In addition to gp's point: After settling my income I began buying software (games mostly) on steam/etc to support studios I like, but it is still much easier to torrent it afterwards and to not deal with bs that stores represent. I never realized before how much hassle it is to own a legal version of everything. You pay your money and they don't even bother of your convenience or digital rights, only theirs. Recently I bought starcrart remastered (without torrenting) and that battle.net downloads over 200mb over my adsl line every flipping time I try to run it. As a result, I just watch falcon pal match reviews at youtube and never run it. Blizzard deserved that money for sure, but man isn't that stupid.
Playing pirated game is putting trust into the hands of some anonymous hackers. And that begs the question, what do they gain from giving out the game for free?
They could be doing it just for fun, for coolness, or out of altruism. And that's true for probably many case. But to say none of them wanted to earn expedient money would not persuade me.
Malware and Spyware is pretty common with purchased games, of course they call it "DRM" but it has the same goal and purpose
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/06/crackers-say-denuvo-d...
That's the point. Companies have proved themselves not accountable to their customers.
A modder distributed a tool to bypass the anti-cheat and restore performance the same day the expansion released. It took over two weeks for Capcom to get the game playable again, and many more before they improved performance back to roughly pre-update levels.
For reference, I'd been using Steam Proton to play the base game on Linux and was getting 60fps at nearly max settings. After the update, I got 1. One frame per second. I saw a number of similar reports from native Windows players.
This is kind of expected for online gaming due to many folks fucked up mentality of using cheats and playing with rest of the crowd (some psychologists could probably go quite deep on breaking this down to mostly childhood issues). If you play on your own, its just a pain in the a.
Many people buy the game and then play pirated version, just to avoid this kind of punishment of the lawful citizens.
Probably over half the popular multiplayer products on Steam have rootkits in them that send a lot of data about you straight to the publisher. Companies are not accountable for the things you want them to be accountable for, so for normal people it just looks like they're not accountable at all.