Just buy cheap and do not care where.

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.

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?

Honestly i focus on a balance of price and quality, but im not loyal to a company, ill buy from whoever can meet that need. Once a company starts charging too much, ill go elsewhere

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 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 ghappens you can change with which company you chose to spend money.

I had been a customer of Apple since the early 00s. I quite some 6-8 years ago because I realized how not the same company they had turned into.

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.

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.

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.

Perfection is the enemy of good

The point is, you’ll buy from them until they do shitty stuff…

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.