Piracy and Games
I can’t speak for the whole republic of the interwebs, but let me tell you when I download games from file shares rather than buy them.
1) No longer available. Such as Metal Fatigue. Fucking Psygnosis and their convoluted fucking corporate death.
2) I’ve bought the game, but it has DRM, which is irritating. Especially if you’re trying to use wine to run it under linux.
3) There’s no fucking demo available.
4) I bought the game, then had the disc get nuked.
Allow me to harp on point 3 there, ok? A number of studios have embraced Steam like services, which is fantastic, and the internet has been used to deploy patches for a long time now, yet demos of things are still so fucking rare, which is a shame. Green House Games seems to have this pegged, but for a lot of titles we either never see a demo or only get one months and months after release. So, in lieu of that, I download the illegal versions. Why? Because if I’m shelling out $40 to $60 I’d like to know if something is going to make me vomit or not.
Don’t believe me? Here’s a short list of titles I can think of doing this way then purchasing
Mechwarrior 4 (and all the expansions)
Dawn of War, plus the extortions, I mean expansions
Supreme Commander + Forged Alliance
Il2 Sturmovik
There’s others that I’m pretty sure about, but not enough to put it on paper.