That's the problem though. They want you to commit to a purchase and hope that you forget about your 2h grace window

I mean I just pirate it and play the pirated version lmfao.

No sense in paying money at that point

Actually yes.

In my childhood it wasn't very easy to find a licensed copy (TBF, even pirate copy sometimes), but demos would be distributed with magazines etc.

And after playing a demo which you like a licensed honestly bought copy becomes emotionally much better than piracy.

It was a working mechanism. For games which are not crap anyway.

You can return games on Steam tbh, enough of a demo for me if you're a Steam user.

I think you can also return physical copies? Depends.