I pirate games because I can. Though most of my gaming time is budgeted towards games I rented or bought legally (and then there's the free games on Facebook. Those are legal). Unless I really enjoy a game I downloaded for free, I kinda feel like I'm cheating myself out of my money by spending time on pirated games I obtained for free instead of taking advantage of the rental subscription I'm paying for or the games I bought. So even though I have a DS flash card, a homebrewed Wii, a soft-modded PS2 and all sorts of "free" options with the PC (whether pirated or freeware), Facebook Games and legacy hardware ROMs/ISOs (8-bit, 16-bit, PS1, N64, Saturn, Dreamcast, MAME, etc.), I find myself gravitating towards taking advantage of the rental subscription I paid for and playing the games I bought instead of playing the free stuff. Admittedly, I do pirate some video games (I rent/buy everything I've played on the Xbox 360, PS3 and PSP though. To cut down on costs I have a rental subscription that allows me to rent 2 games at a time for $27/month. And that includes a game reserve feature and fast return for 1 game at a time). I'm not going to make a justification for it. I do it because I can get away with it and will do it if it's not too much trouble for me.

If it's too much of a pain in the ass to do so or if there are too many cons to make it worth my while, I won't though. ie. I don't mod my Xbox because I want to keep LIVE, I didn't jailbreak my PS3 because I kinda don't want to deal with the hassles (especially when Sony is putting a lot of effort into counteracting these hacks). I have a rental subscription I pay for so if I want to play PS3 games, I'll just rent em. My Peacewalker Green PSP can't load pirated ISOs at all (I didn't feel comfortable with buying a used PSP-2000 off ebay). More reason for me to stick with legitimate options like renting. I downloaded a pirated copy of Mass Effect (PC version) awhile ago. I couldn't get a crack to work for some reason. So I just said f that and bought the Xbox 360 version (which was like $18-19 including tax or so anyway. No big deal). Just pop in a disc and play. No need to download huge ass ISOs and trying to get cracks to work. Or fiddling with the settings so that it can run on my Dell laptop. lol.

Pirating music albums, TV shows and movies (usually ones already released on DVD/Blu-Ray unless there's a screener out of a movie in theatres. I still prefer to go to the theatres to watch movies anyway though for the social experience of going out with friends) are much less of a hassle (but still a hassle at times) so this is why I cancelled my free Netflix trial right before the month was up and don't bother with buying or renting DVDs/Blu-Rays (I own like one DVD movie I think. lol). I think my local Blockbuster has a $10/month unlimited Blu-Ray/DVD rentals deal in place (to try to counteract Netflix) and Netflix.ca has a really shitty selection so going with the local Blockbuster subscription would probably be more worth it. But I can't be arsed to do it (it can be a big pain in the ass to track down old seasons of shows without resorting to torrent though. I'd rather not use torrent since it's risky) right now. Maybe I'll consider it. I plan on moving out soon though so I won't be near that local Blockbuster anymore though.

It also slows down my computer when it can barely run left 4 dead because the Steam platform chews up half a gig of RAM. cockfuckers.

That's just terrible. Good thing I've got alot of ram.

I'm not quite sure I follow or I just don't have your issue. I loaded up Left4Dead 2 and saw that it was using up half a gig, but that's the game. Steam was only using 17 megabytes.

like the article said we are Loyal customers to our developers. Not all gamers, movie and music consumers are like this. 

You know that study you likes so much points out too that the most successfull video game of the last 10 years in terms of revenue is immune to piracy. I am of course talking of Wow for those that wonder......

Immune to piracy? That statement screams of ignorance. I'd link a bunch of private servers, but I guess that's not permitted here.

Eh I didn't make that statement. Your study did....Read it again...

So are you implying your study screams of ignorance ? Thanks, that's all I wanted to hear..

Just for the record, here is the quote :

" The researchers further note that games such as World of Warcraft are immune to piracy because of their business model"

Indeed. It's as immune to piracy as all oter Bnet type games. And they all seemed pretty successful.

just close the store front when you load the game problem solved, I have 8GB of RAM so the program basically loads everything into RAM it needs and with it just sitting on the task bar it uses 10-12MB or RAM open up the store front/Library/Etc 50-100MB.