Because being scolded by a NARC over something stupid makes you want to do it more. Not everyone who downloads an album illegally was ever gonna pay $20 for it, so measuring piracy as a loss of "potential sales" is always going to be a more inflated statistic than it should be. There's also the matter of companies making their media harder to access and enjoy for consumers in the hope that the difficulty will make it unstealable - when that tends to get cracked the fastest, and they lose sales because their potential audience is alienated by the DRM restrictions.
We know now that even before streaming, artists got paid to produce albums, and they were given a pittance of the album's proceeds while a majority of it went to the record company. Nowadays, artists receive fractions of fractions of cents every time one of their songs is played on a streaming service. Then and now, artists make a majority of their earnings through touring or through releasing music themselves through services like Bandcamp. So the piracy panic of the 2000's over Kazaa and LimeWire, where the hot button issue was how much it was hurting the artist, was mired more in the genuine dent it was putting in the music industry at the same time. It was bad for artists, but it was significantly worse for executives.
Same goes for video games. Developers are hired to develop the games, and there are only a small handful who receive royalties. It's a common practice to work in the industry as a freelancer, work for years on a GTA or a Last of Us, and then get laid off before the game ships because you're only ever a transient employee and the company doesn't want you to own a slice of the game because you're not one of their core employees. Publishers make a majority of the money from every games purchase, initial and recurring via in-game shops and DLC. Buying a game from a triple-A publisher is like throwing your money down the toilet. Now, an Arc System Works or an indie studio with no publisher? Pump those motherfuckers with cash. Your Activisions and EAs, the ones who exercise the worst DRM practices in the industry, feel the burn in their executive's pockets, not the developer's.
Piracy isn't great, but the sort of hand-wringing moralizing that some people get up in arms about is enough to drive you to spite them and their message. You should use Bandcamp or other services to buy music. You should support indie devs. But Metallica and Call of Duty devs get paid for developing their art, and they rarely see more than a pittance for the sales of the games. They themselves are choked by greedy industries with greedy layabout executive hands taking money from the coffers. If you're going to pirate - which I'm not encouraging - at least think about who you're impacting. That being said, moralistic chest-thumping makes you look like the most high-strung nerd in the room, and of course people are going to see that petty ass-blastedness and go "fucking lol that guy's a prick, time for me to download my Programs now".
When I find the vampire who did this to us, I will rip out his heart with my hands.
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