I could be wrong, but I do believe that a lot of it is part of the mainstream media.
For many decades, we have seen on TV and the so-called "legacy media" that piracy is illegal, it is evil, and it would take the jobs of hard-working people. That is an evil and abhorrent act that could destroy the things we enjoy like movies, cartoons, and all the good stuff.
The thing is, when Netflix was in its infancy, they watched the torrent sites and saw the content people were looking for, and made it available in its service. The truth? If it is easily available through legal means,
and at an affordable/reasonable price, people will rather get the legal one. Why does the Capcom legacy collections sell like hot cakes? Why are GOG and the Nintendo Virtual Console very solid choices? Because they are the easiest way to have access to older games that people know are good. And they usually have a reasonable price.
If the price is too high, people aren't going to buy. Simple as that. The music industry had sponsored research and tried to bury it because the results weren't what they wanted. Which research? This research:
EU withheld a study that shows piracy doesn't hurt sales
In 2013, the European Commission ordered a €360,000 ($430,000) study on how piracy affects sales of music, books, movies and games in the EU. However, it never ended up showing it to the public except for one cherry-picked section. That's possibly because the study concluded that there was no evidence that piracy affects copyrighted sales, and in the case of video games, might actually help them.
You can read the research
here. It is an academic research published in 2016.
There are many reasons to malign piracy and abandonware. One of them is to force people to buy the new products through planned obsolescence, even if the new product can't do a fraction of what the previous product could. An example would be how Adobe Photoshop would force, especially big corporations, to always get the new products and now it has a subscription model that forces to pay monthly and features what we call "dark interface" that intentionally obscures how to cancel it and hide features and conditions that the user should know -- and, of course, many people still pirate the adobe softwares and if you mention it in the open you are an horrible person and should be burned at a stake.
There is also something else that Disney created, which is an artificial scarcity. Most people nowadays don't know or don't remember, but there was a time when Disney's featured movies had the "Disney Vault". They would be released in VHS for a short period of time, making the price skyrocket with the limited run, and then back to the vault to never be seen again for a decade or so.
It is easier for the people with the money say "piracy will have your computer filled with viruses". The uncomfortable truth is : the people who had made most of the things pirated have already been paid by their work by the time it was released, and much of the profit is going to people in suits that don't care for the product itself, or its fans. Only the money matters. If you pirate it or not, the creative minds who put their effort and sweat behind it aren't going to get paid one cent.
These people in suits don't want people to remember that
Nintendo has a "legal slave", someone who will have to pay a huge chunk of his earnings until the day he dies and they love when people get upset when their "comfort games" like Mario or Pokemon are bashed and the fans want to go to war.
My stance? Yeah, pirate to your hearts' content. The only thing I disagree is pirating indie games. This is the only line I have. But big corporations? They don't care about me as a consumer and as a person. In fact, they just want my money, so there's no love lost here. There are good people working for them, but they will never get the money and the recognition they deserve.
