I read over the rest of your post and I get what you mean of course if everyone downloaded a game it would be tragic for the creators of said thing, but really when you got the big games making billions upon billions that isn't anywhere near happening, they put in mountains of drm to try to stop piracy but that got broken fairly fast so what is done now is creating a game which is always somewhat online, even if it doesn't really have a need to be, there has to be a good balance found I think so that the actual customer isn't getting fucked over too much so that they think fuck it Imma just pirate that instead. One for me where I done that was SF5, picked the game up only to find that what is in the box is around 3/4's of the full game at launch, then season 2-3 roll around and the base game is a fraction of the complete title anymore with pay walls on characters, stages and costumes up the walls. that sort of thing 100% will send me to pirate bay or w/e to get a "Complete" version of the game.

I'm even put off by games having the different versions to start with, seen Guacamelee 2 was on the switch on sale for 13e coool that doesn't sound back, clicked into it.... but hey.... there's Guacamelee 2 "the full game" for just another 2-3e why not buy that? so yeah it creates a conflict for me where a product is pulling a customer between different versions of the same game and honestly most of the time when I see those I opt to not buy at all.

I dunno maybe I just find myself in a place where getting games means I don't feel I need to stick to one store or even a store if the devs want to be shitty, I have the ps4/Switch and 2 fairly decent gaming PC's in the current gen that I'm not locked into a situation where something runs shit on the Switch or where some version of a title might have always online or horrifying DRM at play, neither of my consoles are currently modded to allow playing of homebrew or pirated games but my ISP is very lax on such things here and my PCs (Ryzen 7 1700, 16GB DDR4 3000mhz, 980TI, or Ryzen 5 2600, 16GB 2400mhz, 780TI) are more than capable of playing any title that I want to skip out on purchasing each individual costume for a fighter or where the game has a point in it which has options of don't play it or wave a Credit card at it, that's the point where I just wave piracy and a middle finger at the game and honestly I don't think I've felt bad once in doing so.

oooo!

Felt bad cos someone gave me the files to put Downwell on my Vita for Free! That game was amazing and costs just 2.99 so after a few runs of it I bought it on the Vita and been meaning to give them another 3 quid on the Switch. Would highly recommend that game as a great on portable time waster... really is amazing by digital devolver!

Don't make Brazil data out of only your life... Plenty of people had 2 Xbox, 1 for the MP where they paid Live and had one or two games and a piracy console with hundred of games.

The "the person wouldn't buy it anyway" argument is strange, if the person is willing to pirate the material them they have interest in it, so it would be a matter of choice and priorities. Because if piracy were impossible what would he do them? Buy the thing. PS3 for several years had no piracy and people still bought it and the games.

here is one rea I could suggest for things like this, I know of a few people who have pirated a few of the Senran Kagura games to have easier access to modded versions of them for nude mods etc and jus for the sake of avoiding the embarrassment of not having those games appear on their steam librarys

I've been on both sides and piracy sucks.

When I was young piracy was deemed normal. Music, just copy the tape. Movies, just copy the VHS. Games, meet up in special events and copy everything. So to combat that blank tapes etc increased in price... Extra tax on all writable material because it can (and usually will) be used for piracy.

Then I started working for a small software company. We didn't have any copy protection, couldn't really spend any resources on that. And at some point our stuff got pirated. At first you think, he that's cool, people like it so much they are willing to steal it. Yet then we were forced to fire people because we ran into money issues. Perhaps if some of those pirates had actually bought the software they would still have had a job.

The company recovered and grew so now we added anti piracy measures, also mandated by the other company we worked with to protect their data. It was a pain in the ass for testing and development. Previously it was a beta version that had leaked onto the web so now anti piracy measures had to be there all through development. Damn annoying when trying to find bugs as you can't simply copy everything over to another device to test as it was all encrypted with the device ID.

But the biggest piracy of all came in the form of patents. We didn't have money in the beginning for patents either, so a much bigger company tried suing our company over similarities with vague software patents, trying to get our product banned from the shelves. That cost millions of dollars in litigation plus a lot of effort to buy and build a portfolio of patents to protect our own software and use as leverage to fight of patent cases.

Then there are the Chinese copy cats you can't do anything about :/

All piracy sucks.

Hey man, not saying there aren't the odd man out that pirate 5 games and buy 2 of them later. Or any other variation.

But the most common case people wouldn't completely leave gaming realm because they can't pirate anything. They would do something like I did when I was a kid. Buy 1 or 2 games a year second hand, loan and trade a lot to try other games, also we had rentals... that didn't prevent me from gaming. Hell no, there were a lot of people that couldn't even afford a console and that generated the arcade rip-off here, where people gone to a rental place to play 1h of SNES for a buck. And there were a lot of low income people doing it.

All excuses for piracy are just excuses.