Torrent – a cure to that. You buy only thoroughly checked software.
Only torrent AAA games if you can afford to (if you can’t, go nuts).
If you pirate an indie game, that developer might not be able to afford to make another. Try to use a demo (or even the ol’ steam buy and refund) to check the game in that case.
AAA studios generally make their money from shitty business practices these days, so 100% feel justified in pirating those if you want to play them.
Buy only software you need/want. Torrent helps. The amount of As is irrelevant.
Demo or pirated they still don’t get money mate…
Pirating is usually used as a demo, lots of people still buy after trying a game through torrents. Lots of indie devs gush about pirating actually boosts their sales. You’re looking at this from the wrong perspective.
Downloading a demo helps engagement statistics which feed recommendation algorithms
Pirating helps pirates.
Not casting any kind of judgement, just pointing out who benefits
(Disclaimer I pirate shitloads, just not indie stuff)
When I can get a game on my wishlist for under $20, the time cost of unpacking and patching a game is often more than the value against my bank account.
Like, sure, if they want $90 for something and I can get it for free, fuck it. Especially if its a re-release of a re-master of a 30 year old classic I already have on a console. But I’m not going to short Owlcat Games or Larian or some other high quality indie studio when its well within my budget and affords me 50-100 hours of original gameplay, easy.
Testing. I’m talking about the testing. If the game is in your wishlist it doesn’t mean that the game is good.
Game cracks have their own flaws, especially when you’re running them through an emulator.
If I’m going to spend the time to make a game properly payable, I’m not going to give up on it and download a fresh new copy after the first few hours of play, even if I do like it.
I got Wrath of the Righteous for $4. I’m not going to pirate it, demo it, decide i like it, re-download the game, and restart the campaign over a game selling for loose change. I’ll just take my chances.
Neither am I going to restart Cyberpunk after two hours of tinkering with settings and another fifteen hours of gameplay just to send a company with over $1B in revenue my fist full of quarters.
This is my gaming workflow.
Find game on steam I want to play
Check pricing history
Pirate game to see if it’s worth the current price
If it isn’t, I put it on my wishlist and continue playing until it goes on sale.
If the game turns out to be very good, then I buy it when it goes on sale.
Oh shit, I literly just bought some on sale games lol this is so true hahaha
I feel like I do gaming right:
- Find a single blockbuster game from last year that looks good, download it
- Play it for 3-4 days straight over a long weekend without sleep, using a trainer to skip the grindey parts
- Finish it, get sick of gaming, sleep
- Don’t feel the need to touch another game for at least another 9 months
I’ve started rooting through my steam library looking for unplayed games that have steam trading cards and achievements. I’ll install the game and give it a try to see if it’s entertaining. If it’s not, I’ll leave it on the main menu for a few hours to get the trading cards so it doesn’t come up again in my search.
If the steam achievements look easy, I’ll try to break open the game with cheat engine by myself as a sort of game of its own. No doubt I could find some cheat engine trainer that makes the game a single button click but where’s the fun in that.
If you’re even the slightest bit technically inclined and never heard of cheat engine, I highly recommend it. It lets you memory edit running applications like games. Once you figure out what you’re doing you can change in game variables on the fly. The game isn’t the game anymore, figuring out how to break the game is the game. When you install cheat engine you can actually run it on itself, and it is basically a self contained tutorial. Check up in the help menu to get started, the tutorial is AMAZING.
That sounds neat and enjoyable to tinker with. Is there a possibility that using a tool like that will get you flagged and/or banned from Steam? Or do they not care when it’s a single player game?
Yes definitely. If you search Google for ‘VAC enabled games’ you’ll get an easy link to the steam website filtered to just games with valve anti cheat. There’s a search bar on that page you can use to check if a game is on that list. If it’s not there, have at it.
Pretty typically just online games use it. Cheat engine wouldn’t be able to do much anyway, as most multi-player games will keep track of the fun variables serverside instead of on your computer. It’s a jerk move anyway to ruin other people’s fun by cheating in multiplayer.
Edit: Google isn’t showing that link anymore for me. I think this is it, it looks right:
https://store.steampowered.com/search/?sort_by=Released_DESC&category2=8&ndl=1