Multiple studies have shown that pirates are often the best customers. (see https://torrentfreak.com/pirates-spend-much-more-money-on-mu...)
It makes sense. If somebody is supper passionate about games, or music, or movies they might pirate to get early releases, alternate versions, and to try new things. Collectors may even want to keep their purchased media untouched/unopened or may just want easy access to their purchases.
I've pirated things I've purchased just because it was faster than ripping a CD myself or even going into the next room to take a DVD off the shelf and using the player.
But that’s a completely different claim, no?
Also, Torrentfreak is horrible quality agenda-pushing blogspam. I wouldn’t take their interpretation of a survey of unknown quality (which they didn’t even bother to link to) at face value.
And if we were to do that, perhaps the best explanation is that more technically oriented pirates were more likely to spend money on streaming services in 2016 than the average person. Perhaps piracy was just a proxy for tech savvy?
I doubt a meaningful amount of people did this, but I’d love to see evidence to the contrary.
>and plenty of people (myself included) have refused to buy or play games until a crack is available.
Well, yeah, but it’s HN and we have all kinds of crazy people here who aren’t very representative of the overall market.