I don't try to criticize people for pirating games. They're expensive and a lot are greedy.

What I do tell people though is support good games.

If you end up playing a pirated game you really enjoy, you should try to support it if you can, even if it's from one of the bigger publishers. It's basically our only way to truly tell a publisher that we like something and to keep making it.

Not counting un reasonably priced re-releases though. I totally get that (looking at you Nintendo for Galaxy 1+2)

If something isn't respecting your values, I'm of the opinion that you make a stronger statement by not even pirating those games. If you're spending time playing them, you're also not spending time and money playing some game that was meticulously made to respect your values. You're fine playing indie games, but you'd play more of them if you gave up playing these AAA games that you decided to pirate. You talk to your friends and on forums about the games you play, which will at some point convince someone else to buy and play them, too. If you want them to hurt, so that they change, don't even give them the time of day.

Since you mentioned publishers that haven't been greedy, I'll throw a few more out there that I think are worthy of support. They don't need launchers, that don't need accounts, they don't have predatory subscriptions. They just make great games.

• Supergiant Games: Transistor, Hades, Hades II
• Larian Studios: Divinity Original Sin, DOS II, Baldur's Gate 3
• Playstack: Balatro

Otherwise, I'm totally with you. The account-walling of the Internet as a whole has pissed me off royally and I see no reason to give those bastards what they want.

I am just ignoring them. Not playing their games even pirated.

Played the demo of Prince of Persia last year, totally liked it, price was good, saw the Ubisoft Logo (CEO tells that you don't get to own your games, AAA games priced 70-130 €, anti consumer practices), never bought that game never played it.

Nintendo also took a red card this year from me, not another penny from my wallet.

Bonus i put in my Steam ignore list all the games that come out with price >60 €, so i wont make a mistake and buy them even on a huge sale.

I buy indie games and only AAA games full priced like BG3, Expedition 33, Elden Ring, etc.. , games that they worth it and they don't bloat you with stupid stuff. And also their companies respect the players.

There's so much competition in gaming right now, and good AAA games are so few and far between, that I don't see a need for piracy. For every $90 piece of garbage there are ten $20 diamonds (don't forget Devolver in your list of good small companies). I don't ever buy dlc/deluxe/etc editions unless the company/game has earned it (almost never).

I will admit, Rockstar creates some high quality experiences, but their monetization practices are down there with the worst of them.

I can't justify not pirating, I just think for me the motivation isn't strong enough right now. Too many affordable good games to choose from.

I haven't bought a full price AAA game in at least 20 years for this reason.

The last few years though things are getting really bad and I have begun investing heavily into retro game disks for my PC as well as on my OG Wii and PS1, 2 and 3 games for my PS3 phat.

I'm getting some great games for l from $1 - $12 that i can play anytime, no connection required.

Why bother with ethics or morality? I've been pirating what I can half of my life now, just because I'm a poor and stingy bastard. Let people with finished mortgages and nice cars pay those companies.

Rockstar: Abandoning and cancelling GTA V (single player) expansions and purely focused on milking online for pay2win. I'm not hyped for 6.

EDIT: The worst part - declaring war against modding community because it affected their online sales (since people enjoyed playing modded singleplayer). It backfired, badly, but they still went for it.

There are only 3 developers I will preorder from whenever I find the game they are releasing interesting. Erin "Concerned Ape" (Stardew Valley); Bob the Bot (Survivalist); and Terry Cavanagh, the creator of VVVVVV.
They keep their games updated, they are pretty chill people, and they keep players informed during development.
For now, they are the only ones who have earned my trust.

For everything else, it's full patientgamer mode for me. Wait until the whole game is released with a single price tag, 90% discount, no online requirements outside of multiplayer, and community fixes.

I don't know if its the age or perhaps I unconciously became sick of the practices OP describes, but the games I genuinelly enjoy playing the most nowadays are mainly AA or Indie. And ofc, I don't mind paying full price for them.

A non-exhaustive list of those I loved:

• Outer Wilds (became my favourite game of all times)
• Inside/Limbo
• Little Nightmares
• Sifu
• The standley parable
• Still awakes the deep
• Gris/Neva
• Firewatch
• Journey/Abzu/The Pathless/Sea of Sword
• Rainworld
• No man's sky (a special case, I know)
• Cocoon
• Unravel
• Stray
• Below
• Far
• Pacific Drive
• The invincible

I pirated the RDR remaster and felt very entitled to because I bought it way back on xbox360 with the Undead Nightmare mode, but that whole DLC is broken even though they still sold it to me on the Xbox store. So I pirated to new remaster and when I went to play Undead Nightmare, it's still broken lol

Steam is fine, for the most part, but steam is also DRM. Personally I opt to buy games on GoG, because whatever releases there, you can download the installer and play offline, anywhere, anytime, and due to the platform requirements it strips a lot of the extra nonsense of requiring accounts and launchers and such.

The one downside is some publishers/developers don’t have the latest version on there or release on there later as definitive builds, but it’s better than having to deal with all that nonsense to begin with.

I just don't buy games that have features I don't like. I don't pirate them, I just don't play them.

Most of my money goes to indies because they don't pull this BS. I'll play the occasional AAA game if it's worth it, but not many.

Just curious. Is piracy your strategy to kill the big companies, since you really want to consume their products but don't want to pay, because of your stated reasons?

For the sake of discussion, is it not possible for you to not buy products from big companies but also not consume their products?

Using myself as an example, I hate EA so much I don't install any of their products on my machine. Or I hate Adobe so I don't use it at home (the workplace is uncontrollable). I don't pirate their products as there are alternatives, and I cannot imagine how I may enjoy them since I cannot forget who made them.

Same story as Netflix, it used to be great value but look at it now...

I am not going to be the one to try to stop you but you need to keep in mind that games/sw piracy comes with great risks.

You need to execute anti cheat / drm / copyrighted stuff and this is always a big door open to malware.

Be cautious out there, it is not a pleasant walk

I am not going to discuss the ethics of piracy because I genuinely don't give a fuck (also the vast majority of people don't know the difference between ethics and morality and insist whatever they do is Good so it is even less productive than slamming my hand in a cabinet).

But if your goal is to actually not support those companies? Don't play the games. Because "Wow, Spider-Man is fucking awesome" is still going to encourage others to buy it. Even if you say "Wow, I am so glad I pirated it because Spider-Man is fucking awesome" is going to encourage people who don't know how/don't care to pirate things to buy it (and people are going to think you are an obnoxious edgelord).

And yeah, I'll parrot others: If you think games are in a bad place (from a monetization and content perspective... not from a funding and censorship one) then that just tells me that you don't actually care enough to follow indie devs.

I went back to sailing the high seas for games when The Sims 3 from Steam wouldn't run on Linux no matter what I did, whilst a pirate version runs just fine.

Pirating in Linux is actually much more complicated than running the game from Steam or from other stores via something like Lutris, because for official versions of a game there are usually scripts doing all the necessary Wine/Proton configuration, but not for the pirate versions of a game, so if it fails to run directly you have to enable logging, dig through the logs yourself and figure out which libraries need to be configured with Winetricks, which is how gaming in Linux used to work 5 years ago (and why very few people did it).

Unpopular take: I’m just gonna quit gaming for a while. If I really need to piss away some time I got a bunch of wad files or newgrounds. F it.

Too many investors coming off cheap, obvious ripoff games for a mobile telephone.

The trump family of asshole con-men just bought EA. Everything from now until they're sold off for scrap is not only completely worthless, is actively hostile to users.

It's a sign that the cons and grifting has 100% fully come to Computer games. Many have exploited them before, but not like this.

Man ea and Ubisoft games suck so bad I don't even bother pirating them. I'm not even being facetious, the last ea game I played was the dead space remake which was passable but also totally skippable, and I borrowed a friends ea account to do that, getting bored half way through and stopping. Had he not offered I'd not have played it at all. I think the last ea game I paid and played through was mass effect 2.

Same thing with Ubisoft. I briefly had gamepass and played AC Odyssey for three hours before losing interest, same with their terrible Greek botw wannabe.

Neither company has released anything I've even been interested in since that, years and years ago.

That said I still buy rockstar games, the amount of money, effort, and attention to detail that went into Red Dead 2 is simply breath taking, but by the same token i bought it for twenty bucks after pirating it to make sure i liked it and it ran well.

Other than that I'm on the same page as you. Also I'm not criticizing you, just pointing out a slight difference in opinion. I pirate two dozen games a month

This was me 20 years ago.

Congrats on finally seeing the light, but what took you so long?

I don't think I've pirated a game since 2008! Used to be if I didn't like their price, I waited and bought on sale or used. Now that I play on PC and used games aren't a thing anymore, I just don't play it.

There's a sea of games out there and If I don't like the practices of the publisher, I skip them and move to the next. Why should I engage with their product if they don't respect me as a customer or share my sensibilities? I'm not a hypocrite.

I am too paranoid about security to pirate a video game. I just don't play the big AAA titles. There are so many indie games worth my attention and support that I don't notice.

Bit busy so can’t make a long comment. Just wanted to say, welcome to the ‘dark’ side. I highly recommend to check the instance I’m on for everything you need (Megathread). It tells you where to look, which safety measures to take etc.

I wanted to purchase Metaphor Refantzio because the game seems good and then figured out they blatantly said “you don’t own Metaphor even if you purchase it”. Thus decided to pirate it (it isn’t cracked but it is playable).

Last game I ever bought was minecraft, back in 2012(?) for $15. Played it non-stop for a decade before the community imploded. Got my money's worth. Haven't bought a game since. No point unless they have a similarly active multiplayer community. It's a pirate's life for me.

Eh, if it’s a new game I want and I can afford it I’ll buy it. I’m just buying less new games lately.

I am however just going hog wild on emulating all the old console games.

Got my PS2 all set up with a hard drive and FreeHDBoot so I can just load it up with all the PS2 games I never got a chance to play or own! Hacked my Vita and download all that stuff I never played.

Haven’t tried to hack any Nintendo stuff besides my Wii, which I need to do again apparently. But I’m not exactly desperate for things to play, I’ve got loads of things to choose from these days.

The hell does "piracy against big companies" even mean?

Man, pirate what you can't afford if you must, just... you know, be honest about it. I'm always annoyed by people doing the thing they wanted to do anyway and presenting it as activism. That's not how that works.

For the record, while I think there's plenty to be critical about in modern gaming, "DLC", "game has a launcher" and "game is ported from other platforms" are not that. "A game I played on the PS3 was too expensive when I wanted to rebuy it" is somebody giving you bad value up front, not some ideological stance you're taking.

For the record, I also didn't buy it because I also didn't think their launch price was right. In fairness, it has since been on sale for 30 bucks multiple times, which is a lot more reasonable.

And again, I'm not saying don't pirate it. Do what you want. Just don't be weird about it.

I stopped (console) gaming right around the PS4 era - partially because side I was heavily invested in WoW and PC gaming in general - but also because I was livid over how Sony handled the Anniversary edition launch, where scalpers scooped up ~98% of available stock.

I feel like I lucked out opting to become a retro gamer around that time - there are just so many great games from the PS3 generation and earlier that I could dedicate (my diminishingly little) spare time towards and never run out of absolutely incredible content.

Hell, my PS2 version of Vice City runs just as it did when it was new - complete with Billie Jean being the first track on the radio; something that can’t be said for any current/PC versions I believe.

I always watch at least 10+ gameplay videos and critiques before buying games, especially AAA. For indies, I don't do it as much, more like "surprise me" kind of experience.

RDR is €50 full price and includes all dlcs, €30 atm in autumn sale. AAA games are priced between 60-90 these days. What do you mean it's full AAA priced

I wouldn't add pirated games to steam. I think I heard they can ban your account for that. But yeah agree, don't support bs practices.

I stopped buying games and swapped to graphic novels which is unnecessary af because I pirate comics and get everything for free instantly, weridly just getting more dopmaine/value out of these purchses than games lately, couldve bought bf6 with a friend so itd be half price but im just not feeling gaming, would rather spend 200$ to read old discounted comics, can get quite a bit of content

Think the physical books help remind me that the digital comics exist, I forget my hobbies without daily reminders and if I dont persue them for a week I forger why I even enjoyed them. Need to start using blender again but I cant remember why it was fun til I use it lol