The principal remains the same, regardless of the damage done. If the argument was "Sure I'm stealing, but at least I'm not directly taking money out of someone's bank account", I wouldn't disagree at all. I would actually say that stealing from game devs is a good thing, as I hate them and they deserve to suffer.
But when I see people claiming that data theft doesn't qualify as theft unless the victim loses access to the data, I ask myself if they would be fine with their data being copied and distributed as well. If this logic only applies to video games and music, then they should specify that. They don't, because that would make their efforts to justify stealing for the sake of convenience transparent.
It isn't theft though. Digital goods like video games aren't physical objects that are being taken from an owner, it's just information that's stored in an object instead of a human brain. Like information, it's just being "learned" and spread around, rather than stolen. Theft is mainly viewed as bad because objects that belong to you can be viewed as an extension of yourself, so having something taken from you is similar to someone say ripping your eye out and taking it. Less extreme, but it was yours, they took it from you, and you're now missing something because of it.
But you can't really "own" information the same way because it's purely conceptual and easily copied into others, at best you can own an idea in so far as you're acknowledged by others as the first one to think of it. Technically one could make the philosophical argument that ideas aren't even created by people so much as naturally spawned within, but I won't get into that since it will get gay quickly. Since you can't "lose" information, protection of it in any context isn't based on the same principle as to why theft is wrong, it's more about what the material consequences are for that information spreading. Any sort of embarrassing information is guarded because the person doesn't want others to think lesser of them for knowing it. A criminal like a murderer wants to guard the information that they did the crime so they won't be punished by others for it. Someone locking material goods behind an information barrier like a pass code is really trying to guard the goods, not the pass code itself, the information just becomes a means to an end. In the case of media like video games, the information is guarded from being copied willy-nilly by anyone so that the one legally acknowledged as the "owner" of it is the only legal source for others to obtain the info from, and therefore increases the chance of the owner getting paid money in exchange for the information.
Which is to say that copyright doesn't really exist to protect ownership per se, it's more about maintaining certain circumstances that insure the copyright owner's ability to make money off people paying for the information that that they're legally acknowledged as the owner of. It's not so much a right to ownership, and more of a right to make money.
Of course... You could call this theft for short. But the different moral dimension to it is always in the back of people's heads even if they haven't articulated why to themselves, which is why people don't view piracy as the same as theft, and don't view people who have digitally pirated something as thieves. And because of all that, you can't make any exact equivalence to people having other sorts of data copied and spread, because the consequences to that (which is what matters) is different, and so falls under different moral dilemmas.
