The story could be similar for many but I’d love to read through all.
I pirates games till high school because of obvious reasons: no money. Asking my parents money for a video game directly related to burning money and wasting my precious time I could spend studying instead. For them, at least.
I always had this urge, however, to support the developers by buying a game I pirated. Not for all, but for a few: Sleeping Dogs, San Andreas, Ori, Max The Curse of Brotherhood, Limbo, Inside, etc.
Fast forward to when I was in college, I started making a few bucks writing gaming articles on the internet. I mean, how cool was that for a fresher. You get to write about games, and get paid for it? You buy games with that money and get paid again? Sweet Jesus!
So, I went ahead and bought all the games I thoroughly enjoyed during my piracy days, just to have them on my platform libraries as a tribute to the developers and also as a collection.
Haven’t pirated a game since, but man, those green download bars, with seeds you forget to stop, cracks that won’t work and that one .dll file that always seem to be missing, those were some memorable days.
When I think about the games that genuinely interested me always got money out from of me. Wether I was a kid or not. That too in a third world country.
It definitely feels a lot better. It’s not like movies/shows/sports where most of the time the pirates have way better clarity/accessibility… Pirated games can be an absolute mess.
I also think this is bonus reason as to why games are so bad on release. Pretty much no PC release is perfect at launch. Even the great ones like Elden Ring wasn’t good on release then they fix it pretty quickly. Pirates have to recrack the ‘fixed’ version while the devs now added the missing loopholes that can prolonge the piracy