this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2023
627 points (100.0% liked)
196
16436 readers
1821 users here now
Be sure to follow the rule before you head out.
Rule: You must post before you leave.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Arrggh, you can pay and sail the high seas too.
Pay and then install the pirated version to play without the overhead of garbage DRM.
Piracy had amazing quality of life back in the day: no-cd cracks, keygens, fully patched, custom installers, no splash screen. Maybe even extras.
No one makes demos for their games anymore. I’m not gambling on whether I’m gonna like a game with the cost of AAA titles these days. Piracy is amazingly handy for that.
I've been calling my pirated stuff "Extended Demos"/"Extended Trailers" for ages now.
That is the number 1 reason for me too. Although steam solves this problem partially with their return policy. But I don't want to pay the price upfront everytime, so I resolve to piracy until I know if I want to buy the game.
I'd almost agree. Steam is great with it's return policy, but only really by comparison. The 14 days is definitely plenty of time, but 2h is not a lot for quite a few, and especially the expensive, games.
I want ~10 hours to make a call personally. If I can’t make it out of the character creator and tutorial stage then it’s not enough time.
it's a bit of a shit situation because i can't really come up with a way to decide how long the free return window should be on a per-game basis, surely if you make it depend on the game's standard playtime they'll just make the main quest 30 minutes long and make all the actual content side quests
I agree but I have recently bought 2 games that offered steam demos: Xenonauts 2 and Astro Colony.
I've done this with games I've purchased physical discs for but are a pain to install on Windows 10. I was able to find a pirate site that had lightly modified games to help work on modern systems.
I do that a lot with "free" EGS games. Since I now legally own them, it's no longer "actual" piracy