xIcarus:

It's ok to disagree and I respect your decision. I just don't think justifying piracy by means of morality is logical when there's 'blood' on both sides' hands.

One moral wrong does not make another moral wrong a right. Piracy doesn't exist for you to try out "demos" of a game; perhaps that's what you do. Others have suggested alternative options, such as Steam refunds, sales, etc... You keep harping on about paying the full price of a AAA game when I know I have never paid $60 in the last few years for any of the games I have played because I play it smart and either buy shortly after release at a discount or buy later when prices are low enough. Gaming is a luxury, not a necessity. And there are loads of F2P / low cost massively popular games which millions are on exactly for that reason and for reasons of competitive gameplay. Whatever argument you use to support the "benefits" of piracy, make sure you're not justifying it because developers are shafting us and this is some sort of "revenge" one exacts by pirating their games. Your money speaks. Boycott games that demonstrate behavior you deem irresponsible / lazy / wrong. Don't pirate to punish, a boycott means you forego your right to the product in order to object to the producer's ethos. Even if piracy is beneficial, the benefit is an accident, not the target, of piracy. Any perceived or actual benefits of piracy to the developer does not alter its moral wrong; rather, it demonstrates a phenomenon whereby making a product massively accessible to different categories of people makes that product even more popular. That can be achieved by means of a demo / cut-down version / time-limited trial / game sharing. It doesn't have to be piracy. Steam and other digital distribution platforms solved the problem of accessibility and, to an extent, price. Developers are partnering left and right with coupon programs and other distributors like GMG and GOG. I've yet to see a game so remotely inaccessible that I understood why it would be pirated. Even online-only games like Battlefield - they are regularly on sale. There's no excuse nowadays. Also, you don't get the same access as if you had pirated the game when you share it with someone else - that's nonsense. A main incentive in buying a game is when you can share it with someone else. You don't just happen to make a friend who has a huge Steam library then get access to the game for free - nevertheless, a game he paid for. You cooperate in buying games that you mostly play where he can borrow access and vice versa. Publishers understand this and this also helps their sales - Steam does not even protect against going offline then playing a game while someone else is online with your Steam account playing whatever they please. They realize that the main incentive to having your own account solely is online multi-player. They don't care otherwise, nor do the game developers.

EU withheld a study that shows piracy doesn't hurt sales "In 2013, the European Commission ordered a €360,000 ($430,000) study on how piracy affects sales of music, books, movies and games in the EU. However, it never ended up showing it to the public except for one cherry-picked section. That's possibly because the study concluded that there was no evidence that piracy affects copyrighted sales, and in the case of video games, might actually help them."