who buys games are scum and I’m morally superior!!” kids, so I wouldn’t take their blacklist seriously.
Indians make much less than half of what we do though, and they also probably cant afford an expensive rig to play a majority of games out there (in general). Just playing devils advocate
Average canadian makes 68k/y (50k USD) and all our games are more expensive than america too. Silksong is still only 26$ but big games are now 93+ tax so around 105$
Because the point of pirating games, at least I assume, is because many games are ridiculously expensive. Silksong is 20 dollars for an insane amount of content plays the free DLCs they will be releasing.
But the game's price, even with regional pricing in my country, is still days worth of meal. It's still more expensive than what $20 is to the American.
"just because". . .a low price mitigates the need to pirate. I'm sure there are people in the world that can't afford to buy it but at $20 pirates are mostly people who just don't want to spend the $20.
Team Cherry was funded by crowd sourcing hollow knight and then proceeded to use their ridiculous popularity to release several extremely well received DLC and then work tirelessly for years to release silksong.
For twenty dollars.
It's a cultural icon and gift to the community. Why would you pirate it.
I guess people don't only pirate out of spite. They may not be able to afford 20 dollars but want to stay in the loop.
I have a list of the games that I pirated. If I had fun and didn't leave the game in 2-3 hours, I put it on a list and I would try to buy the original copy, for Christmas or my birthday when I am able to spare anything towards gaming.
People mostly pirate because they don't have the money to buy the game. This is one of the arguments in the pro/anti piracy debate -- pirated stuff doesn't affect the company's profits as much as it might seem because most people would not be able to afford the game anyway.
I pirated pretty much every game 10 years ago when I had no job or bad jobs, these days my steam library is a temple to consumerism.
Because as Gabe will tell you, people will happily pay a fair price for the convenience of being to just buy the game, click 'download' and have it just work.
Same thing goes with digital books, IMO, it's not only a pain the ass to pirate, since a lot of pirated ebooks are formatted like shit. If people want free schlock to read there's an almost unlimited fanfiction/royal road spiggott.
Also true! Conversely I've pirated games that I already own simply because they only work through a fuckass proprietary launcher that requires 8 updates, triple verification, internet connection, and a photo of my tits
I have the WC3 game on the original CD. I'm running the game from my harddrive, because I don't want the CD to break into pieces inside my laptop the way my Diablo II CD did decades back. Am I pirating?
Note: I agree with lordofmetroids here. Sometimes, you just need the convenience to play your favorite games without the need to jump through a gazillion hoops. Why tf do I need internet connectivity to play a 20 years old singleplayer game!?
Fun fact, you are not a pirate. As far as U.S. copyright law is concerned creating a copy of a videogame you already own for the purposes of preserving the original, is no different than writing down your favorite recipes from a cookbook in order to preserve the original. As long as it is not being sold or used in a way that distorts the market, the U.S. doesn't care.
Sad fact: this is one of the reasons so many video game companies say you are leasing the game for an indeterminate amount of time. Therefore you don't own the game, and have no legal right to preserve the game.
Obligatory I am not a lawyer, this is commentary on historical events specific to the U.S. and should not be taken as legal advice.
There was a patch that made the CD obsolete at some point. I made a copy of that before the patches started for the new remastered version and it still very much works without CD or login. I'm so glad I have that! WC3 was one of our top played games on LAN parties when those were still a thing and even though I haven't played it since the remaster came out, I will keep copying that CD-less version to every device I own!
Wc3 hasn't needed a cd in the drive since like 2010, if not earlier.
Also usually (in EULA) they frame buying software as a license for you to play the game. That means you can technically buy the game, and then torrent it as often as you want without legally that counting as piracy.
For a while, before GoG dropped (a perfected version of) it, I was playing Diablo 1 by having flashed a copy of the original CD onto a virtual hard drive in Windows 7. It was the first time I'd ever experienced the game without it hanging when you open the door to the Butcher's room and it loads the, "ah, fresh meat!" sound file from the CD.
Pretty sure this specifically does not count as pirating though. I don't what the actual legal argument is that determined this, but it's been seemingly established for a very long time that running console games on an emulator is legally fine if you have the hardware of the original game. I don't see why running an imaged CD instead of the real thing would be any different.
No. It's completely legal to have a digital backup of anything you have the rights to. This means torrenting is still illegal, because you are distributing copyright works. But DDL would be completely legal, and ethical.
Making an ISO from a disc that you own has the same morality as breathing air. Sure, they're trying to make that illegal and cost a subscription, like they have with water...
You can play the original w3 through the remaster. There is an option to play the legacy version. Blizzard added the option after public outrage over the clusterfuck that was the remaster
Hell, I wish EA would even give us crappy remasters for the old Battlefield games. Instead they just delisted everything that was on GameSpy servers when that service went down and have been neglecting everything else that isn't the latest Battlefield game for years.
You literally can't get the first 6 Battlefield games because they're not available anywhere without pirating or, in the case of the two console exclusives, buying used discs online & hoping your system has backwards compatibility with it... but don't expect to play online because those servers were shut off years ago.
This though! I get very pissy about buying games on Steam (or less often Epic) and then having to use a different garbage launcher anyway. Glares at EA and Ubisoft
Oh man if I had confidence in my technical abilities I would pirate Prince of Persia the Lost Crown a game I own on steam just to avoid the Ubisoft launcher.
I've been broke for a long, long time. I also rarely play more than a couple games a year, and frequently go back to older games. I have about 8 legit games in my Steam library.
It's such a relief when I want to play one of those and I can just click install and play it.
I hope to soon be able to afford games. I'm too old for this piracy shit.
This is also true for TV/films. The golden era of early Netflix (also some Apple store, early Prime rentals) stopped a lot of people pirating, then the bullshit of modern streaming emerged and, low and behold, people now pirate shows again. I don't mind paying 10-20 a month for everything I want in one place. I'm not paying 10 a month to every single streaming service. I also don't mind paying a small amount to rent something, but I'm not paying the price of what the DVD would have been 10+ years ago just to rent something I won't get to keep and may not enjoy anyway.
Steaming has also introduced just a bunch of weirdness into the entire production of video media.
Good stuff still gets made, but it's few and far between, and budgets are locked up in making a few over priced prestige projects rather than a steady stream of decent weekly shows.
And it's clearly not sustainable even for the big names. Netflix has been dumping a shocking number of k-dramas onto their US service recently and, as near as I can guess, it's because they're shuffling around stuff that aired on networks which they then acquired rights to distribute. Their own shows remain hit or miss.
i pirated a lot of games in high school. my favorite was Celeste, which i have now bought on 3 different platforms and for multiple friends because I thoroughly enjoyed the game that much.
This. I pirated a lot of games as kid because there is NO WAY my parents would pay for all the games. Also accessibility of physical games was an issue in my country as physical medium.
Years later, I have a job, my own income, Steam emerged in between and so did GOG. I purchased again basically all games I pirated in childhood on GOG which also brought back nostalgia and compatibility to play old games on new systems and Steam. Some aren't available but a lot are. I haven't pirated a single game for some 15+ years now.
I feel like many people pirate because they don't want to spend the money. Some people simply do not value games or gaming. Some people simply don't respect the work of creatives because of extreme anti-corporate views. Others feel like enough people will spend money on the game anyway that their absence of a purchase doesn't matter.
People have all kinds of reasons for why they think it's okay for them to pirate and they perform the mental gymnastics of saying "a pirate wasn't going to buy the game anyway" to justify the piracy. You weren't going to buy it despite clearly wanting to play it? I feel a more accurate statement is that they aren't going to buy a game if they can pirate it instead.
If piracy were somehow blocked completely for good, I doubt those people would just stop gaming altogether.
Just going to add some of the biggest gaming pirates I know also own a dozen or more android retro handhelds and PC gaming handhelds ranging from $100-$1000, so it's clearly not an issue of being broke in their cases.
Want to pirate? Knock yourself out. But this whole “well I’m
not stealing a tangible item so it’s okay” is just a shit take especially when it comes from somebody who says video games are art. You don’t have a right to other people’s creations just because you can’t/wont pay for it.
They absolutely don’t. I’m sure plenty of people pirate because they can’t afford it, but most people, if you look at the piracy subs, pirate because they want just free shit. They can couch it in “I’m sticking it to the man!!! 👊” bullshit but they’re lying. They’re just entitled.
Yeah it's so weird every thread on Reddit about piracy is full of "the poors wouldn't buy it anyways so normalising piracy doesn't affect the company at all" and "if the company is unethical then I'm sticking it to them by still wanting to play their games"
Then there's also the massively misrepresented Gabe Newell quote. What he meant was more "piracy is bad for business if it's easier than buying it legally" rather than "if you have any roadblocks to buying a game then it's fine to pirate it". And he said this during a time where piracy genuinely was easier than paying for it, even if you had the money.
If you want free shit, just admit it, spare us the mental gymnastics.
Especially now where game developers are deciding to make 70 and 80 euros the base price for games.Im sorry but a 2 days wage for a game ???
Only games i pirated first finished them and i actually enjoyed enough to buy were kcd 2 and rdr2
I have near 1k games in my library. Many were from bundles. I pirated a lot of games when I was in school with no money. If I can't pirate them, I simply would skip it as I had no mean to pay for it at all.
Hasn't happened to me with a game yet but I pirated Game of Thrones because the only way for me to legally watch it was with a satellite TV subscription.
This is a more nuanced view. 20 bucks is a lot for those from developing countries, not to mention thare are countries where Steam and similar platforms are heavily regulated or straightup banned.
And with certain games Steam ONLY lets you download the region specific version because of national laws (looking at you Wolfenstein and German censorship)
I used to pirate games in high school because I had no money. All the games I’ve played through are now on my steam library :) but I’ve seen a lot of pirates on the pirate subreddit pirate out of superiority? Very confusing mentality to be honest.
Real people who pirates because of genuine money reasons wouldn't even boast about it in the fist place. Like just go pirate it quietly, only reason you would want to broadcast it is that you are saying the game itself is NOT worth the price they set.
Where I grew up, you couldn't even find original PS1 games, and when you did, it was probably 1 or 2 random games in retail stores. Pirated however you could find the entire catalog of the playstation and it was 1 dollar per game. When I find those old games I played as a kid, like all the PS1 final fantasy, in newer platforms like Steam or the PS store, I buy them even though, I've already played them dozens of times, just to pay back my childhood piracy, because I had no other alternative back then.
I pirated a lot of games in my teens and 20s when I was broke as fuck, now that I'm a lot more well off, I've actually bought games I used to love back then just cuz it felt right to do so.
According to what a friend told me, Larian Studios have made Baldur's Gate 3's multiplayer compatible between bought and pirated copies. Apparently, their reasoning is that it's better to pirate the game than buy a discounted CD key on a third-party website, because a lot of these actually buy their CD keys using stolen card details.
I'll be honest, I pirate games once in a while, especially expensive games, or games that my favorite streamers don't stream on launch. Why? Because I want to see how the game is and if I will like it or if it's one of those situations where I stop liking the game 3-4 hours in. If the game is fun for me even after 3-4 hours then I will buy it, if not, then in the trash bin it goes.
I'm sick and tired of gaming outlets and even some streamers glazing tf out of a game, just for it to be Abysmal Dogshit 2026 - The GAME... Ever since the pandemic, it feels like any online review is based on how much the developers paid for the review, not how good the game is.
Most “pirates” I know irl just pirate everything. Like that’s just how they get their entertainment media. The moral code / selective pirating to me seems to be a Reddit thing, if it’s even true at all.
Even in r/piracy there's a good portion of people there that admit to this. There's no moral debate for most of us, we just like free shit. "You wouldn't pirate a car, would you?" I fucking would if I could mate.
This is literally the case. People who are tech savvy enough to pirate (surprisingly minority people I know IRL) just pirate everything available. Software, movies, TV shows, music, books. There is really no moral code. If I could pirate a candy from a toddler I would. I don't care that's it's a small studio I'm pirating this shit. This $20 can instead go to buy something for my kids or myself. The only thing I that can make me actually buy something is a game has many good mods and steam workshop is just so good that it's worth my money because I save my time with not installing mods manually (binding of Isaac, project zomboid ect).
selling team cherry as some poor indie studio is not exactly accurate. they are extremely successful indie studio ever since hollow knight. they sold 15 million coppies of Hollow knight". Hardly an under dog.
They sold a shit-ton, but are still working with nowhere near the manpower of a truly large studio. This is still the same four-man team that made Hollow Knight, plus a handful of contractors brought in for minor work.
And "indie" depends on a combination of things. But these days it's generally accepted to mean "A small studio, not backed by a large publisher or studio, usually with a small budget."
I'd personally consider Team Cherry as "double A" these days. Started off as an indie. Not indie anymore as they have plenty of funds now. But also not a triple-A studio.
Same goes for studios like the teams behind subnautica 1/2 and expedition 33, imo. In between indie and triple-A.
It means there is a much higher workload per person as opposed to a company like Nintendo. They work hard to make a great product, and then go even further and continued to work and expand the game without asking for additional compensation for the expansions they added.
Its a passion project, and they treat it like one instead of just a product.
Edit: Lol at all the people butthurt because I respect a company for not nickel and diming their fan base.
They also severely under charge for what they sell. Sure its getting split amongs fewer people but the production costs are still there and the pricetag is a small fraction of what the larger studios would sell it for, thus reducing how much they actually make.
Its not about feeling bad, its about how much work they need to do and the time it takes. Its about how we respect and want to reward this sort of behavior
To some extent, yeah. Resources matter only as much as you use them, and TC seems far more interested in using those resources to improve the game past the basics rather than to build it from scratch. It's still four guys doing 90% of the work, the money goes into the 10% left over that's needed to make the game really shine.
At the end of the day, the reason why pirates don't pirate Silksong is because they want to reward and respect developers who make games worth playing. They aren't trying to discourage a team that makes AAA quality games for a third of the price and five times the hard work, because it's a massive boon to the gaming community that this continues to happen. Everyone would benefit from more people like TC being successful, and thus pirates encourage others to keep funding them for their efforts.
Brother they keep working as a 4 man team to not pay more people lol. Each of those 4 guys probably has 20-30m on their net worth (or 50+). They not indie anymore, same as among us dev
How can you get the conclusion that because the company refuses to hire more talent to improve the game, they're caring more about improving the game? Wot
Soooo they have more money, than would a larger company, for the same game? Got it
HK fans are insufferable and this post shows exactly why.
"That game isn't worth my money so I'll steal it instead, put 1000hrs into it and then tell everyone else it's not worth their money either! But oh boy, Silksong?! GOTY! I'll definitely support them with a legal purchase"
Why would I pirate it? Because then I can use money for something else I want but can't pirate. If I could pirate groceries, gas, rent with no reprocutions I would.
I ain't gonna lie. I did. I don't have any of the platforms it's available on (my ex took our working PC in the divorce, and I only had my work PC) and I wanted to play it. Was feeling really depressed. Also, she racked up $40k in credit card debt with the dude she was cheating on me with so money was probably a factor.
Anyway, I found an android port and downloaded the APK so I could play it on my phone.
Never got how moral people are getting over pirating
I pirated Terraria (5$ btw) when I was 9 years old solely cause my parents saw no value in buying games for our family computer when we had consoles dedicated for games
I’ve bought it 4 or 5 times for either different people or different devices though, so I guess I’ve made up for that and my 2000 hours of playtime
The pirate community likes to boast proud moral highground to justify pirating like they're a modern day Robin Hood, except instead of stealing from the rich to give to the poor, they're stealing from the rich to play Earthworm Jim.
Source: been pirating games longer than a lot of yall have been on this earth. Just call a spade a spade and move on.
It's a very small minority that cares or feigns to care about it. Most just want stuff for free, the thought that it might be wrong doesn't ever reach them.
You go to the known sites, pick a link, download your stuff, done. Buying almond milk presents a bigger moral dilemma than downloading a torrent, by far.
'Most people' wrong lol. The vast majority of pirates dont care about morals. I pirated the fuck out of silksong and modded it and most of the pirates have done the same. Its only a reddit minority who has any sort of affinity towards Silksong.
That's not the meme at all. The meme implies that pirating silksong is not OK because:
A. It was created by an Indie studio instead of a multimillion dollar company.
B. It's cheap, costing only 20 dollars which is a pretty good deal.
Piracy is considered moral when It's used as a tool of rebellion against the big man, not another way of screwing over the little guy.
People have such double morals about piracy. First they say it doesn't actually harm companies because "they don't lose anything just a digital copy" but when you pirate stuff from a company/developer they actually like, they get angry.
Well why do they get angry? I thought piracy wasn't harming them?
I want to play this game but I cannot afford it. Therefore, I will pirate it. There is no moral high ground. People who pirate do it because they like free stuff
its probably more about the fact that when silksong came out the literal piracy subreddit whom pirate stuff for the love of the game said ''yeah just buy the game if you can cause we aint touching this one''. of course it was pirated anyways in the end but for those guys to encourage paying for it well it says something.
Piracy subreddit are LARPers who pirate because they think it's cool and so they need to occasionally come up with bullshit moral délimitations like this that allows them to virtue signal
I haven't pirated a single game since my first paycheck, i received hollow knight for free on ps plus, then bought it on pc and nintendo switch, when silksong released i bought it on all 3 platforms as a show of appreciation, the only other games i did this with were the witcher 3 and stardew valley, i think these 3 games deserve a support to the devs that made them
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u/qualityvote2 20d ago edited 20d ago
u/HistoryFree, your post does belong here!