This is a glimpse at our future under Techno-Feudalism, by the way. Five companies own all the entertainment and charge you extortionate rates to rent it. Please enjoy these last few years of Steam allowing indie games to be published with $20.00 or lower prices - once Gabe Newell goes away, inide devs are going to get “Spotified” out of existence by whatever venture capitalist buys up Steam.
They’ve might also have been told by their parents that it’s unsafe and it’s how you get viruses.
That was probably a lot more true back when downloading random .exe files on KaZaa or LimeWire was the thing to do.
I mainly downloaded rips that were divided into 20 different parts of a .rar file. Sure, they were always missing some features, but at least I got my games, dammit.
Or worries of being caught, and the safer alternative of paying for a VPN just to avoid paying for copyrighted creative works can feel a bit hypocritical and exploitative.