Try before you buy

The internet had this sweet spot right before smartphones became popular. This was the Windows XP era.

Network speeds were getting decently fast, it was fairly straightforward to access, search engines produced useful output by default. You didn't had to dial individual BBS numbers anymore, everything was "point and click", and short-form media content wasn't eroding our attention span yet.

Software distribution over the internet also became more widespread as speeds increased. This further popularized a software distribution method that as of today barely exists anymore.

Shareware

The concept is simple. The user can run your software for free with one of two caveats:

• Some functionality was purposefully locked away, limited in functionality, or can only be used a few times
• The software was fully functional, but the trial period was limited.

This became commonly known as shareware. It wasn't uncommon for this actually being the same executable as the main version, which meant that the limitations could often simply be removed by purchasing a license key and entering it.

There were of course other means to get a key, usually involving music.

Shareware existed before internet usage became widespread. Popular shareware included the original DOOM game, WinZip and WinRAR. Shareware tools were also often distributed by computer magazines on the included CD.

Today

Shareware has largely vanished from the internet. Rather than testing a piece of software and buying it if you like it, it has become commonplace to force you to pay for it upfront and go the refund route if you dislike it, or you have to sign up for a trial period that automatically upgrades to the paid version at the end if you don't remember to manually cancel it.

Shareware games practically don't exist anymore. Personally I think this is immoral. Imagine you had to pay full price for a TV at the electronic store before they would allow you to turn the display model on and test it.

Piracy

Media piracy is a completely natural phenomena just like other illegal behavior. People are willing to make sacrifices in order to do things the intended way. How much, varies from person to person. When that bar is crossed, the will to use illegal methods rises.

One of the best examples are roads. Every road has a design speed and a posted speed. People will generally obey the speed limit, but the further the posted limit undercuts the limit that feels natural for a road, the more will people be considering to exceed the limit.

This is why roads with small posted speed limits often contain some form of obstruction. People are more likely to obey the limit if the limit says 30 km/h and the road feels like 30 too.

The will to pirate media follows this trend too. Including:

• The product is too expensive
• The publisher is a dick
• Legal options are not available or unwieldy to work with
• Inability to test the product
• Uncertainty about long term access to the purchased product

Piracy has gotten easier in the last few years. There's established and easy to use channels to download the content you desire, and especially for media, there's a plethora of software to build your own Netflix for free.

For software, there's trustworthy release groups that produce "double click and go" type of installers.

As sailing the high seas gets more comfortable, legal options have to adjust, and also get better

• Music: The music industry has this mostly figured out.
• Hollywood: The movie and TV industry is a fractured mess just like cable TV packages used to be (and still are).
• Books: Less fractured, but vendor lock-in. Amazon for example made older Kindle devices useless recently.
• Software: Increasingly only available on a subscription method, one time license keys are slowly vanishing.

Apart from a few outliers, most media is also DRM protected, which hurts paying customers only, and makes making backup copies harder or outright impossible for them, because often you don't even own the product, you just "own" a time limited usage license.

Some people demand physical media again, but that does not solve the DRM problem. A legally bought game on a disc will be useless if the DRM on it decides you're no longer allowed to use it. Plus, physical media degrades over time, and the readers for them eventually get phased out.

The real solution are long term available digital copies. Provided by a trusted entity, like the Internet Archive (archive.org).

Your own shareware rules

You can set your own rules about what you consider fair. Here's my shareware rules:

If something is cheap enough, I buy it, but I may still download a pirated copy for backup purposes. If I'm not sure if the price is worth it, I will download an unofficial copy and try the product. If I consider it worth paying for after testing it for a while, I think about what I would consider a fair price for it. If the actual price matches my estimate, I buy it. If it doesn't matches, I add it to my watch list and wait for a discount.

Completing a game or even playing it at all anymore is not a factor in this by the way. I've bought "The long Drive" at a discount because of this ruleset even though I stopped playing it a long time ago, and I don't think I ever completed a Factorio save but I bought the game anyways. I additionally got the space age expansion when it was released even though I don't think I will ever complete it.

Factorio by the way has a free demo version you can play that contains a decent amount of content.

Also don't forget that people talk to each other. If at least one person buys a game because of your recommendation, I would consider your piracy debt paid. If two or more people buy the product, the publisher actually made money off of you.