I pirate exclusively for the reason that pretty much everything I am interested in can only be gotten through services that spy on me or can otherwise restrict or thought-police me for arbitrary reasons. It might not be right even in the moral sense, but I just plain and simply don't feel like cooperating with or contributing to this. I'm old and remember when steam came around with Half Life 2 and back then I already thought this is gonna be bad. Turns out it is. Thankfully pirating stuff also has never been easier. Just look around for one of the semi-reliable warez sites or forums, get your links off them and you can download either via torrent or file hosting service like mega. Using a VPN is probably wise, depending on where you are. With today's broadband connections, I have downloaded the average game or movie inside of twenty minutes if it's popular and I don't even have a fast connection. (I am old enough remembering the times where that shit would hold up your phone line for a week at nights, sometimes waking up to my 56k modem dialing in to start the downloads)
Patches and mods are sometimes a bit more of an hassle but still very doable. Piracy is very alive and well. It also helps that I don't give a shit about online gaming. I also love the cases where some copy protection or other fucks with the actual customers and I get away with zero problems.
Also Steam completely ruined the industry by turning it into a popularity and PR contest. I always hear "b-but the indies, so creative!" and yeah.. most games have barely any content or rip each other off. Tons of them are also completely cookie cutter, designed to go viral and be a quick sell and not much else. Also I don't know, but a real company complete with corporate office and marketing deparment (the ones taking the majority of the pie) aren't really "indies" in my view just because they skip on an distributor for physical copies you don't really need these days. An indie for me is the lone wolf developer that programs the game in his bedroom, and 99% of that stuff is garbage.
Genuinely good indie games are still as rare as ever and I feel most of the industry is held up by advertising, government grants and people with poor impulse control, and yeah I just don't want to contribute my money to it, even if I could. Fuck 'em.