Speaking honestly, as a PC gamer mainly, i pirate games which i am not sure about.

Because im on a strict budget (student) will download games which i am interested in but not entirely sure of. Play maybe an hour or so of it and make my decision of whether to make the full investment or not.

I think of it as an unofficial demo

In Sweden we have a very weak arm of law. You can torrent as much as you like (on paper there is a law that protects digital rights and IP ownership, but people don't care because the risk is minimal and the fines are small).

My only obstacle is the moral obligation to support the developer. I feel like a thief and I feel a lil bad for the developers, but since I'm a bad person who wants a lot of stuff for free I usually still decide to steal if it doesn't cost to me a punishment.

Yeah I know, generally speaking. All the way since the stone age you had to own the CD key to play online. Those were the PC games I used to buy, games with a multiplayer component that demanded an online code ("CD key"). I avoid cracked servers due to cheaters. The other games I would pirate.

But my question is about Steam since that's the popular online community on PC nowadays. Is there something extra, some extra anti-piracy filter that Steam brings, that I have to be aware of?

Do the same as you do with your music collection..

The whole downloading guilt thing started with the record companies fighting against Napster. When Napster came out, we all used it and thought it was the shit. No one considered it stealing, because it wasn't. By downloading a song, game, movie or whatever, YOU'RE not stealing or breaking a law anymore than someone who has a physical CD,game or movie given to them for free. The only person breaking the law is the person duplicating said product.

No one had a problem with this until the internet. We all taped songs off the radio back in the day and dubbed copies with friends. The internet is just a high tech method of the same thing.

lol, good one.

I haven't bought a CD in over a decade. But on the other hand you might be thinking of iTunes and stuff like that.

Pirate games that you are not sure about, Buy games that you are sure about... I personally dont trust demos to give me an overall impression of blah game, Its way too controlled, but if I know a game is good, then I buy it

The biggest problem of pirating games is that you can't play online (unless it's an extremely popular franchise like CoD, I have seen people playing on unofficial servers). Other than that you won't get achievements if you care about those.

Is also worthy to note that sometimes pirated games have problems. If your game crash it might not be the game, but the crack of said game, graphical glitches could sometimes be attributed to the crack and not the game itself. Really depends on where you get the pirated game...I recommend Skidrow, those guys are masters in what they do.

I used to pirated practically every single game I wanted to play....now I only do it depending on the game and how much I'm willing to wait for a price cut.

Also check out for viruses, downloading games online can have lots of them. So again I recommend the official Skidrow site, all of those guys links are clean.

The answer is still no, my brother pirates all the time and probably has like 2 warnings.

Also, if you're scared you can get a proxy-server for like 5 USD a month (you can get free ones but those are shady), so even if you get warnings they don't have your identity w/o warrant.

There's still very little risk in the USA. I doubt it has much of an influence.

As for the risk of getting caught...well I have 139 GB of pirated games on my PC and I never got a warning nor anything. But I live in a country where the cyber-crime laws are still in their infancy, and most of them just involve hacking and not the download of illegal media.

If you are scared you should check if your country has any laws about cyber-crime, just to get an idea.