This month, I bought 226 PC games for C$185.82 ($134.58)
Now are those a lot of games? Yes, it’s a silly amount of games. Perhaps I’m addicted to good deals that deliver fun.
We all have a vice, and this is mine. I don’t drink, or smoke, or gamble – but I buy lots and lots of video games.
Though back when I was a console gamer, I’d might get eight games for that price – if I were lucky.
Legally, I can download all my installers from GOG, store them to a hard drive, and make a duplicate of that hard drive as a redundancy.
And believe me, I’ve thought about that.
What keeps me from doing that is the price of storage. One title alone can be 120GB.
This is ultimately why I don’t pirate. It costs me $20 for a 128GB SD card. But if I’m buying that game for $4 off Steam, it’s cheaper to store that game in the cloud—especially if I only average a couple hours of play per game.
There’s also the convenience of knowing the game will likely work, I (mostly) don’t have to edit DLLs, and malware is unlikely.
The only reason to pirate is for some bizarre moral reason, which I don’t share. It really is easier to just pay a couple bucks—store indefinitely, get to work immediately.