I often blame the rampant piracy that exists nowadays on the fact that demos stopped being made and freely released to the public for some reason.
Not only that, more and more games are getting crazy expensive for less content and polish. We are in an era where people are asking for DLC before games are even out. And unfinished games sell likes hotcakes, backlash and bad publicity barely hurt the editors, so why bother?
I followed a guy on youtube, complaining the CEO of I don't remember which video company said that people were ready to pay more than 120$ for their games. Yep, complain all you want, Forza was released two days later, at 120$, and in less than one day sold over 500k copies...
So, that's one side of the coin, then there are the Patreon games. No offence to Runney (I subscribed, by the way, if only for the lore, you more than deserve it).
Patreon games require a monthly subscription, it doesn't matter if the game gets updated or not. Often, to have full content you have to pay quite the hefty amount. And a lot of those eventually get abandoned, so they are not even worth the money.
Once upon a time (15 years ago), I pirated games because I simply didn't have money. 100% of those games, I eventually bought when I eventually got the money.
And since then, I continued to buy, the very rare occasions I pirate is when the pirated copy is actually better than the official version (the joy of getting rid of system-heavy DRM)
But now, I'm more and more considering going back to full piracy and only supporting small devs who do put a lot of effort in what they do.
A guy was complaining some months (years?) ago about Steam refund policy because a lot of people were finishing his games in less than two hours and then ask for a refund. Instead of complaining, he should have made longer games.
When I read short stories, I have a rule of thumb, never read anything under 1000 words, because it means that either nothing is happening, or there is 0 description, and the writing is very raw and unenjoyable. Well, same with games. If your game is the length of a movie, but the price of one week of food, no wonder people will pirate/abuse the refund policy with it.
And now, to go back to demos, I don't really blame anything n them, for some years now, the Steam festival has had a lot of demos. I doubt they'll do anything to lower the piracy rate though. A demo is not representative of a game. In the same way, some people (like me) can be fooled into buying never to be released Early access games. Or, on the contrary, can make people want the game even more, but still for free.
