AITAH for pirating games before buying them?
Nowadays, the absolute vast majority of games that I play are shit tbh.
This is why I pirate games first to try them out. I wanna be very clear that if I think a game is good I buy it, no questions asked.
However, since most games don't have demos or trials, I don't want to feel like I've wasted money so I look to piracy so that I can try them out before making a purchase.
AITAH?
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Used to do that for decades. Nowadays with steam i just return the game.
I don't trust the refund policy. If they have a so called refund policy why not force every published to add a 1-2 hour free trial instead? We should be able to try games and evaluate before the money leaves our pockets.
Because the "default path" is different, a free trial would have way less conversion than the current system.
With a free trial you have to take an action to buy it. With a refund you have to take an action to be refunded.
Or they could do it like SaaS, where you're automatically charged at the end of the trial unless you decide to cancel before... But that's a bit convoluted and it wouldn't bring much compared to the current system.
Personally unless it's a dirt cheap game I do enough research before buying and I rarely have to refund. But I definitely refund if the game is not at the level of quality that I expected.
Try it, steam makes it so easy to refund stuff assuming you played less than couple hours and bought it fairly recently. And forcing companies to make trials isn't as easy as you think. Some indie games still have trial versions but those are pretty much impossible to find in AAA titles as they obviously want people to just buy them and play past the return window.
Edit: Also on your post, who cares? Lot of companies certainly don't have morals and do whatever they can to milk their users. If you don't wanna pay for it then don't, its better than not playing anyway. Buy something if you can afford to and wanna support the studio, especially indie studios who rely on that income to produce more games and the money actually go to the people who deserve it. I personally just grab a bunch of stuff on sale and play one when I feel like it, although a lot of them remains untouched to this date.
Tldr: don't overthink it, do whatever works for you
They don't really market their refund policy. And, I know they have a 2 hour playing window. However, what if you're really into the game and you play 2.5h non-stop not realizing and they you decide to refund but can't. Sometimes it can take up to 10 hours to actually evaluate if a game is good. Some games have tutorials which can take 1-2 hours if you read everything and play at a slow pace at which point you're locked out of refund. I don't support their refund policy at all actually.
I would say its reasonable as it applies to all games even the indie ones that can end within an hr so any higher and people might start abusing it.
Don’t trust the software company to do what they have made legally sound claims to doing, and that hundreds of thousands of people have said they’ve done.
But do trust the script kiddies writing crackers not to install invisible keyloggers and ad trackers.