Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

Same. I make good money today and I can pay for the stuff I use, but when I get some nostalgia and feel like playing a game from my childhood like The Little Samson, my only option is to go cry on a corner because the game isn't available anywhere and is worth 3 thousand dollars minimum - which even if I paid would never go to the folks who made the game anyway.

When I was a teenager I couldn't afford anything. I didn't even had a computer or a video-game of my own, I started working at a Lan house when I was 14 just to be able to afford an occasional snack. I played a bunch of SNES games at that time thanks to emulators - if piracy wasn't an option I would never have played them and probably wouldn't have gotten into videogames that much. 6 years later I managed to buy a DS and a couple games. Since then I've bought several consoles and a ton of games for each of them. Nintendo made several thousand dollars from me over the years and that would never have happened if I didn't have access to SNES pirated games 20 years ago.

I even got to make a game of my own now, which directly benefitted from piracy as well, as I noticed a bunch of people playing pirated versions on YouTube, with comments on those videos mentioning they liked it and bought it. My main concern related to piracy at that time was that those players were not getting bug fixes and new stuff I added to the game.

In truth, there is no downside to piracy - it's a net gain for everyone involved as long as the paying customers get to have a better, more comfortable experience with not having to deal with any hassle to consume your content. But if you make it harder for me to consume your content than the high seas does, well that's on you.