What the world needed was a service where I could buy a game once and never have to worry about losing the physical media or my rights to play it ever again. And the worst excuse is that it required me to have a DVD-ROM in all of my computers just to install these games. Once I own the game I can’t ever lose the CD key or it would be worthless.

Either buying a game retail from Amazon required me to wait for it to ship or I had to drive to Best Buy. So in a way the main reason I was pirating games was that I was lazy and there wasn’t a service that catered to me. Sometimes we get lucky and games like Borderlands and the original Modern Warfare have an online mutliplayer mode that plays nicely with cracked versions, but that’s getting somewhat rare. As soon as I finished my first time through MW2, Battlefield Bad Company 2 was released. But for the most part it’s not a huge deal as great games are coming out at such a rapid pace. Those of us that download games understand this limitation. So while I played through Modern Warfare 2’s single player mode twice, I haven’t seen one minute of the mutliplayer mode. Most pirated games do not allow for multiplayer as the game often has to connect to an official server where its legitimacy can easily be verified by some sort of authentication service. Besides the moral issue of stealing, the primary reason people buy games retail is for the multiplayer modes. Why in the world would I want to drive to a store and give them $50 for the same thing?Īctually, I can answer that. The files download as fast as my cable modem allows and I have the full game with simple cracking instructions a few minutes later. It’s like three clicks of the mouse to download a torrent and even less on Usernet. Part of my motivation was that it’s just so damn easy to pirate a game. I simply couldn’t justify spending $50 on a game when pirating offers so many real benefits verses owning a legit copy. Yet like many, I’ve still managed to play every PC hit over the last decade.

The last PC game I purchased in a retail box was Half Life 2.

Up until a few weeks ago, the last PC game I purchased and didn’t pirate was Team Fortress 2 via the digital download service, Steam. Note: A reader sent us this interesting take on Steam and DRM, but requested to stay anonymous due to the nature of the article.

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