I'd usually be pissed at having to restart a game from scratch, but luckily I lost all my saves when my HD died so I can't really complain.
I won't join the discussion completely, since I am doing an 80-page dissertation atm and my brain can't handle any more high-brow discussions currently, but I'll chime in with my thoughts. As a proud pirate, at one point we had over 35k pirated movies back in the video cassette times, I don't think I ever cared about the morality of it. The dynamic we have in place is the law, if you break it and get caught you face the consequences, and that's as far as my thoughts on piracy, and crime in general, go.
That being said, my standpoint on supporting is always: wait for the project to end, then throw in 60$ if I am satisfied. Far too many projects turn to milking or go way off the fucking rails and into the constant remakes, complete storyless sexfest, complete sexless storyfest, 3 - 6 month cycles of nothingburgers, and all the other death traps we see tons of games fall into. If you manage to finish a game I put you on the "actually serious about his side job" category and watch your other projects, SOMETIMES even throwing in some cash here and there. 40$ is the absolute most I give for games, triple A or otherwise, so I consider this to be more than fair and within my monetary abilities. However, if anything at all gets put behind a paywall the dev goes onto the "pirate with no support" pile and are usually the games I will specifically target to pirate and share on sites like these. The reason for that is simple: while the game comes out for free for everyone my money is classified as support. When the game has something behind a paywall it is now a product, as I am now paying to get a service I would otherwise not get and to which others do not have access to, unless they pay. Meaning it is no longer me supporting someone, it is now a transaction between us. And since this service changes from month to month, you could call it a live service.
That logic has holes that are interesting to discuss, but like I said at the beginning I am in no mental state to engage with it currently, so I'll just leave it as an opinion that will not be further elaborated but is there to be freely criticized.
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