For a long time now I've found it weird that people who like single player games on PC (and to a lesser extent older consoles which had piracy enabling mods) didn't acknowledge the long game consequences of their actions, or at least were willfully ignorant to them because everyone loves getting something for free. It seems to be a variation on Goodhart's law - you get what you reward - if the reward for a company (big or small) in spending lots of time and money isn't as good as other options, those other options will get more investment in the future and the ones you do like will get less.

The other option I can see for the large companies is that any project involving tens or hundreds of millions of dollars is likely to be insured, and a condition of that insurance is they take all reasonable options available to get the most success out of it that they can. If they don't they need to reduce the risk which probably means less resources allocated which again may not be interesting to the companies capable of making grand experiences versus other options.

To give you an idea of the scale of the problem:

Greenheart Games famously released a "cracked" version of their own game (Game Dev Tycoon) onto torrent sites on launch day. In this version, the player's in-game studio eventually goes bankrupt because "pirates" steal their games.

The Data: Within 24 hours, 93.6% of players were playing the pirated version.

The Consequence: The developer's blog post highlighted the irony of pirates posting on forums complaining that the "in-game piracy" was unfair and "ruining" their fun. The experiment proved that even at a low price point ($8), a massive majority of the PC audience will choose "free" regardless of the developer's size or struggle.

https://web.archive.org/web/20161118042043/http://arstechnic...

https://web.archive.org/web/20131214165241/http://aussie-gam...

P.S.: It bears repeating that the game cost only 8 dollars.