The entire “buying (licensing) digital media” business model is extremely flawed and is detrimental consumers for the primary purpose of making a few gigacorporations even richer, so I’m not going to lose sleep over piracy.

My biggest concern with game piracy is the malware risk associated with pirating an executable file, not for the sake of the game publisher. Though it’s not like you’re safe from that with legitimate copies either, remember when Sony literally installed rootkits that damaged their customers’ computers as DRM? And got away with it?

Organizations like the FSF, Linux Foundation, major Linux distros, etc–hell even sponsorless YouTubers on Patreon–have shown us that you can have both open source/open access, and financially sustainable content creation. It just requires your content to actually be high enough quality in and of itself, instead of relying on marketing tricks and hype to convince people to pay for something before they even know if they’ll like it.

In the end, media and software don’t have intrinsic bill of materials costs like physical objects do (costs associated with the material required to manufacture an individual unit), nor is the supply of a particular title limited physically, so it makes no logical sense to pay for every copy of it. See “Copying is not Theft.”