I actually bought ultrakill but now I have an even bigger respect for the chad that is Hakita
It's already been proven that piracy is a causal factor in more sales. Any self-interested dev should be promoting piracy of their game.
This is how you effectively combat the interests trying to kill libraries, filesharing and the public commons in general. Continue normalizing the activity, as it makes law designed to attack it all the more odious and unworkable. The bad guys lose when cultural attitudes rally around free information exchange. The key to that is being public and vocal like the dev.
Ultrakill, Terraria, Crosscode and Hollow Knight are the only singleplayer games I've gone out of my way to buy after playing through their pirated copies.
People in the future will be like:
"Pokémon? There's radio silence after the 3DS games. I think that Nintendo closed down by then."
"Ah, Ultrakill? Here. [points to some file in the repo] Still playable. Small dev from a brilliant indie scene."
I'm being kind of cheeky; it's reasonably possible that people in the future know that Nintendo games actually existed past the 3DS, they simply weren't preserved because their corporation got too greedy. In the meantime, game devs like Hakita are keeping their legacy alive.
I love the fact that he does not only speak of gaming piracy, but of general piracy in general. He talks about culture, and it's true, lack of culture is used to control the masses
It resembles the efforts of Archive.org and other culture-preservation driven websites/projects.
Internet is (or should be) our Library of Alexandria, where everyone is welcome —no matter their country, believes or financial situation— and have a feist on culture and knowledge like none other and for free. Games, art, books, cinema, Lemmy-like forums. You name it.
Intellectual property is a lie created to protect capitalist interests.
My opinion is that if you don't have not much money to spend into video games that's okay to pirate it, but try to encourage the creators by donating or just say thanks!
