I tend to stick to games that are Public Domain, as I don't usually just have a hundred bucks lying around to buy a new game with.
However, I would have no qualms with paying from a game from an Indie developer, and I would have no qualms with pirating a game from a corporate-sized developer/publisher.
Why? In two words: Consumer sovereignty.
We, the market collectively have the capacity to tell companies what we want and what we don't. Naturally we want to encourage the former and steer away from the latter.
What behaviours can we implement to succeed in these goals? Making an idea/product/service profitable and unprofitable respectively. Regardless of all the harping on about electronic gaming as a medium of artistic expression and a reason for faster, bigger (or smaller) and better technology to deliver these experiences, at the end of the day, if there is no money in games for a company that makes games, it is out of business. Some of my favourite developers, including DC True (Shadow President, Cyberjudas), Presto Studios (The Journeynman Project series, Myst 3) and to a lesser extent Access Software (shit, everything from the Tex Murphy games, Top Spin 1&2 and the Links golfing franchise)succumbed to this fate (except the latter, which was bought and sold like AIG shares the day after the reverse split before closing because of zombie invasion or some other disappointing, un-noted reason.)
For an industry as 'unecessary' to human life and survival as electronic gaming (I resent that statement as much as you do, but society would not break down if videogames were banned completely and suddenly the same way that if say... electricity or running water were banned, or become as culturally replete if painting or sculpture or television were abruptly and absurdly discontinued), the onus is completely on the companies that participate to justify their place in human society. That leaves us at an at an advantage as consumers, because we have every right to avoid every product that isn't worth as much to us for the price as say, water, or the air we breathe, and to turn down a game because we'd rather be able to afford a month's rent. One would believe that in turn, such a position would mean that all games companies would be pumping out either the most amazing or the most unique masterpieces they can. Well, as we've seen, that's not always the case. Especially in the corporate side of the industry, where we have NYSE floated companies like EA almost exclusively publishing clones of the 4 or 5 popular themes and types of modern game and them with a famous licence slapped to it.
And so, as consumers, we are supposed to either buy what we like, or leave it. However, with the advent of the ability to distribute these unecessary forms of entertainment in ways that publishers and developers would rather you didn't comes the capability for the consumer to have a say in the way the major corporate players interact with their market. More than simply walking away and passively denying profit to an inadequate or insultingly bad cash grab, we can aggressively seek to reduce the market share and profit of such. So it comes down to a question of executing consumer power. Do we passively ignore mediocrity or pure uselessness in the games we buy, or do we aggressively show companies that what they're doing isn't worth paying for? A vote with our feet, or one with our bandwidth?
EDIT:
Oh yeah. Linkin Park. Well, I haven't heard their new album, and if they play their concert in Apartheid Israel, then I won't be interested in them as a band anymore anyway.
