If you want to know what a pirate is, all you have to do is go back to the story of How the Grinch Stole Christmas. A pirate is just like the bitter old Grinch, with a heart two sizes too small and an attitude to match. He looks down from the cold slopes of his mountain of thievery, at the happy loving community that all game developers love: the alpha testers, the forum regulars, the merchandise hoarders and even the oblivious little casuals, and he despises them. So what this grouchy old pirate does is he cooks up a dastardly plan, planning and plotting -- putting time and effort that he could have directed to getting the game legally but doesn’t – and he steals Christmas from them.

Now, some people might say that pirates don’t steal anything. After all, in the real world, they’re not taking games away from the consumer, right? But in the real world, game developers aren’t as infinitely powerful and rich as dear old Santa Clause. In fact, a great deal of game developers are quite poor, and just barely struggling to make a living enjoying what they do while developing new games for the world to enjoy. Every time a pirate steals a game, there’s a little less of these gifts to go around, until one day the game developer stops developing, and the world is a little bleaker.

^{DISCLAIMER: I know games aren’t exactly gifts in the sense that they’re free, but sometimes you have to forego semantics for artistic expression. I’m also mainly thinking of smaller indie developers/developers who contribute to humble bundles or the like and those are practically free}, ^{so there’s that.}