No one makes demos for their games anymore. I’m not gambling on whether I’m gonna like a game with the cost of AAA titles these days. Piracy is amazingly handy for that.

[–] Azrael@feddit.de 17 points 1 year ago

I've been calling my pirated stuff "Extended Demos"/"Extended Trailers" for ages now.

[–] narshee@iusearchlinux.fyi 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That is the number 1 reason for me too. Although steam solves this problem partially with their return policy. But I don't want to pay the price upfront everytime, so I resolve to piracy until I know if I want to buy the game.

[–] Akagigahara@lemmy.world 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I'd almost agree. Steam is great with it's return policy, but only really by comparison. The 14 days is definitely plenty of time, but 2h is not a lot for quite a few, and especially the expensive, games.

[–] princessnorah@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 1 year ago

I want ~10 hours to make a call personally. If I can’t make it out of the character creator and tutorial stage then it’s not enough time.

[–] Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 1 year ago

it's a bit of a shit situation because i can't really come up with a way to decide how long the free return window should be on a per-game basis, surely if you make it depend on the game's standard playtime they'll just make the main quest 30 minutes long and make all the actual content side quests

[–] atlasraven31@lemm.ee 3 points 1 year ago

I agree but I have recently bought 2 games that offered steam demos: Xenonauts 2 and Astro Colony.

[–] violetraven@lemmy.blahaj.zone 9 points 1 year ago

I've done this with games I've purchased physical discs for but are a pain to install on Windows 10. I was able to find a pirate site that had lightly modified games to help work on modern systems.

[–] ICastFist@programming.dev 2 points 1 year ago

I do that a lot with "free" EGS games. Since I now legally own them, it's no longer "actual" piracy