Edit: I should add, if corporations can’t be bothered to respect what the word buy means, why I should I bother to provide them money? morality is a two way street, if one side is dishonest and shady, do they really have a right to whine when others steal from them?

Ah, yes, remember all that tone of honesty and seriousness from companies in the 00s against bad, bad pirates, and also scorn at FOSS, like those amateur toys, we make better things? And now from time to time those “serious professional” programs from then are found to contain GPL violations. Or how Sony put a virus on music CDs.

TBH, there was a time when things were better with actually buying software and music and such. And probably the surge of piracy was first.

But somehow that doesn’t hurt Steam. Quoting GN - because piracy is a service problem. People generally pirate what they can’t comfortably buy. There were games I’ve never seen in stores in my childhood (no official localization, and by the time I got interested in them people selling bootleg discs in subway road crossings were coming out of fashion here). Piracy was the way I got them.