Depends on the game and the publisher. There are frequent sales as well as sales from 3rd party resellers. Check out IsThereAnyDeal.com which tracks all the prices and you can see how often a game has gone on sale at steam or any legit reseller.
“The average American buys more than one new piece of clothing per week. If that matches your shopping habits, in a span of five years you have purchased more than 320 pieces of clothing.”
Who the fuck is buying multiple pieces of clothing every week? I don’t know anyone that does that. I feel like buys-ridiculous-amounts-of-clothing George is an outlier and shouldn’t be counted.
Yeah we’re like super serious about privacy so we require you to make you’re account based on a unique, hard to change, personally identifiable, insecure data point and require you to show it to everyone you talk to. The fact that they’re only now starting to test hiding your phone number is beyond asinine. Any arguments signal has about security I might listen to but their concept of privacy is laughable.
If you do system wide blocking by setting an adblocking dns for the whole device it stop them. Check out stuff like nextdns.io. They have a config profile you can set up to do it and if you make an account with them you can configure what plugins you use for blocking… basically it lets you use ublock lists on the dns side.
As far as I know there is no issue with legality. I don't remember the specifics at this point. I believe the psobb setup was a free download for the client and what they did was rewrote the server side so it was their own software. As far as the IP art, music, etc. IDK 100%.
I will say it has been going for nearly 15 years and widely publicized and sega hasn't ever tried to do anything to shut it down. I believe it's in some kind of loop hole where running the server is legal, and using the client is legal for PSO:BB, but for v1, v2, and I & II version you would still need to have a legit copy for maximum legality. So if you just want to play the game... PSO:BB using their modified client / server setup is a good way to do it... plus it looks nice in HD. There are other servers besides schthack, that's just the one I used way back in the day and they're still around.
FYI, for the same price you could grab it in a bundle right now and get several other games with it.
https://www.humblebundle.com/games/return-to-metroidvania