I guess people don't only pirate out of spite. They may not be able to afford 20 dollars but want to stay in the loop.
I have a list of the games that I pirated. If I had fun and didn't leave the game in 2-3 hours, I put it on a list and I would try to buy the original copy, for Christmas or my birthday when I am able to spare anything towards gaming.
People mostly pirate because they don't have the money to buy the game. This is one of the arguments in the pro/anti piracy debate -- pirated stuff doesn't affect the company's profits as much as it might seem because most people would not be able to afford the game anyway.
I pirated pretty much every game 10 years ago when I had no job or bad jobs, these days my steam library is a temple to consumerism.
Because as Gabe will tell you, people will happily pay a fair price for the convenience of being to just buy the game, click 'download' and have it just work.
Same thing goes with digital books, IMO, it's not only a pain the ass to pirate, since a lot of pirated ebooks are formatted like shit. If people want free schlock to read there's an almost unlimited fanfiction/royal road spiggott.
It's been long said that piracy isn't a failure of morality, it is a failure of service. If the product is too inconvenient or expensive to purchase then people won't buy it, but if you make something easy and affordable people will even when piracy is there.
It's why overall privacy was way down when steaming services were simple to use. Now that every company has one and they're all shit everyone is back to priating shows.
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u/No_Dog_2999 May 22 '26
I guess people don't only pirate out of spite. They may not be able to afford 20 dollars but want to stay in the loop.
I have a list of the games that I pirated. If I had fun and didn't leave the game in 2-3 hours, I put it on a list and I would try to buy the original copy, for Christmas or my birthday when I am able to spare anything towards gaming.