When a particular product hits home, people feel robbed for not being able to buy it on the spot for any reason, especially when shipping and manufacturing costs are close to zero. Indeed, it really is the other way around, and it will never be otherwise, but it doesn't change the fact that some of your paying customers will be dissatisfied by your service to the point that they will take action to bypass your own faulty distribution channel, and they will even pay to be able to do that.

Heck, let's drop the masks, the majority of your paying customers even bought their very first computer just to be able to do that over the past decade.

I'm not advocating piracy, I'm explaining why it exists in the first place. When the pirated product is available immediately instead of months/years later, and with better features than the legit one, it's foolish to expect even paying fans not to pirate things nor look into piracy as a distribution channel. This is a challenge that content distributors need to deal with, one way or another.

Saying that people shouldn't pirate digital goods because it's illegal is all nice and well, but is this even enforceable? It's my own humble belief that it's not, not with the current state of the art, and that yelling at piracy is like yelling at windmills. Just deal with it and improve your product distribution in every possible way so that piracy is not exactly a better option.

It works, Apple proved it, Steam proved it.