Link: https://old.reddit.com/r/Piracy/comments/1vnav0u/sorry_for_pirating_would_you_donate_directly_to/

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The original was posted on /r/piracy by /u/Delicious-Courage760 on 2026-08-13 13:33:10+00:00.

I’ve been sailing the seven seas for quite a while, and something has happened to me more than once:

I pirate a game, play it all the way through, and at the end I’m like: fuck, this game was actually amazing.

And sometimes I genuinely want to give money to the people who made it.

A recent example for me was Sifu. I loved it, and after finishing it I thought: these guys deserve some of my money.

The obvious answer is: “Then just buy the game on Steam.”

Fair enough. But that’s not exactly what I want.

First, maybe I can’t afford the full retail price, but I’d happily throw the devs $5, $10, $20, whatever I can afford.

Second, if I’m doing this specifically because I want to support the people who made the game, I’d rather have as little as possible going to intermediaries/platforms. Ideally, I want the money to go directly to the studio.

So I had this idea for a website/concept called something like “Sorry for Stealing”.

The site itself wouldn’t necessarily process payments. It could simply be a directory pointing people toward official ways to directly support studios: donation pages, Ko-fi, Patreon, whatever the studio itself chooses.

And maybe the bigger purpose would be to encourage studios to add a simple “Support us / Donate” section to their own websites.

No account required. No need to explain where you got the game. No judgement. Ideally no unnecessary data collection.

Just:

Piracy exists and realistically isn’t going away. But I suspect there are at least some pirates who finish a genuinely great game and would voluntarily send a few bucks directly to the developers if there were an incredibly easy way to do it.

Maybe studios are leaving some money on the table simply because this option doesn’t exist.

Would any of you actually use something like this?

And if you’re a developer: would you want to offer this option, or is there some reason studios generally don’t?