Unlike Steam, buying a mod from a random website has no refund policy. If you pay $7 for a car and the dashboard doesn't light up, you are stuck. Pirates argue they are "testing" the mod before buying.
The community typically categorizes these "pirate" activities into two groups:
When a creator sees their $10 RSS Formula Hybrid pack downloaded 50,000 times on a pirate site, they don't think, "Oh, I gained exposure." They think, "I just lost $500,000 in potential revenue." They quit. They move to iRacing development (where piracy is harder) or stop modding entirely.
