Its simply too much effort and BS dealing with pirating shit.
Eh? Go up a torrent site, click on magnet link, wait a few minutes for download, mount iso, use provided installer. Or sometimes just unrar the thing and click exe to play.
Sure, if you're already on Steam, it's a bit more convenient, just a few clicks away.
But what when you buy it on steam and it still redirects you to some third-party crapware where you set a separate account,
get to feel your way around it, then dodge the inevitable barrage of ads... I'd rather just pirate.
It's splitting hairs, but I beg to differ about the amount of bullshit. Case in point, last time I bought something from Ubishite was Assbandit's Creed Syndicate.
I already demoed it beforehand and knew they didn't do that bad of a job with it. So what did I get as a legitimate customer?
Mandatory data synch with the ubi server after every major mission, which, like clockwork made of dung, failed every time and made the game go teats up.
And don't get me started about folks who had to struggle with Denuvo chopping their CPU performance, or who got fucked over by SecuROM.
In my case, I did find just buying the thing more convenient in some cases, but these cases typically include early access games that are frequently updated.
I'd sometimes just be eeeh, fuck it, I'll buy it, can't be arsed to look up what's the newest build version this week.
I'm burned out on early access stuff, so that's less of a factor.
edit: having said all this, I don't actually believe pirating is that big of a problem simply because most of the people who pirate a game would likely never be legit buyers otherwise for various reasons.
They only have the game because its free, otherwise they never would play it and/or are not actually real probable customers for the game in question outside of it being free.
You're not wrong on this one. The practice of pulling hair and counting each torrent as a lost sale was always laughable.
Speaking of pulling hair, I wonder what feels worse for a game dev, getting pirated or refunded on Steam. I mean, you could almost smell the smell of that sweet money coming your way.
Also, what if your game has no gameplay and I get to see everything that's to see on youtube in 4K? Did you just lose a sale?
How about getting a game on 95% discount? Did you just lose 95% of a sale?
I'm not justifying piracy here, just a few things to be salty about instead (and whose fault is it if the game is crap or has no gameplay to speak of?).
What I'd like to point out that it's not always the case of poverty. All those massive steam sales, humble bundles and key resellers make games available to everyone
(could be argued if the latter isn't actually a worse offense than piracy, because at least it appears you're being legit).
In my case it's about having been fucked over by legitimate purchases more than one time.