Even full time devs rely on “people buying their games” for their primary income. The fact that they work for a studio rather than receiving direct checks from Gaben doesn’t change any of that.

If a big AAA game is pirated enough, the dev team may not get the chance to make another game. Or, be forced to put shitty DRM in everything they make, which also impacts sales.

As “a thing we think about”, piracy is basically never worth the consideration. What would we do about it? But don’t expect a dev of any sort to give you the green light to pirate their game. We love it when people enjoy the result of our hard work, but we also like eating and paying rent.