Well, yeah. Pirated games are also much more convenient to run nowadays with all the launcher logins and DRM checks that games go through. If I get a game from EGS that requires any other kind of check, I already have the game for free, but I’ll grab a pirated copy jist so I can launch it will a single click.

I imagine a lot of people use piracy as a way to get a sort of demo of a game, especially as demos got more and more rare. Pirate a game play it for a while, and pay for it if you like it.

I would imagine a considerable number of people use games piracy as a form of demo, since they’re very rarely available anymore. Combining that with a lot of people not being able to afford the games they were pirating even if they did want to pay for them, I’m not very surprised that piracy is more of an advertising boost to games than a hindrance.

I can only speak anecdotally, but if I had not pirated so many classic games when I was younger and didn’t have expendable income, I wouldn’t spend the inordinate amount of money on games that I do now. I’ve spent way more than I ever pirated at this point. And I often buy remakes/remasters/rereleases of games I pirated in the past, now that I can afford them. I literally just did that with Ghost Trick.

Piracy is the only way I got into gaming. My parents were never going to spend the amount of money they did on my gaming habit. I got by with a home built cobbled together PC and Napster/limewire with cracks from game copy world. When I grew up and finally had income of my own I went back and purchased every single game I loved so I could keep it in my collection.