Piracy has always existed, it is not an excuse for poor, buggy or scam games(those that never gets finished, takes ages of development etc). Piracy is not such a bad thing for the industry. It is almost like a free popularity boost for games. This site is an example of it. Personally, I would've never known so many games if I wasn't able to pirate them in the first place. For example, I've learned about the character in my profile picture while browsing a well known steam piracy website. I pirated the series first, played them all and liked them enough to buy all of them on steam. Same can be said about pretty much all the games I bought from steam.
Anyway, they can(they already do) earn so much from patreon(or steam early access etc) they could make developing games their full time jobs instead of working on them as side-project.