Also teenagers grow up eventually having money to buy the games on their own.

I’m a Diablo and StarCraft fan because of pirated games played during my childhood when I couldn’t convince my parents to let me buy them.

I was exactly the same! But then StarCraft 2 came out, I went out of my way to purchase the retail box, it had nothing more than a slip of paper with a CD key inside, I grudgingly went to download it and Blizzard demanded a bunch of PII from me. I regret the purchase.

Not making that mistake twice. I imagine this is one of the reasons that Steam is so successful. No surprises and near zero friction. Why risk going elsewhere as a consumer?

Steam requires the same bullshit. It's just that you only do it once, and it remembers your PII for your future purchases. In this way, centralised marketplaces have lower friction.

Did Steam change something? I first opened the account to claim a game via license code. It only required a working email at the time.

Later I chose to provide my credit card for convenience. As far as I know I could have instead used gift cards or prepaid cards.

Regardless, there's also an issue of trust. I might choose to provide PII to a large central marketplace that has a good reputation but providing it to each individual producer seems highly questionable.

As a broke ass teenager, yeah I didn't pay for them. Now as big money adult I bought them almost 1.5 times over. Once on GoG and sometimes on Steam.

When I was a kid, piracy was the norm. If your friend had a game you liked, you would just grab the tape, go home, insert into the recorder and make a copy. I didn't know about buying games or what I did was bad until well into the 90s.

> I didn't know about buying games or what I did was bad until well into the 90s.

Really? When we were pirating games off each other as teenagers in the early 80s, we absolutely knew we were getting games for free that the publishers wanted us to pay for.