I’ve been gaming for 35 years. I’ve known dozens of people who pirate games IRL. Online, I’ve probably known hundreds. Literally zero of them ever purchased a legitimate copy of a game after pirating it.
I think the “try before I buy” justification for piracy is completely dishonest and disingenuous. I have far more respect for people who simply admit that they want to play games without paying for them. Because that’s at least believable.
Nah, I've known at least 1 or 2 who do it, and done it myself a few times. It's definitely a rarity because more often when I'm on the fence enough to do that, I get it and realize "yeah, this is why I had my doubts". Then a portion of games I ever seek out are ones I technically already own on some defunct platform.
Hell, just last week I tried a leaked dev DRM-less copy of dragon's dogma 2, and thought "this is alright" and bought it. Then had to refund it because the actual release version was unstable garbage that crashed constantly, compared to a rock steady pirate version.
I wonder how much this behavior is influenced by the complete absence of demos and rentals in the industry now. I never bought every game I rented from Blockbuster, but I've definitely played a few demos to death and then bought the fully game when I finally found it, but sometimes that 900 seconds of the original GTA was all the experience I needed.
I do also know a few guys who will use the 2 hour steam refund window as a demo system, but honestly I'm usually happier to seek out a pirate copy rather than waste a real person's time at customer support for something I can just as easily do independently.
Plus I think the more you do treat Steam's refunds like that the more strict they get about what they'll let you do, understandably so, and I'd rather not strain their hospitality. Same reason I always get my refunds as steam credit, rather than real money. It's objectively worse for me in the short term, but they've generally been good enough to me as a customer than I'd rather do that than make them eat extra bank charges for an almost negligible inconvenience.
I’ve been gaming for 35 years. I’ve known dozens of people who pirate games IRL. Online, I’ve probably known hundreds. Literally zero of them ever purchased a legitimate copy of a game after pirating it.
I think the “try before I buy” justification for piracy is completely dishonest and disingenuous. I have far more respect for people who simply admit that they want to play games without paying for them. Because that’s at least believable.
Nah, I've known at least 1 or 2 who do it, and done it myself a few times. It's definitely a rarity because more often when I'm on the fence enough to do that, I get it and realize "yeah, this is why I had my doubts". Then a portion of games I ever seek out are ones I technically already own on some defunct platform.
Hell, just last week I tried a leaked dev DRM-less copy of dragon's dogma 2, and thought "this is alright" and bought it. Then had to refund it because the actual release version was unstable garbage that crashed constantly, compared to a rock steady pirate version.
I wonder how much this behavior is influenced by the complete absence of demos and rentals in the industry now. I never bought every game I rented from Blockbuster, but I've definitely played a few demos to death and then bought the fully game when I finally found it, but sometimes that 900 seconds of the original GTA was all the experience I needed.
I do also know a few guys who will use the 2 hour steam refund window as a demo system, but honestly I'm usually happier to seek out a pirate copy rather than waste a real person's time at customer support for something I can just as easily do independently.
Plus I think the more you do treat Steam's refunds like that the more strict they get about what they'll let you do, understandably so, and I'd rather not strain their hospitality. Same reason I always get my refunds as steam credit, rather than real money. It's objectively worse for me in the short term, but they've generally been good enough to me as a customer than I'd rather do that than make them eat extra bank charges for an almost negligible inconvenience.
If games have been made with ESG money then we already paid for it.
Where are you from?