Lol, without reading the caption I just assumed this was a shit post comparing Johnny Depp's likeliness to Jack Sparrow, and I laughed pretty hard at that.
PSA you can still get Gamepass Ultimate for cheap. This is your last opportunity to stock up (I think September 14th is the cutoff).
Find some cheap Xbox Gold cards (sites like cdkeys or eneba). It's a little trickier but cdkeys usually sells the cards from the Turkey region super cheap but you have to redeem over VPN.
3 months of gold converts into 50 days of Gamepass Ultimate. Depending on the price you should be able to get 3 years for $200 or less. Careful to not go over, you can't redeem past 3 years.
Edit
PSA #2
If you already have Gamepass take part in rewards. You can earn enough points throughout the month to self fund your gamepass subscription or other purchases for free (I cashed in my rewards points recently to get that dope Starfield controller and the Starfield early access upgrade).
Here's my 4 main avenues for points:
Xbox mobile app: go to your profile icon and do everything in the rewards tab. I usually leave Vampire Survivors idling on my PC for the PC game task.
Edge mobile app: click the search icon on the home screen and scroll down to the news stories, click through them. Till you get your mobile & edge searches (think it's about 20). Then go up to the top right menu and open rewards. Do everything in here. The top 3 items you usually have to actually do (quizzes and polls). The rest you can just click into and back out of.
**Bing mobile app: ** click rewards and collect the daily check-in points then click earn to read. Open a news article and scroll to the bottom, it'll open the next article (you need 10 of these).
Xbox. Get the rewards app. Do everything in here. Mostly just clicking boxes. Go to the Xbox activities box in the bottom right, you'll find some rewards to earn in games. There's also a daily 50 for earning an achievement. Rare Replay gives you an achievement for every game you open and Killer Instinct has several quick achievements for every single fighter.
It sounds like a lot but the mobile app stuff only takes about 10 mins. I usually do it while I'm waking up in bed and the Xbox stuff takes another 10 minutes usually do this before work.
If you max out your points you can easily get $15-20 a month.
$70 for a game ($7 per hour if you only play 10 hours) no way.
Though I am a fan of pirate first, pay when they fix the bugs. The low quality of games at release and the whole seemingly 10 year pre-release cycle sucks.
The expensive part for me is, that I need a new machine to run it. My good old GTX 1060 doesn't cut it anymore. No crack can help me with that. (Unless the crack manages to optimize the engine.)
Well, I cross my fingers for a GeForce Now release of Starfield. Otherwise it will have to wait a bit.
Naw fam I’ll pay $10 to play it for a month on Gamepass and either beat it in that time or lose interest and never go back. And cancel gamepass on October 5th
Lol man I generally agree with the hive mind, but on this particular point I never will. With the singular exception being a complete lack of availability, I will always view pirates as being cheapskates that are totally cool with theft. Try to justify it all you like, in the end you are receiving a product without paying for it. Just admit what you're doing.