Piracy can often be discouraged by making the legitimate options more accessible. Steam served as a unified storefront for multiple titles, and made it easy to

Piracy can often be discouraged by making the legitimate options more accessible. Steam served as a unified storefront for multiple titles, and made it easy to manage a library of content without flipping through a binder of CDs, a notebook page full of CD keys, and a box full of the manuals they came with. Why worry about downloading multiple chunks of an archive and reassembling them, or having your ISP throttle you for torrenting, or trusting the crackers of the content you're pirating when you can just wait for the game to go on sale? I'll say, though. Elden Ring didn't work for me at launch, and I ended up refunding it(thanks, digital refund process!), but I seriously considered getting a pirated copy to see if the cracked version would work better. Anecdotal reports suggested that the anticheat (which was cracked in the pirated version) was the cause of issues for plenty of people.