considering most people here have jobs, if it looks like buying the game for 13 dollars is gonna save them a bunch of hours working on mods in one way or another, the time gained by those 13 bucks will be worth a lot more than the purchase price
and of course, as long as one doesn't shout to the world about it, they can always just get one of the absolutely inevitable cracked versions ( and yes, those are viable to use because usually, cracks have to be applied and don't come pre-installed )