I remember that, epic moment indeed. I was pretty young, but I didn't understand how can one ruin own house and be proud of it. I still can't.

In just a few following years, good percentage of these people will die for various reasons... I can probably claim that most of these people will loose everything or near everything of what they had due to incoming ponzi schemes of MMM, Hoper invest and so on, as well as basically, a collapse of industrial, transport and commercial sectors. After crime rate and poverty skyrockets, people will be hit by Chechen war and then Black Monday. The social standards will drastically fall, as will their income and security on streets.

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The mass media will shift focus from mostly cultural programs to crime films and soap operas (like Los Ricos También Lloran).

None of them will appreciate what they've done and whom they supported. I can guarantee you that.

Edit: I noticed how GOG forum still managed to eat out half of my response. GOG guys, really, please, install some decent forum software and be done with it...

I can see that even though I've clearly won this argument, as far as you are concerned, I will never win this argument, regardless of what else I show you and prove, so I shall make my exit from this thread now. Besides, I really don't want to be here when you start in on how wonderful Collectivization was and how the millions and millions of people whom Stalin starved to death were actually grateful to be dying for their country. :P

How did you manage to mix "Moscowite", "Ukrainian", "Crimea" and "USSR" to "EU" in one topic :///

Also.

Sorry, but from historical point of view, Collectivization was a good thing - the education and production skyrocketed. You just have to look at poverty of regular population in years preceding revolution (aka "maidan" :D). Its unrealistic that these problems could've been solved by Nicolas II and co. Just look at economic growth of 195x-6x.. During this era, the USSR created an infrastructure that has managed to carry it through rest of the time, and even during Perestroyka the criminals have literally failed to steal everything of it. The housings built in Stalin era can often still be seen in the cities - they are of very good build quality and with high ceiling, about equal to upper class residential flats in the west. Although they were given away, rather than bought, after Perestroyka those old stalin flats were quoted pretty high.

This does not include the 192x - late 3x -- those were, like I said, bloody and dirty years, because of the careerists and rednecks that got the power, but there was still some economic progress.

Also, neither you nor me are raging wars for any arguments, we are just exchanging opinions and experiences. Don't confuse my experience with me defending communism, I do not endorse it, because like I said, it has grave flaws as a ruling method. But, like a claim that 1950-1980 USSR were a "concentration camp" of some sort, is false. Perhaps, you mean "equalization of income" as a counterargument, that would be true one - it lead to many "brains" leaving the country. Getting the best education for free and then fleeing (temporary or permanently), haha, that was essentially took place. :)

It killed more people than the Holocaust. It was a "good thing".

Okay then, I can't top that. :P I'm done.

Erm,... no, it didn't. Maybe you are confusing it with yezhovshchina? Its arguably more efficient farming technique. But where it really excelled at - was transparency towards government, so corruption went down. There was still private property, but the political ideology was that regular citizen has nothing to hide. People who excelled in industry were well-rewarded, at least - not on the capitalist scale, but more socially. You can say, they were motivated by heart rather than by financial stimuli... So its technically very efficient - but requires leadership behavior from state (, which attracts crooks into it). And once that leadership fails, and it did fail in 198x, people will start making connections, reporting false statistics, - thus the corruption. The "equalization", combined with low priority on individualism lead to dissatisfaction and no small scale entrepreneurship caused damage in high-tech industry however, so yes - too much "big brother" overwatch could be good for the start, but very harmful in the long run.
You can actually track similar model in corporate culture of big industry, especially japanese - which is known to be one of the most efficient, and also in military, where most stuff is owned by government and playing as a team is most important... funny, isnt it?

Honestly, you've got two general groups of people who pirate:

A) People who cannot afford to buy every game they want, and "test out" games before purchasing them
B) People who just dgaf and pirate because they hate the major devs/publishers.

Both of these groups are related in that they can't trust a new game to be good. Personally, I don't pirate and haven't since I was a kid, but I can see why especially poor people, want to test drive a game before buying it. I'm pretty poor myself, but I choose to wait for sales for most games instead of test driving them or buying them full price.

I got burned by FarCry 3, 4, and Primal all basically being the same game. I got burned by other publishers releasing mediocre games for $60. I get it.

The real reason that major game publishers are so afraid of pirates, is not because of the effect piracy supposedly has on sales, but because they have little to no faith in their product selling based on its own merits. Well, this is my opinion, anyway.

Games on gog tend to be here either by devs and pubs who have more faith in gamers (Example given: They tend to be actual gamers themselves) or by major companies who have already gotten a profit off said game, and are looking to cash in on the drm-free craze with a low risk option.

I know someone who makes $80k CAD a year, which I hear is about like $50k in the US, which is definitely middle class, and does not buy a single new game without testing it first because he's been burned by games like Hellgate: London, etc. Do I blame him? I am neutral, but I definitely can at least understand why he does it. I am not saying it's right, but the industry needs to look at itself more than someone like CliffyB railroading Epic for several years because he hates pc gamers. Look at all that revenue Epic lost because of him. They lost out on millions of dollars from not porting the Gears of War franchise over, because he was afraid of dirty pc gamers.

As far as the EU, they may not be perfect, but they have some laws that really put my country's government to shame.

Honestly, the biggest issue I have with the "piracy=lost sales" fallacy is that DRM will reform a pirate into buying a game.
They won't. They just won't play it at all, like what happened with Lords of the Fallen, or they'll wait until it's on sale at a fraction of the original price. Either way, the company is going to lose money.

Anymore, I feel like DRM isn't actually there to prevent piracy, it's there to control content, in an attempt to reduce expose to said content before purchase. The new trend of no advance copies to reviewers/etc, isn't helping dissuade me from that theory.

It almost seems like they're willfully attempting to isolate their demographics before they can form an opinion on their product, which, as most people have begun to notice, usually means that that product isn't terribly high quality, and even if it IS, I'm less likely to make a full purchase on a new game, if I know nothing about it. There are VERY few games still in relevance that I would consider an unthinking Day One purchase, and even fewer companies that have achieved that status with me.

What I will say is this: there are a LOT of companies spending money on DRMing up their products, that will never see a dime from me to begin with, so it's pointless blaming pirates for people like me, who don't like their business practices, their products, or their agendas to begin with. Even if I did pirate, I still wouldn't do so to Ubisoft, EA or a few others. I'm just plain not interested. Don't care.

EA will get money when they release old classics here and that's the entirety of my relationship with them.

I thought the new trend was EA/Indev which has loads of transparency, as well as letting popular youtubers/twitch players play your game before release to hype it up?

I certainly don't feel the trend is towards hiding your game, but then I've been keeping less track of new releases in the last couple of months

(That said, my most recent purchase was XCOM 2's expansion which did great in that regard xD)

I still quasi-trust 2K games a bit more than I do EA, but no, maybe it's not EA specifically, but there's been multiple large publishing companies who have been making a habit of NOT courting youtubers or reviewers until the game's actual release. That, in my opinion, could lead to piracy, as more than a few people aren't going to drop $60 on a new game blind. (Unless it's on Steam, in which case, their refunding policy makes it less of a risk.)

EA in this context being Early Access xD

To a certain degree that is true, but only because war with Germany was imminent. But really speaking, the Bolsheviks weren't much better than the Nazis. Both had an unhealthy love of power that overrode all other concerns, and the human cost was almost unfathomable -- and still is.

You seem to be forgetting that Germany wasn't given a choice -- it was neutered.