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It's simply rewarding good behavior with your wallet. This goes for anything in life. I will never shop at Wal-mart, Amazon, Ebay, Microsoft or anyone else who actively hurts society by playing financial and legal games to get their way.
I'll take a hit to my bank account for paying a slightly higher price to reward good companies.
What's the point on buying from small business/indie dev. if they might become big and greed eventually?
Allow me to reformulate to a broader level:
what's the point of living if one is going to die no matter what?
The point is to try to do something.
The worst criminal is still a human being. Does that mean we should all commit suicide, now, the 8+ billion of us, to never risk becoming the same criminal? Hopefully not.
By supporting a (small) company whose work you appreciate you give them a chance to keep on doing good work, maybe. Things can change... and when this happens you can change with which company you chose to spend money.
I had been a customer of Apple since the early 80s. I quit some 6-8 years ago because I realized how not the same company they had turned into.
Edit: typo on the date I started being Apple's customer.
Best answer OP could have got
The point is, you'll buy from them until they do shitty stuff...
By supporting small companies you make sure alternatives to the big companies thrive. When the new alternatives become too big, now at least there are two companies instead of a monopoly or you start supporting a third up and coming. The idea is not to make the perfect choice, but to make sure there is a choice.
Like choosing between Apple (Mac, iOS), Google (Android) or Microsoft (Windows)? It still doesn't feel the right approach.
Well I use Linux, so none of the above
Me too, but that's an exception. The mainstream OSs are still in the hands of greedy companies.
Valid point but do you think they would be more or less greedy if they had no competition?
Applying that logic, it seems to me like you can't ever use money for anything. What if that open-source project you donated to goes paid? What if the friendly corner store owner turns his store into a billion dollar chain?
Perfectionism/idealism is the enemy of good
Do you mind to elaborate how is the idealism the enemy of the good?
The idea here is that by spending too long looking for the prefect solution and dismissing anything that is not perfect, you allow the bad system to thrive.
Regular and consistent changes for the better should not be dismissed because they could be better. Just keep trying to improve the system, no matter how small the change.
I think I developed some kind of fear given the recent events on human history, I'm completely afraid of helping a company to become enshittified with my own money
Again. That is a valid feeling.
Be sceptical, be cynical, but don't get that fatalist mindset where you feel like your choices won't make a difference.
Not every small choice will make a difference, but some will, you just won't know which one's or what their effect will be.
What's the point of pirating if you're going to be morally confused?
You either pirate or don't. Why complicate it?
People pirate for a variety of reasons, but largely it comes down to "cause its free and I can" whether they accept that or not, but it is the truth.
And a lot of the time, people who pirated games, buy them because they wanted to support the developer anyways. They didn't have this stupid worry that you have here as to whether or not it'll be popular, it is because the experience was so great, it was worthwhile to buy it anyways.
It'll only be a waste of money, time and effort pirating the game if the studio or a standout individual involved turns out to be a shitty person. Not because they're popular, if a small game or studio is popular, then great, we all love to see it. It is until big corporation decides to stamp them out via acquiring or law-suiting them to death is when it is a problem.
Buy it on sale if this is such a huge worry. You don't know that the indie thing will turn evil and many end up okay.
Honestly why i prefer cooperative over small buisness. Small coop my vote matters more buy big coop i still have a vote.
Opensource or otherwise contributes to public good also helps mitigate this too. So if Proton goes off the deep end the qurstion is what forks exists and not "how do i learn a new product and convince everyone i know to do the same?"
Again best case is i can vote to keep the coop sane/aligned with my interests AND I can fork/self-host/etc.
So, instead of paying for a game, which provides money to that dev, you will instead pirate that game, you'll steal from them instead, potentially driving them to poverty.
If you pirate it, you are the bad person. If you don't want to risk it, don't buy it, and don't pirate it either.
