Often not true
You can go further and say piracy has the opposite of the claimed effect, the overwhelming majority of the time.
When the RIAA and BPI tried to construct their anti-napster/etc narratives about this in the 2000s, they invariably found that the groups which pirated the most also bought the most, according to surveys. This is reflected in how the BPI celebrated all-time high album sales in the winmx/soulseek/suprnova/kazaa era (2001 to 2005-ish), sometimes year on year. There was a sales blip in 2002, which they used for scaremongering propaganda, but that was because 2001 had been a year of historical high sales. They broke 2001's record in 2003 - and then 2003's record in 2004, and I think the same happened in 2005 (not sure, then I stopped tracking after that) - all at the height of the biggest normie acceptance of piracy.
I recall an anecdote of some label PR goon trying to make a failed point by telling a student group to raise their hands if they had recently pirated something, then raise their hand if they had recently purchased something, and all the same hands went up.
I'm sure there are people around who do nothing but pirate and never buy anything, and moreso with gaming which is a bit different to music, but there's nothing to suggest they're anything more than a fat unicorn. Remember the notorious analysis from an indie dev which found they had to prevent 1000 illegal downloads to create 1 sale:
"Though that doesn’t make a 92% piracy rate of one of our banner products any less distressing, knowing that eliminating 50,000 pirated copies might only produce 50 additional legal copies does help put things in perspective."
Such a round, vague ratio of piracy to lost sales, on an obscure indie game, coming from a dev whose focus was fighting piracy and not arguing for it, suggests such a weak relationship that I think it was merely the best thing he could pull out of his ass. For all he knows, reducing piracy decreased his sales. Denuvo, etc. are total industrial snake oil for retarded corpos.
Often not true
You can go further and say piracy has the opposite of the claimed effect, the overwhelming majority of the time.
When the RIAA and BPI tried to construct their anti-napster/etc narratives about this in the 2000s, they invariably found that the groups which pirated the most also bought the most, according to surveys. This is reflected in how the BPI celebrated all-time high album sales in the winmx/soulseek/suprnova/kazaa era (2001 to 2005-ish), sometimes year on year. There was a sales blip in 2002, which they used for scaremongering propaganda, but that was because 2001 had been a year of historical high sales. They broke 2001's record in 2003 - and then 2003's record in 2004, and I think the same happened in 2005 (not sure, then I stopped tracking after that) - all at the height of the biggest normie acceptance of piracy.
I recall an anecdote of some label PR goon trying to make a failed point by telling a student group to raise their hands if they had recently pirated something, then raise their hand if they had recently purchased something, and all the same hands went up.
I'm sure there are people around who do nothing but pirate and never buy anything, and moreso with gaming which is a bit different to music, but there's nothing to suggest they're anything more than a fat unicorn. Remember the notorious breakdown from an indie dev which found they had to prevent 1000 illegal downloads to create 1 sale:
"Though that doesn’t make a 92% piracy rate of one of our banner products any less distressing, knowing that eliminating 50,000 pirated copies might only produce 50 additional legal copies does help put things in perspective."
Such a round, vague ratio of piracy to lost sales, on an obscure indie game, coming from a dev whose focus was fighting piracy and not arguing for it, suggests such a weak relationship that I think it was merely the best thing he could pull out of his ass. For all he knows, reducing piracy decreased his sales. Denuvo, etc. are total industrial snake oil for retarded corpos.