Topic: Unpopular Gaming Opinions

The idea that "piracy is a service issue" mostly relates to the early days of online stores for PC gaming, where you'd typically have anti-piracy measures coming with physical media that made it a legitimate annoyance, including software that would give itself root access to your operating system and single use codes that would restrict re-installs even to the same PC. Meanwhile, pirate copies of games would have all of that stripped out.

Then along came Steam, and other online storefronts, and you could finally just buy your games, have them download automatically and play pretty much seamlessly on all your computers. That pretty much addressed the "service issue."

That's never really been a thing with consoles though, and even ones that have been cracked wide open have generally still enjoyed decent software sales, because owning your games never made you a second class citizen like that.

Playing with pirated games and illegal modded machine is really a big temptation.
It's back to your moral value to justify the right way of playing the games.
If you think playing with original games & machines is something right then you really want to do good deed.
I got the enlightenment after I bought original game and machine for the first time from 3DS in year 2013 and it changed my mind forever.
I'm no longer want to play pirated games with illegal modded machine.
Instead, I made the retro machines like PS2 or Wii reverted back into Original state by removing the modchip inside PS2 machine and Reset factory Wii machine with Homebrew and update the machine with the highest update patch after Factory reset.
So, the gaming piracy as the excuse for gaming preservation is really SMH for me. 🙄

I will say, barring maybe people who actively try to profit off of it, I have less issue with piracy than people being really annoying about how they do piracy. One of those things where the moral wrong of "annoying me" is greater than the actual crime, I'm being at least half serious.

Or worse the people who just lie about it. Underrated annoying online gamer "ew this costs too much I'll just start emulating now" no you won't, you liar. I'm convinced who were loudest about that don't even do it. Especially when Nintendo fell on their face with the N64 NSO launch and so many people clearly did not understand how flawed N64 emulation can be.

@Megas75 The reverse is true as well, don't chide or castigate people who sail the high seas for otherwise inaccessible media that generates no revenue. What people do in their own homes is none of my business.
Also, people are allowed to critique the quality of products that Nintendo releases. These are very barebones releases, "ports" which are just ROMs in an official emulator. No screen size options, no CRT or LCD shaders, no save states, nothing, just the game and no quality of life features. That alone is worthy of critique.

Octopath 0 killed JRPGs as a genre for me. I genuinely think I hate them now because of this game and how bland and generic it is. The main issue is that this game opens my eyes to how horrible JRPG storytelling actually is, and how these games are ultimately just the same bowl of tropes over and over again with zero to no variation between them. They endlessly recycle characters and ideas ad nauseam and are full of bloat. It's literally just spending 50-70 USD on a game that has 80 hours of filler content and then a climax that has a character become a God, or a God starting an apocalypse that ends the world. Shove in some hollow and depth-less character tropes and you have a JRPG storyline! Bonus points if you overtly explain the main themes of the plot over and over to the player as if they're a five year old with minimal intelligence.

I used to love this genre, but now I don't even think I can stomach it if it isn't a creature collecting game without a serious plot (Pokemon, Monster Hunter Stories, and Digimon effectively).

@VoidofLight To be fair Octopath 0 is probably one of the worst examples of JRPG writing. Even the way dialogue is written itself feels like filler, like someone got paid per word, but you're not wrong in general. I've grown extremely tired of the tropeyness over the years as well. I still enjoy the Xenoblade Chronicles games as they do enough differently, but it's an exception as a series at this point for me.