sparklecherry

That is a good and valid question. Talking about the US exclusively, piracy is a grey area. Some want stuff for free and now. On the other hand, some are willing to try things before giving money for the real thing or wait. There can't be only one for piracy.

With videogames, I'd say the number of sales are way lower than 14 years for profitability. I think it may be closer to 5 years or under. By 14 years, the game console has already gone on to it's new iteration for a few years.

I believe in waiting until the next gen or until developers can't make any more money for games. "Pirating for good" is either people wanting stuff for free now or the companies are making it extremely difficult to buy stuff. It's up to the person and not really the masses.

I do believe in the numbers of being locked out without "piracy". The average person is mostly trying to watch TV and movies, even games, that are locked by region. That requires a VPN at a mostly legal level. Without it, the # of legal accounts would drop and would be more costly.

Piracy of old was the only way and now the new ways are going back to old. This time however, there are more official ways of getting things without sketchy sites. A VPN, modding or a cracked app isn't going to solve real piracy in the future if companies are letting untapped money sit out untouched.

You could try audiobooks from Libby or audible. It's not the same as reading the physical text but maybe it can help getting through books faster. For digital manga, there's tachiyomi. Some are scanlations and some are official translations from old publishers like tokyopop and yen press.

Back in the day, Undertale. Many made YouTubers and livestreamers have less fun by spoiling the pacifist, genocide and neutral routes and letting everyone only go the pacifist way. If they didn't then the fans would get all angry. Outside of playing the videogame was also another can of worms.

Don't know if Deltarune, also made by the creator, has the same problem since I've only ever played the game myself and never seeked out the community.

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, I hated how Death keeps spoiling everything. And when it was clear it was going to stay that way I dnfed halfway through. Otherwise, the novel would have been fine.

Any book by Neil Gaiman. Just can't vibe with his style and in turn couldn't get past ch 1 of Good Omens even though I like Terry Pratchett.

Usually FOSS unless I need to use a particular program that doesn't have a good FOSS alternative. My old Mac runs fine but doesn't have many FOSS alternatives that works with High Sierra, so I have to use cracked apps. Using Windows, Linux or Android it's all FOSS.