I forget where I saw it but well over half of all pirated software has some sort of malware on board. I'm no longer a poor college student. I cannot afford to risk my bank / brokerage accounts and credit cards for the sake of saving $60 on a game.
The real question is, in a world of Wine/Proton, Linux emulating the Windows API, and offline games (because the company running the servers would likely be dead then too), can you sandbox a game enough to not care whether it has some old malware or not.
I wouldn't do my banking on that computer, but a dedicated gaming computer, where each malware can only see the files of its own host game and has no networking -- that might just be good enough.
