Hmm… Katamari Damacy, Braid, Portal 1 2 combo. Subnautica.

Iirc, the future government (? I guess) weren’t trying to find the source to stop the release, but to get a pure sample to study so as to cure the disease in the future. The lady on the plane was there to get the sample.

If their art doesn’t make enough money then it’s clearly not in enough demand.

Unless you burden the word ‘enough’ with far too much work in that sentence, then that implication doesn’t necessarily follow. It is possible for something to be in great demand by those without money to spend. Furthermore, it is possible for there to be issues with the logistics between the source and the demand (e.g. demand is very physically distributed, or temporally limited and/or sporadic).

Money is a very particular way of empowering and aggregating only some demand. It ties the power of demand to history and not moral or egalitarian considerations for one.

Ditto.

Canceling cable used to be, at the very least, a long, phone call that alternated between stretches of hold music dulling the senses and combative sales technique verbal jousting. Canceling a streaming service… I don’t think that has ever taken me more than four minutes of finding a webpage and clicking. The collective consciousness is in danger of forgetting/underplaying just how far we have come on this.

If pirating ever takes less than four minutes every other month, I guess it will have reached convenience parity. But it certainly wasn’t that back when I was in that game. And I really, really doubt it is now.