Quote from: Chrithu on June 27, 2014, 03:53:12 PM

Lol that's just hilarious. Going through the hassle of finding a torrent and downloading for weeks because noone ever seeds if you can just go and pick up the games for 10 bucks on Steam and DL them over night at full speed is something only people with absolutely no money at all still do.

In TPB, create login, set to auto-sort by seeds. Then search game just like with Steam and click magnet icon near game you'd like (ideally, you'd want to be familiar with uploaders and scene names). When finished, right-click title, open folder. Extract contents from archive (or mount image file using something like DaemonTools). Run installer, then drag&drop contents of crack folder to game directory. Nothing difficult there, and roughly same number of clicks.

Torrents offer some greater advantages than no-cost, though. Groups like KaOs use extreme compression techniques with their torrents for those with exceptionally slow Internet connections like myself. Rather than a 9GB download, it becomes a 3.5GB download with the caveat that it takes an hour to reconstruct the original files (though that's obviously superior to spending 2+ more weeks having it suck down all bandwidth while sleeping). Since moving and using a couple hard drives to death, I've actually pirated games I bought on Steam just so I can play them faster. The variety of groups all with different niches provide a rich variety of torrents which Steam's centralized distribution model doesn't match -- while I'm mostly just interested in cutting download times down, there are other groups which specialize in things like bundling together many known-compatible game mods.

Lack of dev/pub funding from pirating's a completely solvable problem, I think (Kickstarter/similar are a solution, I think, but we all know the issues with pre-orders and it doesn't solve some of the other user issues Steam and publishers have). The creator of Game Dev Tycoon, maybe a year ago, released his own game on TPB on day of release - a "pirate's edition" which pointed out the game was pirated (it didn't remove any content or prevent progress) and gave the dev more insight into the number of copies pirated vs. purchased (the statistic was insane, IIRC - something like 97% pirated). What it failed to include was a Bitcoin URI, which would've made the experiment much more interesting. I "pirate" TPB by using Adblock (otherwise, pages take up too much bandwidth), but they include cryptocurrency URIs in their pages which make giving value for value received very simple. When game-embedded crypto URIs are not available (so... 100% of the time), I'll still buy their game directly through the publisher with all the bullshit (CC#s, address, yada yada yada) that involves, but it's an inconvenience I doubt many take.