Yeah, Napster was released in 1999 and was huge. Everyone in college in the early 00s was using file sharing networks to download stuff. It wasn't everyone but it was pretty big.

The real answer is that many people in this thread are personally pirating less because they are old; when you have the money, it's often just faster and easier to pay, and for games there are some genuine advantages to eg. owning a game on Steam so you can use cloud saves. Most piracy has always been teenagers and college students, since they often can't buy the stuff they want.

This is the same reason why, in the late 90's and early 00s, anime piracy in particular was huge - distribution barely existed for most shows and when it did it was wildly overpriced.

I was going to say, 2007 as the start date? lol.

I was downloading games off Home of the Underdogs in the 90s, and by the late 90s downloading anime off of file sharing had started to get big.

A local AI model, by definition, can only tell you stuff that's in its training set. It's not going to be able to give you up-to-date info about piracy.

https://gog-games.to/ is a well-known site with a good reputation (but also, because Gog's games are signed, they couldn't slip malware into them without being caught anyway, which is part of the reason they have a good reputation in the first place. There's enough eyes on them that if they'd ever altered any of the game they put on their site they'd have been caught immediately.)

Nintendo is a special case. Their entire business model is based around their first-party games only being available on their systems. As a result, piracy is a much much bigger threat to their business model than it is to anyone else.

(Beyond that I feel that there's a cultural thing where the people calling the shots at Nintendo just hate piracy a lot more than most other companies - they've always been weirdly aggressive about it. But it's not totally irrational - they really depend hard on games like BotW only being available on their systems.)

As Gaben said, piracy is a service issue.

Streaming sites are a bigger issue because they're so easy to use, to the point where it's often easier to just view something on an illegal streaming site than to view it on Netflix. You can email your grandma a link to a torrent site and she can use it immediately. (I'd set her up with adblock first, ofc. But everyone should be using adblock.)

Meanwhile torrents, for people who aren't already set up to use them, are hard. You can't just email your grandma a link to The Pirate Bay.

Personally I sort of wish absolutely everything was saved, with private things only being revealed after everyone involved is dead. It'd be a shame for anything to be lost forever. But doing that while preserving piracy for people who are still alive is hard.