NOTE : This is a rant article.
Given the recent news of Epic 'Failure' Games delisting the Unreal franchise off of Steam and GoG, resulting in Unreal becoming abandonware, It's now appropriate to make this rant article. Before I give out the reasoning for why piracy will still be a thing, I want to get this out of my chest about Epic.
I understand the idea of shutting down master servers, considering that it costs money to keep them alive, plus the people at OldUnreal and 333networks run their own master servers for both Unreal and UT. OpenSpy (a reverse-engineered GameSpy alternative) has support for UT2004. The only UT that might not survive is UT4 (2014-2018) and UT3 (temporary for the time being).
UPDATE : Sometime after the writing of this article, OpenSpy implemented support for Unreal Tournament III.
What doesn't make sense is the fact that the games are getting delisted from digital storefronts without a clear reason. Considering the first Unreal has a single-player campaign and the Unreal Tournament series has a single-player tournament and botmatches, Epic delisting the entire franchise pisses me off to no end!
Epic is taking a massive shit on their legacy while catering to low-IQ children (or manbabies) with Fortnite. Maybe if Epic had kept the games up, they would have made extra money from the recent COPPA lawsuit they lost.
As for piracy, it's companies like Epic and even Gearbox Software that encourage people to download games off of Archive.org or other abandonware sites. People may ask me, Why not just purchase a used copy off of eBay, Amazon, etc.? Because people can scalp prices for these games! I mean, good fucking luck if you are going to hunt down a copy of an obscure game for horrendous prices. Seriously, I hate that route so much. People who are anti-piracy can be annoying at times.
If it were me, I would only allow sharing downloads for games via private messages because sharing stuff publicly could risk places getting taken down. Another benefit of pirating games is that you can try before you buy the game and support the developer. The reason for this is that barely anybody puts out demos or sharewares of various games anymore. So if I were to say to download a GoG installer for some throwback shooter that has no demo, I would try it for a bit, and if I liked it, I would wishlist the game on Steam.
But yeah.. Before I conclude this article, keep in mind that I don't recommend pirating the game you like (especially from indie developers) because that can damage game sales. It's only okay if you are either trying the game out (if it doesn't have a demo out yet) or the game is no longer on sale anymore. As always, support indie developers and buy their games.
