Buy a replacement SSD and stick it in there before selling. Reinstall Windows. Maybe buy a cheap key and reactivate the license. You can get a 1TB SSD for ~$60 these days.
A lot of people are going to want a “ready to play” PC.
This has nothing to do with the gaming industry, specifically. This is a basic (very effective) marketing strategy. But typically federal regulations prohibit them from advertising something as “on sale” perpetually so it has to be advertised at retail price for x% of the time.
That’s not the developer, that’s a Discord mod, and they said in that message specifically that they haven’t heard anything from the dev. It also says nothing about what “the agreement” is. It could very well be a legal settlement.
While I don’t support pirating products that are currently for sale
I do when Nintendo refuses to make them available on other (higher quality) hardware and also treats their paying consumers and fans like scum. I can boot up Doom on any of a dozen different computers 30 years later and play to my heart’s content but that’s not an option for Nintendo. Piracy generally is completely justified by a vast array of anti-consumer bullshit. If they can’t make games without resorting to that bullshit, fuck 'em. I hope they go under.
I guess in a sense it does lead to competitors trying their best to compete
No, it stifles competition because they can say “we don’t need to worry about competing with that game at all because you can’t buy it on this platform”.
but that’s just not realistic
It’s completely realistic. We just pass a law that bans yet another anti-competitive anti-consumer behavior.