My initial response is prob as sarcastic as the others but a thought just occurred to me.

Skyrim, v1. The og release, before all the mods and bug fixes.

Undoubtedly still a better game than Star field. But was it the Skyrim we revere today? Will Starfield be transformed into something fun over the next decade?

What am I on about. Almost certainly not lol.

YES YES YES YES YES YES YES.

YES.

Have you checked out his podcast? He’s such an interesting person.

It’s called ‘Metaphysical Milkshake’.

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I see what you did there ;)

I guess, I just don’t see many people getting something for free then deciding to go buy it out of the goodness of their heart… maybe I’m too pessimistic.

I try not to pirate music production software because I make some small money from my music, and I’ve personally seen companies go bust and get snapped up by Apple because everyone (me included) justified pirating their small plugins as “they’re making lots of money anyway”. But I justify pirating shit like Adobe to myself I hate paying a subscription to use software. I dunno maybe more people have this mindset than I realise and are happy to pay after ‘trying before buying’.

I’m interested to hear responses from anyone who genuinely buys the music they enjoy after pirating it. Why would they not just buy it in the first place?

Ah come on you know what I meant.

People say this all the time about Spotify, but it’s actually a viable outlet for revenue if you’re on a decent label who understands how to leverage playlists.

Obv that doesn’t apply for freeform… but for styles like trance, techno, DnB etc it’s not unheard of for a track to get 500k streams across a variety of playlists, which equates to $1500.

Got a sample preview of your favorite release?

I don’t think it would be wise to dox myself here after I’ve made an unpopular comment!

I agree. I think people have taken my comment as a defence of the geoblocking, was just offering an example of why someone like a small indie musician may choose to do that. I do find it frustrating when I have to VPN to a different country to watch a video.

But the reason I geoblock one country isn’t to be an arsehole, it’s because Russia has no recourse for indie musicians like myself who have their music stolen. They have no law preventing music theft which is why it’s rampant in that one territory (not saying it doesn’t ever happen elsewhere). Pretty much the entire rest of the world has some sort of avenue where I can issue something like a dmca.

Hard to say really. I’m fairly sure if it was available online for free, less people would have bought it.

When you’re talking only £2000 or so of sales for a small indie release, piracy makes a huge hit to sales. My more popular stuff like trance, the sales drop off a cliff the moment it’s leaked. There was a huge problem with people on promo lists leaking pre-released tracks to warez sites, not sure if the main labels (eg ones like Armada, Anjuna etc) ever got to the bottom of it, but it really hurt the sales of people who aren’t exactly making bank from their music

Exactly. I had a 12 track album up for £9, or single tracks for 99p, don’t think that’s unreasonable!

Pirating from massive companies who exploit their workers and customers is different from pirating small indie artists, surely?

Whenever I release music myself, I actively block it in Russia, because they relentlessly steal my trance / freeform releases and upload them in warez sites.

Of course geoblocking can be circumvented by a determined pirate but it helps to not be on their radar in first place as a lesser known artist.

As an example, once I released a freeform album. Freeform is a very niche, small scene. It was on Russian forums within a couple of days. Fortunately one of my fans notified me, I had a Russian friend contact the site on my behalf to explain that I’m a poor struggling artist, and they’re literally taking money out of my pocket; to my surprise they agreed to take the links down.

I’d say to be careful what you wish for, because once the game has begun, it doesn’t end until the cat is bored. It’s impossible to resist the cute drop / sad little cat-activation-noise when you get distracted and don’t notice.

One of my friends in Finland has a couple of cats, one is fairly disinterested in people but the other loves to play fetch with her toys. It’s ridiculously cute.

Sounds like a job for Vicious Mockery. Call in the bard!

Good advice. I probably need to adjust my mindset, as a general rule I don’t replay games as I find it boring… but this one has so much replayability. Instead of my usual “do all sidequests, complete, uninstall” maybe I should just finish the game proper, then start a new run through and continue exploring.

From everything I heard about Karlach, I massively fucked up by… how do I say without spoilers… decidedly not including her in my party. I done goofed.

I’m feeling the same in act 3 tbh. I stopped playing for 3 weeks as I moved and didn’t have my pc setup, now I’m struggling to get back into it.

Feel a bit overwhelmed, lost, lots and lots of different threads and not sure now which to pull on.

I don’t get the hate for kale. Never would buy it after decades of reading how horrid it is… Decided one day to try it and found it’s actually refreshing and tasty, aside from the health benefits

Well, I can confirm I’m using it to write this comment, very smooth experience for me.

I’m using the free version, so far any ads I’ve seen are not intrusive and tbh fairly rare