Yes, I do pirate. I don't pirate utility software much. Most of what I need to do I can pretty reliably do with free software or with the cheap licenses I mana

Yes, I do pirate. I don't pirate utility software much. Most of what I need to do I can pretty reliably do with free software or with the cheap licenses I managed to pick here and there. Some of the free software I'm using is already the best in class like ffmpeg. What I do pirate a lot is video games. There are couple of reasons: 1. Purchasing power. My purchasing power is roughly 4-5x less than the one in the western countries. I feel like this pricing is unfair. It's like someone would ask a US citizen to pay 250$ for a new game. Sure, I can wait for a sale, but at the same time there's no real reason why I can't just pirate the game, play it now and buy it when I feel the price is right. 2. Technical issues. Lots of games are released in a state where tons of stuff is broken. After buying several games with issues like these I decided that it's better to just pirate and check if the game works properly rather than buy and go through the refund process. 3. Quality issues. I've played games where it was clear that the scope of what was supposed to be included was going to be a lot bigger. Or games with an "open world" that is empty and there's nothing to do in it. Or game that abruptly ends after 4 hours despite the 60$ price tag. Or games that require tons of day one patching and are borderline unplayable for the first month or two. There are tons of issues like this in video games nowadays and I'm not going to pay for a subpar product if I can avoid it. 4. Lack of demos. It used to be common to be able to try a small section of the game before buying and I am not going to give this up just because game companies want to save some money. 5. Release date. If I want to try some old game then most of the time the only sane option is to pirate. There are sites like GoG that sell old games but this comes back to the #2 where some of the GoG releases would still not work despite supposedly being patched. GoG is also known for selling publicly released cracks so I'm not exactly sure what I'm paying for here. 6. Convenience. I don't have a CD/DVD drive anymore, but I have lots of games that are on these discs. I can just download what I need and achieve the same result instead of fiddling with physical media.