Pirate games if you want to, but don’t pretend it’s anything more than piracy - no judgement here, I have a stack of ROM from NES to Gamecube, but my line in the sand is I won’t pirate games that are currently available via a legitimate paid route.
If you’re wanting to stick it N, then don’t even pirate. Just.. don’t play the games. There’s some evidence that pirating, via taking about and generating “chatter” about the games you’ve played, still contributes in some small way to sales (bizarrely).
Buy games from their website instead of steam/epic and don't buy from key resellers!
As for big companies... Yeah fuck them. They already make more money than your brain could even begin to compute, they really don't need your 70/80 bucks.
I'm not saying to pirate the games (unless they aren't easily available somewhere else), I want to encourage people to BUY SECOND HAND! Videogames are amazing to buy second hand, they don't wear off by being played, and you can usually get a like-new copy for 40% off.
If you're a pc gamer wait for sales/price drops, and if the game has any DRM bullshit in it, buy and then pirate if you want to stay legal.
There's not really anything bizarre about it, people discover things by word of mouth, and people also like to try things out they see other people doing / playing.
It's like trying to stick it to an F2P game by just "not paying", it doesn't work because players are content and encourage other people to spend more time on them, and some of those people will end up paying money. You stick it to them by just not playing at all and reducing awareness by not even discussing it, even if it might be small in the big picture.
Which was a colossal dick move on their part. Much more so than usual. Shutting down Switch key extractors etc.. I get - that’s their current line of consoles and they have a justifiable right to prevent “unauthorised” uses (much as you and I might ethically think differently). But for a console for which physical and digital games are no longer sold first party and for which Nintendo have no route to gain any revenue? That’s just nasty.