Theft is theft. You can't justify theft. You can't rationalize it. Someone (often hundreds of someones) spent thousands of hours away from their families mainlining redbull and cigarettes to put food on the table, pay for some well-deserved vacation, and keep a job that isn't reprogramming Medicare cost forms.
Whatever the hell they want to charge for their product is their right, their perogative, and the market will decide if it was the right price.
When you steal, you stole those people's time. You stole their futures, you stole a piece of their job security. You broke the market so that fewer people must pay more to offset the costs of your theft.
Intellectual property thieves can hide behind their masks of self-righteousness or whatever other pretense they want. They are still just petty thieves, and everything they do leads only to the financial ruin of others for selfish, petty gratification.
I would agree with you on general, but programmers for most games are paid by the job. If the game sells 150 million copies and everyone has to have it, they still make the same as if it had flopped and walmart employees use it to stop their chair from wobbling.
And as for myself. I've pirated a few games, though I won't say which ones. One of them, I bought the commercial version and the DRM was so bad I couldn't play it. So I got a cracked pirated version that wasn't all DRM raped to play the game. That I paid for.
Another one, I still have the commercial disks. Or whats left of them, I wasn't going to pay $50 bucks to replace 1 cd of a game that I already bought twice.
And the other time. I had bought a game from a developer because I liked the game before it. It had played well and the game box was telling me about how much better this version was than the first. I forked over $50 bucks for the largest piece of non-returnable shit I've ever dealt with.
Stronghold two. Don't play it folks.
So I pirated the first one to feel less cheated.
Now While I'm not going to say that these were for sure right reasons to do it, they counted towards those "Lost sales to piracy" that they're so busy freaking out and tallying up. But they still had a legit sale from these piracy sales.
I'm just saying, this is a lot bigger problem than the black and white they make it out to be.