If not for piracy, many games - Fallout included - would never have been popularized. When I was younger, piracy was flourishing, but people still bought games fairly often, just not nearly as many as was played. For the overwhelmingly vast majority of my peers, buying a lot of games, convincing our (often not well-off) parents to buy games would've just not been possible, and in some cases (like mine) you'd feel bad just for asking (because you knew your family was poor).
Let's take Doom, for example. That shit was distributed by diskettes, and widely pirated by my elder brother and his friends, and it would never have had the cultural impact it did, without piracy. They expect that people would've bought the games instead, but that simply isn't true. Piracy allowed gaming to become a cultural phenomena and then a subculture, and now it is mainstream. This development would never have happened without rampant piracy.
This is no less true with Fallout.
Boyarski seems to have lost touch with the reality as it was 20-or-so years ago, when games weren't endemic, when you couldn't get anything online at a moment's notice, when there weren't 4 major sales a year that everyone had access to, and when gaming wasn't a publicly acknowledged mainstream pastime that parents were OK with investing in, or even knew anything whatsoever about.
And this is without even considering that a lot of games simply would've flown under the radar. You - sometimes - got info (filtered, obviously, by journos) mostly from magazines, not a sales site online with all the latest releases listed. Sometimes, the word-of-mouth following the piracy trail was how you got into contact with new games, and that was that. Missing games wasn't just a prospect, but something perfectly normal unless you invested in keeping track (with costly magazines that at least my family couldn't afford regularly). I missed Fallout, for example. I didn't play that until years after Baldur's Gate.
But I still bought games, sometimes. I still paid for Baldur's Gate + Tales of the Sword Coast. I wanted that box in my shelf, and I fucking loved the (incredibly useless and disc-scratching) paper CD-case. The manual was, especially for a fantasy fan that had not previously known anything about "real" RPG's, fucking amazing. And that game was a significant investment for me. I think it was the only one I got that year. From the corner computer store, on a shelf in my small town.
So fuck you, Boyarski. Fuck you for being enough of a retard to think that if piracy would've been impossible, we would've just magically conjured the money to pay for the games. Fuck you for assuming that others had the same fucking chances as you apparently did. Fuck you for being involved in the abortion that was Diablo III. Fuck you for thinking that the industry, let alone online communities, would even have developed in the same way without piracy. Fuck you for wanting to retcon my childhood.
Even if you wanted to buy an original copy (which was a new concept for us then, with a copyright law being introduced only in 1996 if I remember it right), it was pretty hard to find one back then in Romania. I remember I bought it from a russian at the market and being quite upset that it's the only game on the CD and I still have to pay the same price as for a CD that contained six or seven rips 
