Drive scarcity? I was playing pirated WC3 20 years ago, on pirated battle.net. There's no such thing as scarcity for old games. They will forever be available as long as there are seeders.
but now i'm not just snagging a file, i'm creating an entire workflow. i'll just pay for the actual, clean binary
The impact they've had on bundled malware in pirated copies of their games can not be overstated.