That garbage is rarely even worth pirating anymore.

I’ve come to a point where I don’t even pirate AAA, just buy indie or anything made by Fromsoft and any team that still presents any semblance of passion for their work.

Some AAA games are worth buying. Some indie games are pure garbage. It’s a mixed bag. I rarely pirate and most of the time its because shitty DRM or to try expensive game before buying.

I used to almost exclusively pirate because I couldn’t afford much of anything. Steam has actually enabled me to purchase most of the games I use since I can wait till they’re on special and cheap. There’s also a huge amount of indie games that would never have seen the light of day if they could only release on physical media or through their own website or whatever.
no Steam isn’t perfect, I would like Valve to take less of a cut but in terms of making games more accessible, I think they’ve done a decent job.
No shade on my fellow pirates who still exclusively pirate and don’t want to feed the corporate beast.

A lot of newer games are also big enough that backing them up reliably actually is a meaningful burden. My Steam library is like 900 games. Even though a lot of them are 500MB, a lot of them aren’t.

I can’t store that shit.

You can move your home directory to a different drive so that you don’t lose everything when you switch distros.