I pirate AAA, I buy indie.
I’m generally pretty much in agreement with the idea that online services are crap because you don’t really own the things you buy, but honestly I’ve been buying physical media since the 80s and pirating since the 90s, and the oldest games I currently have easy access to are ones I bought on Steam. I’m not a collector or an archivist or anything. Those just aren’t hobbies that interest me, and I move a lot, and don’t always take care of my stuff, and freely lend things to unreliable friends, and frequently wipe my drives to try out new Linux distros, so at this point even if Valve probably won’t be around forever I still expect my Steam games to last longer than anything else I could get. Steam is really the only reason I ever buy games at all anymore.
I used to almost exclusively pirate because I couldn’t afford much of anything. Steam has actually enabled me to purchase most of the games I use since I can wait till they’re on special and cheap. There’s also a huge amount of indie games that would never have seen the light of day if they could only release on physical media or through their own website or whatever.
no Steam isn’t perfect, I would like Valve to take less of a cut but in terms of making games more accessible, I think they’ve done a decent job.
No shade on my fellow pirates who still exclusively pirate and don’t want to feed the corporate beast.
