Why I don't steal games anymore

I will admit, for a great many years I simply used various torrent sites to download everything I wanted for free. I know this is unethical but it is just how things are. However, I stopped doing so about a year ago and to be honest life is actually a bit better because of it. Maybe there are some puritans out there that never downloaded anything illegally but I doubt it.

Anyway, this article is about why I stopped and it has a lot to do with a combination of me feeling bad and also the industry changing for the better.

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Video games were being released in a pretty crappy way for a while there. Loaded with hype and really high initial prices, we found ourselves in possession with turds like Resident Evil 6 and that truly awful Star Wars MMO which quickly was identified as being so bad that it became free shortly after launch. Studios would release games that were loaded with bugs, horrible control, and basically unfinished products because they knew they could dupe customers with a really nice looking cinematic sequence that didn't even feature any actual player-controlled gameplay.

So I got almost all of my movies, music, and games by torrenting (wait.. that word is underlined? Is "torrenting" not a word?... well it is to me.) Then a game i downloaded turned out to be so good that I actually felt bad about stealing it. It was the revamp of Tomb Raider in 2013 and it was easily one of the best games I had ever played. I started to realize that games of this caliber need to make money in order to encourage them to make more and by stealing the game, i was actually contributing to the downfall of the industry. I suppose this all seems very evident.

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seriously, this game is epic

It was at that point that I decided to start using Steam (the other one) and would peruse the cheap section for games that were under $10 and although the games were not brand new, there were some pretty epic games in there like "Company of Heros," "The Cave," and "Rayman."

These games were made more fun by including achievements and to be fair I didn't really aspire to unlock them all but it was kind of neat to be playing and then find out you just accomplished something that wasn't actually part of the creator's gameplay. They also had a community of people that you could communicate with and soon I found myself with a bunch of old friends and we could chat about various games we both had. You could also look at their libraries and you could get the "straight scoop" from someone you know... which is always handy.

Also game manufacturers are very aware of the fact that people are cracking their games and distributing them for free and therefore installed certain parts of the game that you won't even realize are missing until you have been playing the game for a while. Take "Hollow Knight" for example.

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This fantastic game was easily cracked and uploaded for free but the people who cracked it, and the people who downloaded it didn't realize that the devs put a little treat in the game for people playing the cracked version: Certain parts of the game and chest rewards did not appear on the cracked version. This accomplished two things: One, it made the game far more difficult for those who stole the game and two, it made it obvious on message boards who had stolen the game. It wasn't even necessary to look for the people who had stolen the game as they were all over various message boards asking "Why can't i open these chests?"

Although I didn't play it "EarthBound" probably has the best anti-piracy measure ever put in. The game was much harder if you had a pirate version of it and if you somehow managed to make it to the final boss anyway, the game would glitch mid-way through the battle and return to the title screen. You try to log back into your savegame only to realize that the game has deleted all the save files. haha!

The advent of Steam (again, the other one) was a great one. Can dev's still shove garbage down our throats and overcharge us for it? Well, I guess so, but it becomes far more difficult seeing as how every game listed on Steam is required to allow comments and ratings. If you look at a game that has a wonderful animated trailer but doesn't show much actual gameplay, this is normally a sign of deceit on the part of the company that made it. However, now all you have to do is look in the comments / rating section of that very game in order to determine if you want to risk it.

Manufacturers can try to circumvent this by having hundreds of fake accounts but this is a drop in the bucket compared to the millions of people that are playing worldwide. Fake accounts and bots are normally identified very quickly by the community and the accounts are closed. There is a tremendous amount of transparency and this is what makes it so effective.

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Another added bonus of a Steam membership and paying for your games is the fact that your library is stored on their servers FOREVERMORE. That means that you can be done with a game locally and delete it from your machine, but the fact that you own this game as well as your save game progress, is stored on their servers and you can therefore re-download it, even to a different computer, with very little hassle.

I feel bad for the games I stole over the years but it wasn't without reason. Some of the better ones that I took I re-downloaded them via STEAM and paid for them... kind of a "sorry about that" on my part.

With the amount of research we can do now before deciding to get a game, I don't really feel as though it is necessary to steal anymore an I quite enjoy having a library of games I know to be virus-free. Since I paid for them I am also far more inclined to complete them rather than just throwing the game out whenever it gets to be "too hard."