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

i think it depends. i think it’s always ethical to pirate a game by a big company, but probably not from an indie developer. i’m not gonna stop you though

Buying licenses is never ethical. Buying the actual stuff, yeah, it is.

If you knew the game was bad you wouldn't buy it. That equals no sale for the publisher.

If you pirate it, don't like the game and delete it. It's the same result.

If you pirate it, like it. Then buy it, then everybody's happy.

See, they don't care if you like the game or not, so why should you care if it's ethical to try a game? Especially if you buy it in case you like it.

I did this with Baldur's gate 3. I liked it so much I went and bought it on steam. And still liked it so much I got the deluxe just cause it was the only time gaming I felt like I really wanted them to get more money

Is it ethical to pirate a game

Yes.

Who cares?

No it is ethical to just keep the pirated game. If buying is not owning pirating is not stealing, and you should not pretend that it is.

No, buying a license is never ethical.

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.

Yes.

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.

It's always ethical to pirate.

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.

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

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.

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,

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.

Ideas have no fences, intelectual propriety is bullshit that keeps poor people away from culture

I think you should do what feels right for you.

I have only grabbed one game actively being sold in the past decade(sims4 lol). But I recently grabbed a bunch of older games to emulate.

My personal belief is that if I were to grab a game and I did really enjoy it? I would want to buy it at some point. Especially if it's a small studio or an individual that made the game.

I read a lot and watch anime. If I enjoy a book or a show I'll buy some merch later if I can. I always recommend media to friends and people online. But thats just me.

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

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.

i mean that was literally the entire point of shareware.

Whenever I'm in situations like this, I think back to my days in high school when I had a CD collection that was worth several thousand dollars. Each of those CDs cost 10 or $15, and for each one that I purchased, the original artist got a few cents.

It was all a giant f****** scam to get the record companies rich. The record companies owe me for that, but they're never going to pay up, and ethically, I don't feel like I owe them another cent, nor will I for the rest of my life.

Of course the gaming industry is not quite the same, but in some ways it is quite similar.

i wish there was a option to donate money to the devs directly.

Who cares? There's no categorical imperative, only class war

Ultimately, I think that art should be accessible to everyone. Piracy is always ethical when it comes to the question of being able to afford something or not.

Otherwise, the way I view the question of ethics for me personally

1. What do the workers get if I buy it?
2. Does the studio deserve supporting?
3. Is the product actually worth buying?

Example: The Sims, developed by Electronic Arts.
EA was voted worst company gods know how many years now. They are part of the forefront when it comes to hiring workers for a project, and then firing as many as possible. The video game industry is a hellhole to work in, and job security isn't a thing at all. If I buy a game from them, I get a license to run it, I have to put up with their DRM, and all the developers, artists, and workers that actually matter have already long since been paid for their work. That's to say, buying it would be unethical because it further feeds the unethical practises of the company, and the money just go to the board anyway.

And that's without Trump and the Saudis entering the picture.

Example: Paralives, developed by Alex Massé and team Paralives Studio. This is a small indie company with a dozen or so developers and artists. They've been crowd-funding the development for years. At this point, if you buy a license to run it you get an early-access incomplete version of the game, missing features, and loads of bugs. I generally do not buy into early access. That said, buying a license to Paralives supports a small indie studio create their passion project. They don't have the same abysmal anti-worker practises as Electronic Arts, and I like their project. At this point they're so successful that me buying the game or not just adds to a stack of money, but they don't have nearly the funds of EA, and I think they're managing them better.

Ethical to buy? I don't know. I'd say it's less ethical to pirate.

Just train your AI models with it, then everything is fine.

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.

Yes of course it's ethical

I seen my friends do that (if the game does not have a demo) so yes

It's not really piracy unless it deprives someone of a thing. If you want to subscribe to that thing being revenue like the current regimes does, even then you ain't doing that if you are already planning to buy if you enjoy. Why can people do this with physical items, ie:physical returns if the product doesn't meet my requirements or is subpar but not digital media?