Honestly with the quality a lot of games are released with, and the state they often are in, considering also the ludicrous costs of purchase (and you don’t actually own >90% of these purchases), for me it’s completely ethical. In that quite a lot of these people have lost the plot, we are in arguably late stage capitalism, and it’s almost a necessity anymore to test things before purchase. Don’t part with your hard earned money before you know for a fact what you are purchasing.

My two cents.

Ethics are a construct

No, buying a license is never ethical.

If it’s unethical to pirate, you can assuage your guilt by buying the thing after the fact, or deciding you were never gonna buy it anyway. If you don’t think it’s unethical to pirate, then it’s not an issue.

As to what I believe… if buying isn’t owning, pirating isn’t stealing.

Idk if this helps, but here’s my general ethical approach:

If it’s a small indie developer/studio. I always pay for the game, or at least, if I pirate the game, I buy the rough equivalent of their merch or make a donation if that’s an option.

If it’s a large studio/corpo game, I pirate it and don’t shed a single tear. Same is true for all my music and visual media.

I support people and small groups that need the help and are creating great products and art. I think it is actually unethical to support giant corporations monetarily, so I do my best to minimize the amount of money they get from me, which for many years now has been pretty close to zero.

There have been several games I ONLY bought because I pirated it first to play and then purchased. Some games don’t have demos available,

Maybe slightly off-topic, I just want to remind that Denuvo used pirated (personal licence) VMProtect in their commercial product.

Is it ethical to pirate a game

Yes.

Just pirate it. International law is gone. Civilians are being murdered in eastern Europe, Africa and the middle east.

Videogame purchasing ethics are a small grain of sand on a vast beach drenched in blood.

If the game doesn’t a demo or a refund period, then I don’t see a problem with it.

Hmm, well I’d say no. Like what if the ip or production company is garbage? Definitely wrong to give them money.

Ethics is kind of a personal viewpoint, there’s no “agreed upon table of ethics”. So of course be aware you are just getting opinions here.

Now my opinion, I do fall into the “if it’s worth the money pay for it”, if it’s not, don’t, and the Pirate now decide later is IMO a totally valid way to do that, and quite a few independent developers, etc… flat out encourage that method. Of course that doesn’t mean they all do. But to me my personal ethics say it’s more ethical… paying for a bad game, at the cost of not paying for a good game, is a travesty. My ethics say the best games should be the ones purchased… not the ones that had the best marketing and tricked the most people.

Is the development team still intact or were most of them laid off after the game’s success?

Buying in to the corporate notion that piracy is ethically wrong is ignoring the full scope of the issue. Would it be wrong for a slave to sneak a peek at the luxurious entertainment at the masters party? Would it be wrong to read a book in a library? No. In both scenarios, the company has already been paid, and the only change is in your own memory. Absolutely nothing has changed other than their perception that you might have submitted to their scheme of exploiting you for money if you hadn’t pirated their art.

But that is not really the case. Most people pirate things that they have either already purchased for another platform before, or that are beyond their ability to afford. That is not losing a customer, that is widening an audience base into populations that wouldn’t have consumed it otherwise.

Of course, it’s fair to say you should exercise some judgment. If there is a small creator who made something you like, maybe you should pick it up during a steam sale to give the creator some encouragement. But, overall, that does not represent the majority of the industry. Most cases are fat cats exploiting employees and consumers to pay exorbitant prices for a program that they don’t get to actually own. That is not selling anything, that is gatekeeping artistic creation on a level that most other art forms completely reject.

If these companies were actually interested in selling something, they could easily give us disks with real ownership, additional art and promotional items, and other physical goods that allow people to more fully engage with the product. They could focus on preservation of the experience, creating media that would last a lifetime. But they don’t—they’d rather create false moral equivalencies to guilt you into spending money on the same experience multiple times at no cost to themselves.

Don’t submit. Don’t feel guilty for experiencing art. Don’t let them tell you that you owe them money for something that doesn’t really exist. You purchased the hardware, they can’t tell you you’re a bad person because you magnetized your disk into their proprietary pattern. If they want to sell you something, it should be able to be held in your hand, just like a book, painting, or blu-ray. It should be something that represents an energy expenditure on their end like a live performance.

Pirating a game uses the electricity of the seeder and the leecher, but none from the company. It uses the disk space of the seeder and the leecher, but not the company. It runs on the hardware purchased by the seeder and the leecher, but not the company.

So, when you really take a close look at it, you’ve stolen nothing at all. The only change created is the magnetic pattern on a drive you own and the biochemical pattern of your own memory. Furthermore, the insane prices they are charging for an infinitely reproducible product that you don’t even own are creating the conditions that promote piracy in the first place. That isn’t the players fault. If they want to get rid of piracy, all they have to do is charge a fair price for what you receive, or actually provide a real product that is worth that level of cost.

Never surrender to their manipulation of your emotions and self esteem to convince you that you are a bad person for pirating. They set the rules of this world, we’re just living in it.

I’ve bought plenty of games that I’ve pirated. I’m just not willing to pay more than a dollar or two unless it’s DRM free.