I used to steal every single game I played. Even games that had online play, I would play on cracked servers.
These days I buy every single game on Steam, and if it's not on Steam I still buy it on Play.com. Steam is easy, fast, convenient, and simple. Games are one click away. My Steam account contains over £2,000 worth of games.
"It's easier than stealing" is practically the Steam business model. This is also why iTunes and similar services "won" the music piracy race. Not to say that music piracy is gone, but it's been largely dwindled due to the low barrier of entry for obtaining music.
Actually, iTunes and the Apple TV did this for me for movies. At some point I started downloading movies from Usenet, for various reasons:
- Annoying unskippable 'don't copy this disc' messages.
- Movies are sometimes not available at the local rental or retailer.
- High prices of Blu-Rays.
- Downloading is legal in my home country.
- Downloading from Usenet was less effort.
iTunes solved most of these issues, and made it easy to 'impulse rent' movies. Nowadays, we just rent movies via iTunes, since it is less effort than verifying/extracting/converting movies and finding subtitles. Also, it feeds the makers.
I iTunes on Windows reasonably well. (I typed "just fine" at first, and that's not true. It has been a bit crashy and clearly a second-class citizen. But it works.)
in France, the iTunes selection is pretty poor if you're looking for English content with subtitles. Most of the catalog is available dubbed in French - which is a pity, especially for TV Shows where dubbing is really poor.
Still suffers from region locks, inability to get it on my TV easily, late release times, and all those other things that are made so easy when you download TV.
This is not exactly the same. If you get a game via Steam, you get the exact game. If you however get a cd via iTunes, you get a compressed version of the original (at least last time I checked, not sure if this changed, and cannot find any prove it did). Close, but not exactly the same.
I used to steal every single game I played. Even games that had online play, I would play on cracked servers.
These days I buy every single game on Steam, and if it's not on Steam I still buy it on Play.com. Steam is easy, fast, convenient, and simple. Games are one click away. My Steam account contains over £2,000 worth of games.
It's easier than stealing.