Usually I am against piracy.

But if you have pre-ordered the collector's edition and they tried to defraud you by delivering Epic keys instead of Steam keys, go ahead! That is provided that you were unable to cancel the pre-order, of course.

If you did not pay for it, you have no right to pirate it.

What I wanna know if why Epic consider Metro Exodus to be some kind of "killer app" that is so good it will drive players from Steam to Epic, I've always considered the Metro series as a whole to be nothing to write home about, just linear shooters with Fallout copied setting made by some no-name European dev. If this is the best Epic can do then they might as well just pack up and go home already.

Ideally, devs\publishers should be legally persuaded (with user boycotting) that DRM is harmful & annoying.
Many gamers, sadly, seem incapable to resist the hype of a new release or acknowledge\care about the DRM issue.
User piracy, then, is mostly moved by greed and entitlement, more than real ideology.

So, even if I'm glad that Denuvo can still get cracked.. I doubt that the devs\publishers will learn anything good from it.
They'll just look for more ways to lock down their content with more DRM and similar. :\

And completely ignore the success of games like Witcher 3 which were released DRM-free from day 1... this is something I don't get. Do they really thing there is great number of people out there thinking "Oh no, game xyz was released yesterday and still no crack! Now I'll by it full price!"? I think the vast majority of "I want that!" customers buy the game, no matter if there's a cracked version out there. The cheapskates who want a cracked will not buy it anyway... maybe much later at 90% off to soothe their conscience.

But "the other side" is also responsible. They style themselves as the fighters against the tyranny of DRM and copy protection. If that was so, the release groups should immediately stop releasing games to the torrent and ddl sites which were DRM-free in the first place and restrict themselves to cracked versions. There are numerous GOG versions flying around the trackers - the people uploading them harming the purpose they're supposedly fighting for...

Well, I still remember Dune 2's so-called "legal check" after the first two missions and had to resort to the manual. Same for Street Rod.

I agree, it's a kindergarten-mentality that in reality only punish those that buys a "legal" product.

Actually, the same can be said about increased road-toll-huts even though we already pay for the roads via taxes, so it only hurts those with low income, sick, elderly and students. But that's for another thread :)