what
I'm probably too tired to be refuting this right now, but MM isn't on Steam to tag in for me.
First off don't cast me as someone feeling "blame". I did the wrong thing, but I don't give a fuck.
Now, I agree that we should be able to know how a game plays before we buy it, which is why smart devs send review copies to gaming media early, release demos, go F2P, etc. But I also know that I have no entitlement to know how a game plays if the person publishing it doesn't give me it. That's on their head, and it doesn't make it ok to pirate it as some kind of quality assurance.
I'm glad you bring up the example of Youtube music - even if you try to tell me how I feel about it to cast me into some hypocrisy without giving me a chance to voice my opinions. If you upload someone's album to Youtube without their permission, that's 1000x worse than piracy. If you listen to an unautorised upload on Youtube, that's piracy and I definitely feel that it's bad. Again though, smart publishers/artists give people a way to sample what's on the album before they buy it. They release singles, get radio playtime, do TV promotions and play concerts! Until you actually hand the money over, you have no right to listen to the album, unless it's free somewhere like Bandcamp.
Imagine you go into a bookstore, and settle down to read an entire novel. Naturally the staff try to stop you. You explain that you're just going to read the book to make sure it's good, and that you'll pay once you're certain of that. They still seem unimpressed, so you continue that you're morally right, because you're not actually stealing the book. It's still on their premise - they aren't losing anything by letting you read it. Can you guess what the staff say? It's something along the lines of either "Go to a library", or "Read a review". Before you pay the money, the bookstore won't allow you to see inside the covers, because you don't actually own what's inside the covers. With digital content there are no physical covers, just a license that allows you to legally access the product. Jump into The Future, in a world where all bookstores are self-service. There are no staff to stop you reading away - so does that make it ok?
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