I'm maybe 15 years behind the current trends but all games I've ever bought (when I was still buying games...) were carefully screened and test played using pirated sources. Piracy has always been the de facto news channel for new games: not magazines or demo disks. You had the game coming from your friends first and you saw it weeks or months later in a magazine.

Investing actually money into something as brittle and vague as a video game simply requires that I certainly know what I'm buying. Thus, the title must either be a few-in-a-decade known hit or tested with a pirated version.

If the situation is even remotely like that these days, game publishers are making their money because of piracy, not despite of it.