Well, as most things in life, piracy is not as black and white as many people seem to believe it is. Companies such as Adobe and Microsoft have benefited *obscenely* from piracy; it's one of the big reasons for their absolute dominance. Maybe there was a point in time when they genuinely thought piracy was hurting them, but the more cunning business people among their ranks must have quickly realised that they should only put up some half-hearted anti-piracy attempts as a facade, just to scare actual companies into buying their products, because it's really not in their interest to stop the "pirates" *completely*. Microsoft would have never achieved total platform dominance in the 90s among home users if they had been serious about "anti-piracy" (the serial number based "protection" mechanism is a total joke). Then consider all the kids using warezed versions of Photoshop during their teenage years; what do you think they started using professionally when they eventually had to buy something legally at their first job? This
Quora comment sums it up very well.
Maybe the situation was a little bit different with games decades ago, but don't forget that most people would buy only a very small fraction of the games they would otherwise pirate. Then, as many have pointed out, in most non-Western countries (practically the entire Eastern Block in Europe, Brazil, Russia, India, China, etc.) the question of piracy before the mid-90s is quite philosophical: that was the only way of getting your hands on *any* game, and copyright and intellectual property laws were some kind of a novelty in those countries in the literal sense of the word; nobody even fully understood how they worked in the early 90s when they were introduced.
If a modern game released today is also released for the consoles, rest assured that you will hurt no one by downloading the cracked PC version -- especially if you would never have bought it at full price anyway. Do some basic research on the number of console vs PC gamers and do the math. For those primarily console games, the revenue from the PC port is basically some extra pocket money.
In a practical sense, it's only in the minuscule, tiny niche markets where your purchases make any real tangible difference these days. For that reason, I'm buying all Iron Tower Studios games, and I was a funder for the first Grimrock game and for Stasis, among a few others. I generally buy games and software products when I know for a fact that there's only a single individual or a handful or people behind them who are clearly not in it for the money, primarily. For the rest, especially if there's any sort of DRM involved (I despise Steam and similar services), I just get the "DRM-liberated" version with zero remorse.
I also find it perplexing when people buy old games on GOG or Steam. First of all, you're not supporting the original creators one bit; the money goes to the platform and the current right holders (the original dev company or even the publisher might be gone for a long time). Secondly, usually they do a very shoddy job; they release bad versions or ports, screw up the DOSBox configs, and many times they themselves just use some scene cracks (e.g. some non-trivial No-CD patch that their developers would never ever be able to write in a million years).
