(Just to be clear I am not interest in giving a moral justification for piracy)
Game sallers profit from piracy the same way Microsoft and Mathworks would profit from a small population of pirated copies.
you could say the same for mods, If I can mod any game in skyrim why bother having any other game on steam.
Also for most markets the number of people that buy a game after piracy is greater than the number of pirates that would have bought the game anyway (no source on this) especially if mods are hard to impossible to pirate.
UPDATE: I won't claim this is an absolute, I imagine that at least a few (indie)games were deeply damaged by piracy, especially if they were hard to buy legally or not on steam. As I said my intention is not to justify piracy, just to understand its context and consequences
Game sallers profit from piracy the same way Microsoft and Mathworks would profit from a small population of pirated copies.
you could say the same for mods, If I can mod any game in skyrim why bother having any other game on steam.
Also for most markets the number of people that buy a game after piracy is greater than the number of pirates that would have bought the game anyway (no source on this) especially if mods are hard to impossible to pirate.
Also in addition to the extremely weak arguments I have provided something similar happens in movies: https://gizmodo.com/the-eu-suppressed-a-300-page-study-that-...
UPDATE: I won't claim this is an absolute, I imagine that at least a few (indie)games were deeply damaged by piracy, especially if they were hard to buy legally or not on steam. As I said my intention is not to justify piracy, just to understand its context and consequences