This is an old clip from an interview with Gaben talking about piracy. Its well known video, but not everyone may have saw it, so I put it here too.

• On Invidious, a wrapper for YouTube: https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=EQweFurRz4g
• Or on YouTube directly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQweFurRz4g
• Or even on odysee: https://odysee.com/@postscriptreal:e/Gabe-Newell-on-Piracy-(Full-Version-HQ):2

Video description:

This is the un-abridged, web-exclusive version of ABC Good Game's interview with Gabe Newell, which contains the full version of Gabe's take on Anti-piracy.
Despite what the title and YouTube says, this video is actually in 180p, due to it being a web-exclusive download for a show in Australia, where out of all the other first-world countries, we had (and still have) the worst internet known to man. I have attempted to smooth out the video output so it looks less "pixelly", you can find the original video on ABC's site for Good Game, it's from Season 5, Episode 24. This upload is much less compressed than the other uploads found here on YouTube.

Tldw: piracy is a service problem.
If you have a product that's not available in your local language, but the pirates localise it days after release instead of months, and at a much better quality too (and without all the crappy drm that forces always online etc), that's a game developer/distributor/... problem, not a piracy problem.

I also recall (not in this vid though) gaben (or maybe someone else?) saying something about piracy actually increasing sales of games, as a form of demo or try before you buy (for good games anyway lol). I know I've done that, pirate a game when I was a poor student (no sales money lost because otherwise I just wouldn't have bought it) and then bought it on steam years later and never played it there, just because I believe the devs deserve it.

piracy actually increasing sales of games

There were reports, but I never looked into it to check if the articles just made it up without reading the document or if there is some truth behind. Also I have no idea how trustful the document is, nor if its specific to EU. Here is a related article https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/09/eu-study-finds-piracy-doesnt-hurt-game-sales-may-actually-help/ linking and talking about the document https://cdn.netzpolitik.org/wp-upload/2017/09/displacement_study.pdf . I leave the links here for anyone wanting to dig deeper into this subject.

Nice, thanks for the links! I do think it's hard to measure as you inherently have no good metrics for how often something is pirated