• atlasraven31@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        Piracy had amazing quality of life back in the day: no-cd cracks, keygens, fully patched, custom installers, no splash screen. Maybe even extras.

    • Norah - She/They@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      1 year ago

      No one makes demos for their games anymore. I’m not gambling on whether I’m gonna like a game with the cost of AAA titles these days. Piracy is amazingly handy for that.

      • Azrael@feddit.de
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        1 year ago

        I’ve been calling my pirated stuff “Extended Demos”/“Extended Trailers” for ages now.

      • narshee@iusearchlinux.fyi
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        1 year ago

        That is the number 1 reason for me too. Although steam solves this problem partially with their return policy. But I don’t want to pay the price upfront everytime, so I resolve to piracy until I know if I want to buy the game.

        • Akagigahara@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          I’d almost agree. Steam is great with it’s return policy, but only really by comparison. The 14 days is definitely plenty of time, but 2h is not a lot for quite a few, and especially the expensive, games.

          • Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de
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            1 year ago

            it’s a bit of a shit situation because i can’t really come up with a way to decide how long the free return window should be on a per-game basis, surely if you make it depend on the game’s standard playtime they’ll just make the main quest 30 minutes long and make all the actual content side quests

      • atlasraven31@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        I agree but I have recently bought 2 games that offered steam demos: Xenonauts 2 and Astro Colony.

    • violetraven@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      1 year ago

      I’ve done this with games I’ve purchased physical discs for but are a pain to install on Windows 10. I was able to find a pirate site that had lightly modified games to help work on modern systems.