In my case many moons ago not pirating movies and games would have just meant reading more books.
Also the total disconnect between quality and price play a role sometimes.
Even as someone who abhors copyright as it stands, I can tell you this is bullshit thinking.
Game sallers profit from piracy the same way Microsoft and Mathworks would profit from a small population of pirated copies.
you could say the same for mods, If I can mod any game in skyrim why bother having any other game on steam.
Also for most markets the number of people that buy a game after piracy is greater than the number of pirates that would have bought the game anyway (no source on this) especially if mods are hard to impossible to pirate.
Also in addition to the extremely weak arguments I have provided something similar happens in movies: https://gizmodo.com/the-eu-suppressed-a-300-page-study-that-...
UPDATE: I won't claim this is an absolute, I imagine that at least a few (indie)games were deeply damaged by piracy, especially if they were hard to buy legally or not on steam. As I said my intention is not to justify piracy, just to understand its context and consequences
You've got games like Witcher 3, Red Dead Redemption 2, etc. that are basically epics: you could play them for months (amount of time spent gaming dependent). They're not epic naturally, the teams that put them together made them that way. So in that sense, I feel like you'd still come out okay shelling out for a game like that.
Likewise, graphical fidelity is approaching insane levels. Sure, applications assist in this, but at the end of the day, the developer is still spending a ton of time getting various things right visually. As such, I don't mind shelling out for that.
Dunno, as far as AAA games go, gamers have decided graphics and length of playtime are important. As an example of then vs now, Zelda used to be a game you could beat in a few hours. Breath of the Wild? Not so much. Both of these take increased development time which no one is doing for free. For them to bump up those two, price needs to go up. If it remains the same, honestly, it will eventually be unsustainable.