I've come to a point where I don't even pirate AAA, just buy indie or anything made by Fromsoft and any team that still presents any semblance of passion for their work.
Some AAA games are worth buying. Some indie games are pure garbage. It's a mixed bag. I rarely pirate and most of the time its because shitty DRM or to try expensive game before buying.
I'm generally pretty much in agreement with the idea that online services are crap because you don't really own the things you buy, but honestly I've been buying physical media since the 80s and pirating since the 90s, and the oldest games I currently have easy access to are ones I bought on Steam. I'm not a collector or an archivist or anything. Those just aren't hobbies that interest me, and I move a lot, and don't always take care of my stuff, and freely lend things to unreliable friends, and frequently wipe my drives to try out new Linux distros, so at this point even if Valve probably won't be around forever I still expect my Steam games to last longer than anything else I could get. Steam is really the only reason I ever buy games at all anymore.
I used to almost exclusively pirate because I couldn't afford much of anything. Steam has actually enabled me to purchase most of the games I use since I can wait till they're on special and cheap. There's also a huge amount of indie games that would never have seen the light of day if they could only release on physical media or through their own website or whatever.
no Steam isn't perfect, I would like Valve to take less of a cut but in terms of making games more accessible, I think they've done a decent job.
No shade on my fellow pirates who still exclusively pirate and don't want to feed the corporate beast.
Yeah, I know, but I like starting with fresh dotfiles. It gets rid of all the weird settings changes I've made and makes the install really feel clean and fresh. I do have important stuff backed up. I'm just overly aggressive about removing unimportant stuff.
I switched over to Linux about a year ago and personally do not care if you do. But I do agree that some seemingly simple stuff on Linux can be fucking annoying. And that would be fine if you could post on forums without at the very least one douche nozzle implying that you are an idiot.
I understand that the threads about the dumb shit microsoft is doing (ads, ai, etc.) are primarily just for venting frustrations; however, I just want to help. People complain about a problem, I know a good solution. Obviously I'm going to tell people about it but in the end it doesn't really matter to me if you switch or not.
Mostly steam stuff, each game has its specific forum post with info on who cracked the latest versions of a game and whatnot, links to download methods and there's also plenty of piracy related projects (like creamapi, goldberg, etc)
I'm not sure if you're familiar with fitgirl-repacks, but most of her repack pages actually points to the cs.rin website for game updates
Riiiiiight, Linux community is friendlier. I wouldn't really call them that, though some aspects are. My problem still with the entirety of the Linux community that will always put me off about Linux and rather tolerate Windows more is the elitism. I have used Linux OSes before, I have my fair share of favorites and I see Linux as a go-to whenever I pick up computers too old to bother with Windows 10 and 11 and I just simply want a bare basics machine.
But I cannot in full faith, use Linux as my primary OS. I've tried. I can't do it. There are simply things on Windows that I need and want to use that'll simply just run and that's what I want the most is for things to just run. It isn't because I'm too dumb to use a Linux OS. It's because I don't have the patience or time to be weeding through forum posts, deciphering depositories and repositories, figuring out what obscure and vague message the terminal sends me and spending time on Google.
Besides this whole chart doesn't make a load of sense. Like the whole "you'll own what you buy"? What does that have to do with D&D and Pathfinder? I don't get it.