You’re paying for your privacy. Also, a copy of a game or a movie is not a service.

• try before you buy; unscrupulous companies will rip you off if given the chance.

• having backups of games on systems that don’t exist anymore (I have quite a few NES, SNES, and GBC games i’ve bought over the years. Nintendo fucking hates emulation with a passion.)

• Removing spyware and malware from the original software. From DRM that slows down games to literal back-doors that have been included.

But I can’t get around the idea that people can pay for a service to refuse to pay to a service.

I mean, if you assume that the only reason people are pirates is because they refuse to pay anyone for a service then I could see why you would have trouble with this point. But that isn’t why most people pirate. Most people pirate because they don’t want to pay the extortionate prices that media companies demand for their IP. Spending some small yearly fee to avoid paying several much large fees looks like a pretty solid reason for paying for a VPN service.

VPN isn’t specifically for pirating, personally I could even torrent without it, no one would give a crap; my situation aside, you can DDL without a VPN and you’d still be in the clear

How is the idea of paying $20 for 2 years so you can not pay for anything else confusing?

You can ask the same thing at the internet level. Why are people paying for internet service when they could go to the public library and get free Wi-Fi.

Internet service VPNs are foundational networking. You need them to do anything else.

I guess it’s cheaper. $100 a year for a good vpn is much cheaper than all of the things they pirate.

if i pay for a vpn and then just torrent the nights away that’s a lot more bang for your buck than subscription to netflix or whatever

also, a copy of a game or a movie is not a service. as was said

I have a VPN that I pay less than 100 a year for. Here’s some examples of what I use it for:

• Free movies. Each of those movies would be at least $5 to rent and more to buy. If I could even find them.
• Pirating TV shows for streaming services I don’t have. For a long while, almost everything was on Netflix, so I didn’t need to pirate shows. Now with everyone making their own streaming service, it’d cost me $50+ a month just to get access to all the different shows I want to watch. I have Netflix, and Amazon Prime, and I have access to HBO and Disney. But I don’t have: CBS All Access, Apple TV, etc etc. There are a ton of platforms where there’s only 1 or 2 shows I want to watch. I can pirate them instead.
• Pirating TV shows for streaming services I do have. There are streaming services I have that my friends and family can’t access, especially because of Netflix’s new location restrictions. So often I’m subscribed to torrent RSS feeds for shows to put on Plex for my friends, even though I’ll end up watching them through the actual streaming service.
• Breaking through geo-restrictions on streaming sites. I’m a pro wrestling fan, but I don’t have cable. In the US it’s very hard to watch AEW without cable, because they have an exclusive deal with Warner Brothers. Eventually they might go on HBO Max, but in the mean time the only way to stream them is over Fite.TV, which is restricted to outside the US. I can VPN to England, then pay $9 for all the AEW weekly shows, with no commercials. I can also access a bunch of wrestling pay per views for half the price as in the US.
• Pirating audiobooks. Often the only place to get an audiobook is Audible. I don’t want to pay a subscription, the books are expensive, and I don’t want to deal with DRM. Instead I can just download them.
• Pirating retro game ROMs. I have a raspberry pi with RetroPie on it, a handheld abernic retro console, and a ROM cartridge for my N64. Instead of having to buy the same retro games over and over for new consoles, I can just download the ROMs and use them on very cheap retro consoles. Many of the games I wouldn’t be able to buy at all, outside a flea market for 80 bucks

For me it’s more of a convenience issue. If there was a legit site with a subscription for a few bucks a month that had every TV show and movie on it that I could watch in high resolution without ads and other bullshit going on then I’d probably just do that. In fact I basically do that with music already with Spotify. Netflix looked like it might have been going that way back the day but then it all went sideways.

But yeah basically I just don’t want to have to subscribe to like 8 different services or have to keep switching around to find the show I want so piracy & a couple of bucks a month for a VPN is the better service IMO.

Putting aside morality, from a money-in -> money-out perspective you’ll pay much less for a VPN than you would buying your media legit, and it’s much safer to have one enabled if you’re using public swarms. You’re not paying to pirate as much as you’re paying to not be harassed by copyright trolls. If you can make it work with a free VPN, more power to you.

VPNs also have other non-piracy uses, so people might already have one purchased anyway - this is another use for it.

Free VPN == you are the product.

I pay for a VPN and don’t use it for piracy.
I pay for Usenet and I use it for piracy.
Money has never really been a consideration as to whether I pirate or not.
If you want to know why I pirate stuff you can thank Mediacom, after becoming nearly homicidal talking to their “tech support” line for 2 years (I was locked in a 2 year contract), I decided to never pay directly for media again.
12 years and counting

Nobody offers the service that I can offer myself. Not even close.

It’s all about what you value, and supporting the things you love (or rely on, in a more utility sense). I’d value the speed, the lack of data collection that may be used against a user, the speed, the location options, and that same provider being in business for time to come. When I’d need a good VPN, nothing else will do. That seems worth the couple of USD per month to me, whether that VPN is for obscuring traffic I don’t want others to know about (whether it’d be because of those facilitating the connection or the other end of the connection).