If you get a pirate a copy of a game and really like it, do you buy it afterwards?

I will admit that I still do quite a lot of downloading of cracked games for PC. Most of the time I lose interest in the game very quickly and do not finish it but there are also times where the game was so good that I felt bad about not rewarding the team for their awesome creation and then go back and buy the game even if I have already completed it.

Most of the time I do not buy the games at all but there are a couple of noteworthy exceptions to this.

Hades

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When I started hearing everyone talk about this roguelike game I almost didn't want anything to do with it because true roguelikes such as Dead Cells really didn't appeal to me. I didn't like the idea behind losing all progress just because you got stuck in a corner or mis-timed a jump or two. Hades is a roguelike but not fully. Your abilities are powered up as you move along in the game and your powerups on the weapons, which are actually kind of difficult to achieve, are permanent and this changes the game a lot.

I stole this game, played it for at least 40 hours and then paid for it later. The price wasn't unreasonable either.

Starcraft 2

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My original reason for "stealing" this game was because I thought it was overpriced and kind of shitty on behalf of Blizzard to release it in 3 stages. I was wrong in doing that. Every one of the releases is absolutely amazing and while most games fail on doing a killer follow up of a legendary titles Blizzard really nailed this. I ended up paying half what the games cost at release later and an added bonus was doing this unlocked achievements, which were kind of fun.

Hollow Knight

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Of all the games that I have played in the past 10 years this game is definitely in my personal top 10. I'm a fan of platformers and I sometimes enjoy really difficult gameplay. However, this doesn't mean that I want to be one of those guys that is going to do muscle memory and retry a boss battle 50 times in a row. The good news about this game is the fact that they DO have the ultra-hard stuff in the game but almost all of it is completely optional. I have no 100% completed this game and honestly, I do not think that is ever going to happen.

The game has such tremendous replay value and I am really looking forward to the upcoming sequel. Unlike some other game developers in recent months, I hope that Team Cherry waits until the product is actually ready before they send it off to market. They are going to have huge shoes to fill because Hollow Knight in my mind is a damn-near perfect game.

The cracked version of this game that I got had something built into the coding where some treasure chests were not openable on the cracked version. This was more of an annoyance than anything else because all this really did was take away some of the currency available to you and there is way too much of that in this game anyway. I ended up buying it because I felt bad.

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There are others that I have gone back and paid for later but I really don't have any regrets about getting pirate versions of games because while maybe it sounds like a copout, I feel as though the gaming industry is rife with deceptive marketing tactics that dupe people into buying a game when the devs are very aware that the game is substandard or even broken. Then they pay IGN or someone similar to say nice things about it and whoosh! Tons of people buy it!

Trial versions of games are also bullcrap because they normally will just showcase the best that the game has to offer and then you buy it and the real game isn't actually anything like that. While it might be a bit devious to get pirate cracked versions of games I think that this keeps the studios honest with their pricing. If they make a game that is worth $20, then I will eventually pay $20 for it. It is just really annoying to me when a $50 game becomes $20 in a month because they already took advantage of all the early adopter suckers out there and now moved on to what the real price point should have been from the start.

I don't think I am the only person that shops for games this way. Do you? Do you eventually buy them if you like them?