If piracy didn't exist the new games would simply become inaccessible for a lot of people, I don't know about the rest of the world but I will give you an example of my country. Getting a gaming PC in my country hurts your wallet like you are buying an house, you are going to have to save for a while before you can afford a entry level gaming pc( like rtx 3050 or equivalent). The average monthly wage here is like $350-$409, you think someone with this income will put 70$ into a game ? A lot of people use piracy as a medium to get access to expensive software like photoshop or ms suite that would otherwise be inaccessible and run their small businesses usually cyber cafes. It's not just about getting free shit, for some people it's the only option.

Why does purpose or ethics matter. It is called piracy and not robin hood.

Whatever the intent, it incentives archival even with selfish purposes across different decentralized sources, which is pretty valuable with that huge amount of data that would be expensive for a centralized entity to archive on their own. Not to mention a single point of failure. So even selfishness is leading to helping history not be lost.

And you think 100 years from now or longer if some random historian comes across some still working storage containing long lost media that a pirate had kept they are going to care about the legality of that at the time?

And don't forget how much game versions change from launch, so new version is history too. Same for movies and shows and books with how editing has been done that's led to loss of the original copy. And led to reliance of fans to restore content like Star Wars.

It is happening now with Netflix too where now the pirated versions of some Netflix show is the only way to see what was originally shown.

"We have George Lucas’d things also that people don't know about," the siblings told Variety, referring to the Star Wars director's much-critiqued altered re-releases of the original franchise. "It's not, like, story, but you're essentially patching in shots."

https://futurism.com/the-byte/netflix-retroactive-editing

The MCU's The Falcon and the Winter Soldier is barely a year old, but even the Marvel superhero miniseries isn't immune from Disney's re-editing efforts. In March 2022 some devoted Reddit fans discovered that a scene where Bucky throws a pipe through a woman's shoulder had been altered so that woman falls back on the pipe instead.

https://screenrant.com/tv-shows-films-edited-after-original-release/

14 years... Time doesn't stand still for that long.

That is a good and valid question. Talking about the US exclusively, piracy is a grey area. Some want stuff for free and now. On the other hand, some are willing to try things before giving money for the real thing or wait. There can't be only one for piracy.

With videogames, I'd say the number of sales are way lower than 14 years for profitability. I think it may be closer to 5 years or under. By 14 years, the game console has already gone on to it's new iteration for a few years.

I believe in waiting until the next gen or until developers can't make any more money for games. "Pirating for good" is either people wanting stuff for free now or the companies are making it extremely difficult to buy stuff. It's up to the person and not really the masses.

Personally, I pirate every game I play before considering paying. Demos have gone the way of the dodo so my willingness to pay for a new game before I get to test it has too. It's a two-way street and I've experienced buyer's rembourse far too many times thanks to games being busted at release or certain game-breaking bugs only becoming evident in late game.

I don't know that a pirate's motive is really what determines whether or not piracy does good. I read somewhere at some point [citation needed] that a large percentage of the people who pirate wouldn't otherwise have bought the thing anyway. In those cases, that pirate would maybe never have been a sale, but is still spreading feedback and recommendations for the thing through word of mouth, and then some of the pirate's friends might buy the thing, netting sales that wouldn't otherwise have been made.

Of course whether or not it's ethical is another matter, and that's where motive probably comes in.