around the same sort of time it was common to see guys at car boot sales with tables of literally hundreds of bootleg dvds in the open without a care in the world. never saw any video games though, but at the same time i never looked for them either. as gabe newell said: piracy is a service problem. if you provide people with easy, convenient access to the stuff they want for a reasonable price, people will pay for it. if you put up barriers to access (e.g. ubisoft's infamously terrible first party platform on pc) or make it seem like bad value for money (many aaa games) then people will be motivated to pirate it instead. but give your audience what they want, whenever they want it, at a decent price point, and even if a game is very easy to pirate - such as games that have drm-free gog versions - the vast majority of people will gladly pay instead of taking the small amount of effort required to learn how to pirate it. incidentally the same thing happened with films and tv shows for a while, back when paid tv channels were king people would go hunting for pirate copies, then netflix came along offering a very low price point for a dizzyingly large pile of movies and tv shows that you could just click and watch instantly and suddenly pirating was out-competed by a legitimate service offering low-cost convenience. then everyone started scrambling for a piece of the streaming pie, everything is splintered across a dozen different services all charging hefty subscriptions for smaller libraries, and now we're back to pirating stuff.
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