"And pirating PC games is wrong because, were it not for that minority of worthy souls who actually chip in, the industry that makes the games we love would descend into a shadow realm of tiny ad-supported Flash games and Farmville."

How does he deny the entire community of free A quality games? Dwarf Fortress, Cave Story, N, Crawl...? I've got your flash game and your Farmville here, but I know it's not what he was thinking.

There are plenty of other games in quite a few categories that are and always have been free. There are worlds of innovation in every Ludum Dare, and for more particular gamers, there are several amazing games coming out every year from the different shmup and roguelike competitions. VVVVVV notwithstanding, the masocore genre has been almost completely contained in the domain of free indie games.

Note, also, the development of piracy resistant game platforms: League of Legends, for example, provides their Dota-like and dedicated servers free of charge, and get money from users from a store that sells cosmetic skins for in-game characters. There are ways to extract value from players who don't pay, won't pay, and are going to play. Most pirate copies of games give incentives to recommend all your friends pirate, not buy, the game.

Do you think anyone who was making games for love and not money would release Big Rig Racing?