Back in the days when I played new games (maybe late-80's to mid-90's), I pirated most of the games. Of course. I didn't have the money to buy them and everyone was doing it so piracy was the distribution channel. I don't feel guilty about it because if couldn't have bought all those games anyway. Instead, I feel even cherished because it was piracy that let me get much enjoyment out of the various titles which in turn made my nerdful youth much richer and tolerable. The game programmers had their starving families but I was in no position whatsoever to really make any real difference there.
But the thing is that I always bought some games.
Sometimes I bought one game per year, or maybe it was three per year some other year, depending on how much money I happened to get for my birthday. Further, it wasn't so much because I wanted to altruistically feed the programmer's family but that I saw value in owning an original copy of a really good game, with the box and the manuals, and I recognized the value of the programmers' work: the entertainment that came with a really good game.
If I had been the rich kid down the block I could have bought 10 or 30 games a year. But I wasn't and I was conscientiously happy to pay for what I could and pirate the rest.
This brings me to the software market as I want to see it.
The market is a pool of games and software, unfortunately priced so that only some people can buy them. And some people who might buy some, can't legally copy and try it out before deciding to buy or not. Therefore, I see value in considering games and software, in the end, more like common goods to which everyone has some rights. Not perhaps as important rights as to roads and water, but as something that costs zero to copy software begs for common copyrights.
And if it is so, the only way to pay for such thing is the pay-what-you-can model. You can't force people to buy your stuff anyway. I believe that the market, together with piracy, already exhibits this property quite strongly.