The money I pay for games these days no longer means as much as the time I would otherwise spend searching for them & playing them. I can remember back when I was in high school, 40$ meant a whole lot. I still didn't pirate very often, but mostly because I was paranoid about getting caught and/or catching viruses.

These days, steam is super convenient, and I can spend 40$ on a game without missing it. Pirating a game takes a lot of time, and carries the risk of taking even more time & effort if it goes badly. The 40$ just isn't worth the hassle. Honestly, games targeted at older demographics could probably get away with charging a whole lot more than they do now, for exactly this reason. I'm sure everyone has a cut-off where the effort to pirate outweighs the cost of going the legit route, but chances are for professional adults, that cut off is likely way over 40$.

If you are doing game dev yourself, even as a hobby, you cannot compare yourself to the "average gamer" anymore!

Just because you yourself have lots of respect for game devs doesn't mean the average gamer has... how could they when most of them don't even understand that creating games is, like, hard work? And not just sitting around and playing games all day?

A lot of really stupid forum questions in some online game forums show just how uneducated some players are..

Do you really expect these players to understand why they have to shell out 60 bucks for a new game? How they will not get a sequel to their favourite game if everyone pirates as they do?

I expect most ADULT gamers to be reasonable... they will most probably know that games are not created in a day just like milk is not growing inside of the super market. They will know that IF they like something and want to support it, they need to spend cash on it.

But some people will never understand that, and the younger people are, the more likely they are oblivious to simple facts as these. Not to mention them having little cash and too much free time :)

If yomething changed, it is that more people are doing binge buying during Steam sales, which might in fact not only completly over-inflate sales numbers of some normally not so successfull titles, it might actually also make them more money, both hiding piracy numbers a little bit. If anything, I would expect a bigger overall number of buyers/pirates because more people buy the game, instead of a shift from pirates to buyers.

Also, thanks to F2P, as other have mentioned, some devs cleverly steer around the piracy problem. Servers have traditionally been tough to crack or reverse engineer, and with F2P the incentive to do so just became almost extinct.

I have yet to see private servers of common F2P titles, yet for games like Ragnarok Online back 10 years, that was pretty common.

Few indie developers have been around prior to Steam and digital distribution.

I think the Positech guy was around before Steam became big for indie games and there was a blog post of his way back commenting that that going DRM-free not only turned out to make his life easier but advertising the DRM-freeness also increased sales.

From my personal perspective, I can confirm that. I don't use Steam and similar platforms (among a few other related but distinct reasons) because of DRM. I am however rather generous with DRM-free titles. I bought quite a few duds and imaged-would-be-betters because of that but I also stumbled into a few pearls I would have never found otherwise.

In the "old days" I had no way to find out of something was worth my money or time. So I would download a "trial" ( pirate ) version.

If I liked it, I'd buy a non-trial ( legitimate ) copy. If I didn't, the "trial" version would be deleted.

For many years now, I have never had to use "trial" versions of games ( thanks YouTube ), and very rarely have to get a "trial" version of software.

I used to be really into playing "abandonware" games from the early-mid 90s also ...

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Say goodby to your free time ! http://www.classicdosgames.com/online.html

I don't use Steam and similar platforms (among a few other related but distinct reasons) because of DRM.

Not sure if you're speaking as a dev or a consumer in this case, but you can publish on Steam without using their DRM.

I'm speaking as a consumer and the whole DRM crap makes me too annoyed with Steam to leave any money there, regardless of a particular's title DRM state.

What part of Steam's DRM do you not like?

As a consumer most "cracked" version I used in the last... 5 years?... where due some annoying DRM which prevent the running of game I legitimately bought, eg: some DRM did not like I use a different drive letter and not the traditional "C:\" system hard drive path.

I also do not like that some games (single-player included) I bought on steam do not work or crashes if steam server go down, whether I already am in-game or still on desktop.

I'm gonna add to this some games I pirated and why:

1. (And first one ever IIRC) Freelancer - I had bought the german retail version already, but after having played the english demo before I noticed that the german voice action just sucked, so I pulled the english version from eMule.

In fact, on many games I got the perception that german syncro was much worse than the english one and most were sold single-language back then

2. GTA 4 - You sure remember the reports after release that GTA 4 and ATI gpus just didn't want to go together. Since I had an HD4850 at the time, and I wouldn't have been able to return the game if it didn't like my gpu I pirated it - and later bought it on Steam Sale.

3. Battlezone 2 - When it came out I didn't have the money to buy it and when I finally did I couldn't find it anywhere. Later bought it from an XPLOSIV re-release

4. Wolfenstein The new Order - Pirated because of ridiculous german censorship and even though I live in austria and not I germany I can't get the international uncut version activated in Steam.

Anyway, since steam started their steam sales I bought a lot of games there that I had pirated earlier.