Why do People Pirate Games?

I honostly think that most people do it to test the games before they buy them. If you really liked the game, chances are you are going to buy it.

Because they can, and they don't care enough about supporting the developers who made the game by actually buying it.

Availability and convenience.
(Of course, I can't speak for everyone, this is just my observation and view on the matter. And those might not be the exact right words or the most complete ones to describe it with but it's 5 am, gimme a break. :P )

Simply put, if the game (or, when I think about it, anything else that is being pirated) is easily available in a convenient enough way people are more likely to just wanna buy it and play it. Straightforward and simple.
When a number of different factors get in the way of people's comfort, they will instead turn to piracy since it ends up offering a better experience. These factors can range anywhere from the cost of the product (if it's being sold for too high of a price in a region where people get low wages; if the individual person in question just doesn't value the product at the price that is being asked) to the reputation of the manufacturer of the product (in this case our, oh so lovely and kinda obsolete at this point, publishers) and the quality of the product (the pirated version might be lacking certain... "features", that no-one asked for)...

Anyway, I guess I'll give an example with myself:
When I was a kid I pirated my games. I didn't have money of my own and games seemed to always cost waaaaaaay more than I was willing to ask my parents for. I knew the website I can get them from because some friend of my sister told her about it and she told me. It was how just about everyone around me got their games since Bulgaria was a shit country (it still is, but we now have more available technology than we had then). I was patient enough to try to get the games in question to actually work and if they refused to work- download different versions to try again. I was oblivious of the harmful viruses they were infested with. Basically, despite in retrospect offering a shitty experience, it was all I knew and it was easily available.
Anyway, flash forward a lot of years and I got interested enough in games and mature enough to actually... look around more. I noticed Steam was a thing but was initially skeptical. Then I saw that on sales those games are actually affordable. And then some friends that I made while playing some smaller browser-based games showed that they already use Steam, which gave it credibility. Over time I eased up on it and as it turns out it is (reasonably :P ) trustworthy. By then I had my own card so I didn't need to worry about bugging my parents every time I saw a good deal. And it also offered a lot of other extras such as a friend list and achievements for most games.
So, I pretty much haven't pirated games since then. It's just not worth it- I don't consider it a better experience anymore and I have many alternatives. And if a game isn't worth it to buy, well, it's not worth it to pirate either. :P

Basically, here's a cute little analogy- someone is selling a hat in their fancy-ass shop, they even offer a guarantee for it. Some dudes get their hands on the hat's design, make plastic copies of it with their 3D printer and start giving it out for free in their run-down shack next door. Some people would take the free 3D-printed option, but the guys in the shack take no responsibility if the hats melt all over those people's heads from too much sunlight. Most people would take the fancy shop option... as long as it keeps giving a better and affordable experience.

A lot of people do it because of availability. Whether it's not available at all, can't buy it in your region, publisher requiring steps to download or just the typical price being too high. If the games were available for cheap, were easy to download and didn't need an online connection to play then I'm sure a lot more people would move away from pirating to just buying the games.
Then there are the people who literally don't care the developers or about any of above and just want to get everything in their life for free.

Region-locked / censored.

We used to be able to circumvent region-locks by having oversea friends to buy and gift to you.
Can't do that now.

These days, there are mostly 2 things that can make me think of pirating something: day one DLC (aka removed content from base game to raise price artificially), and strong suspicion that I won't enjoy the game despite an appealing marketing (in this case, I'm more thinking of try-before-buy than pure piracy).

reasons to pirate:

• try out a game (not everyone likes to buy it on steam and refund)
  ---- by that I mean try out the gameplay
  ---- and also if it would run on your pc
• if it's too expensive atm
• some people dislike a developer so much, they would not buy a game from them / microtransactions - treating customers like shit - I wouldn't pay for payday (:
• because it's easy to do so and "why not"
• if the game is not buyable in your country for whatever reason

those are not my personal reasons, I'm fine with steam and if I want a game then I wait for a sale (even if it takes 5 years 😒)

another reason is because there are no demos for the games to see how they work on your system and then buy it.
I bought for example Need for speed 2015 - and when I ran it I discovered that my video card was not supported : minimum 512MB ram was the requirement and I had 1GB but the card was no longer supported in newest drivers (Radeon HD 6870)
And a week after I bought NFS the price dropped by 50% and still had 50% discount (I bought it with 50% off the original price)

sounds much like a stupid pretext to self-convince you that in such circumstances it is morally acceptable to pirate games.

Let's see...

1. To spite on the devs e.g EA or Ubicrap.
2. Too lazy to pay.
3. Too expensive.
4. For the sake of pirating.

To save money and/or in rare cases that copy-protection messed so much that pirated copies worked better than legal ones. (Silent hunter V allways online DRM)

Reasons I'd pirate.

• Demo purposes.
• Replacement for lost or faulty physical copy of game.
• Broken DRM on a game I bought.

Additional reasons I can understand others pirating.

• Too poor to buy games without starving as a result.

Personally, I won't pirate because of broken DRM (unless I've purchased the game), or to spite a company. If I dislike a company, I merely distance myself from their products, simple as that. However... I'm not gonna condemn anyone else for whatever reasons they choose to pirate. All I do is advise people to buy from good developers to ensure we continue getting good games. To me the whole war on piracy is a bit ridiculous anyway. DRM doesn't stop it, nor will it ever, it only punishes paying customers. While if you take the ability to pirate away from most people, odds are it wouldn't effect sales anyway. People simply wouldn't buy the games.

Maybe someone want to test the game and test the performance of their PC for that game?If they like it and the PC is working fine then there is a pretty solid reason to buy a licensed game?No?It is obvious AF...The whole topic about nothing imho :D

Because of money i would liketo think. Games are interesting in this regard . With few exceptions game prices are equal to everyone but 60$ Canadian and 60$ to someone from my country for example is entirely different sum of money :)

1. Game have not demo version.
2. Demo version don't show game but show only little piece.
3. No money or not enough money.
4. Stupid price or content policy.
   • For example, I have Mass Effect trilogy which have different included DLC in Steam and origin cause EA (foolish badasses (I hope it's fine on English as it is on my native language)) have conflict with Steam. Also, I forced to pirate Mass Effect 2 because cost of "game+all DLC" = "game x10" (conditionally. game cost 10$, all DLC cost 70$. Total = 80$.).
   • Other example: "money farm train simulator" by microsoft with all DLC costs more than 1600$ on my currency with conversion.
5. Adherence to one's principles. For example, "I've never buy any game".

Because they like One Piece maybe? Now they're thinking that being a Pirate is a cool thing. Yes.

View attached image.

Say you wait all day for a game to try out on steam. It comes out but now you find out you can't refund it for your money cause it went over 2 hours before you knew it and couldn't get out in time. I think it mostly has to do with how much money certain people make in certain areas/places and then before you know it, most of the game devs who made the game you waited for, scrap the game in its early stages and you're left with no game to be update and no happiness to refund. Now who loses out in a game, pirates or the buyers? Thankfully I've been lucky to get deals where i can on steam.

But I'll leave an example, grand theft auto V. Not a bad game at all, never played but suppose you buy it and can't get a refund if you wanted cause you get so immersed in the single player and want to go to multiplayer but then find out for whatever reason it bans your account. Well, just things like that can irk a gamer from paying so called honest companies to make the good types of games. Then of course depends on the gamer who buys or pirates so idk.

I've only downloaded games I already owned but for whatever reason the disc wasn't available to me anymore-- scratched all to hell, broke, misplaced, whatever. I also used to scour the internet for ~cracks that allowed me to play sans disc completely, because at the time I had to do some weird contortion crap just to reach the disc tray to swap stuff out.

Now that things are easily bought/downloaded via Steam, GOG, Origin, et al, I don't have a reason to go looking for pirated copies, so I just don't. I honestly thought that the DRM had gotten so screechingly awful in the last decade that it was easier to just buy the game anyway instead of wait for someone to struggle through cracking it, but by looking at the comments on this thread and the last one I guess I was in the wrong here.

I don't pirate I borrow

Yes, that is sarcasm...

Personally, I pirated because I didn't think I could afford to buy games legit. Then a few years ago I pirated a game that was so good I wanted to support the dev, so I found a way to shell out the 15 dollars to buy it. That game was Stardew Valley. I had bought games before, including ones I had pirated, but that was the first game that made me think "Why the hell am I pirating this instead of supporting the dev who made this super fun game?"

Shortly after that, I decided to stop pirating all together. Over time, I've slowly been getting - on sale and as I get more disposable income - past games that I pirated as well. Sales, bundles, and things like Tremor Games, survey sites, and micro work - Mturk, etc - have helped me be able to get games without cutting into the family budget. A lot of those things are things I discovered when I made the decision to simply refuse to see pirating as an option. It's actually kind of fun to find ways to get the most bang for my gaming buck, or to sacrifice that for a game/dev I see as worth supporting.

Because there's a whole lot of shitty games that get huuuge marketing budgets, and the absolutely rubbish "journalists" in gaming can't be trusted one iota.

So the only way to find out if seemingly interesting games are actually decent/good and runs well enough on your hardware is to pirate it. Then again, testing a game with the DRM stripped doesn't mean that the same purchased game with DRM will run as well as the pirated version... Or vice versa.

• Greed and entitlement. Thinking just about themselves and not caring about the consequences of their actions.
• Money and convenience. I know it is difficult to understand it, as almost everyone here has disposable income, but most people in the world struggle to reach the end of the month and buying culture is not a possibility. A lot of people also don’t have bank accounts/credit cards and buying online is quite complicated.
• Considering it a victimless crime that can be done privately. The rationale is that you wouldn’t buy it anyway so “no harm done”.
• Political activism – some people believe in the free distribution of knowledge, education and culture, and are against copyright laws. I would say most crackers and releasers of piracy (that do not do it for money, of course) enter this category.
• Failure to understand product licenses at premium price. A lot of people, from before the internet, actually owned the products they acquired. They could lend, exchange, resell, giveaway and even copy them.
• Trying it out as a demo, checking if it correctly works on their system and removing drm from owned copies. Still piracy, from a technical and legal point of view.

Because games especially AAA ones rarely have demos, I'm not buying something I can't try for myself first. Gameplay videos can't always show if a game is good or bad.

Also when a AAA game has only single player and it isn't more than 5-6 hours long, what exactly is the point of paying 60$ for it? Obviously they didn't put enough effort in it to justify the price tag.