[zozbot123]

These days you pay for the game/media, and then pirate it anyway just so you don't have to deal with the obnoxious DRM on it. (Or sometimes there's no DRM but the game is abandonware that no one can hope to trace the rightsholders of, and you can only get it reasonably by pirating it.)

[zanny]

Giving companies money that use DRM that drives you to pirate promotes the continued use of crippling DRM.

If you don't actually want a game in the form a distributor gives it to you at the price they ask then no, you aren't a lost sale pirating it.

At that, its not some moral black and white. I use IsThereAnyDeal to price track the games I want and only buy them at all time low prices. Mostly because I still have hundreds of titles to get around to but end up programming, drawing, or reading way too much HN all the time to get around to them.

It doesn't matter if I give a developer $1 or $0 if its still not enough to keep the lights on. The same thing happens with music and movies - you need either a sufficiently large or rich enough audience to keep your studio in the green.

Its probably way too deep for the bottom of a thread on Proton but I'm realizing that no matter how copyright is written in the post-Internet era it will always be an appeal for donation. Just because I haven't pirated a game in a decade doesn't make me "moral" or the pirate "immoral" - I only buy games now because its convenient on GOG and Steam to just have them in one place and not have to keep track of independent installers from torrents and to token support Linux developers. But I'm just an increment on a Linux sales column - I'm not actually making them anything close to reasonable revenue for the number of Linux gamers there are, and my marginal impact compared to someone who would have just grabbed it off PirateBay is completely negligible.

I'll keep buying Linux ports to... collect them? But I'm still not a valuable purchase. I'm waiting often years until its under $5 and even then I sometimes say "eh, I'll get it when its cheaper". But its not some moral high ground, and it barely impacts any bottom line - all game developers depend on first week sales at full price. Nothing else keeps the lights on, you will never see revenue volume close to that again. Buying it years later for $2 on sale is practically putting loose change in a beggars cup.

[jsgo]

Whew. So I'm not sure if I'd go this route, but I empathize to a degree. I have so many games between Steam, Origin, Uplay, Battle.NET, Epic Games, and other misc. launchers that it is near impossible to keep up.

At this point, and I've said this multiple times, I really wish Microsoft had a way to create a universal launcher/downloader where if I bought a game on Uplay, it shows up in said launcher and can be downloaded from Uplay's servers. Likewise Steam and the rest. This would be better than a Movies Anywhere style program as the various storefronts don't carry almost identical libraries of games. This is a big area where console gamers win: universal game management.