Either pay the price asked because you want that game or movie so bad, or say the cost is too high and walk away entirely.

I don't entirely disagree with this regarding newer content, and I personally don't pirate that... but I will happily subvert a system of near perma-copyright that was never meant to exist, goes entirely against key concepts around copyright when it was first conceived, and only exists due to extreme regulatory capture. It has been perverted far beyond its intent.

7 years. Copyright was meant to last about 7 years. There was, at that time, an acknowledgment that culture belongs to society as a whole and shouldn't be monopolized by one person, stifling innovation (I mean, Disney is basically founded on reworking others' stories; would they ever have hit it big if they couldn't have done that? Hard to say...)... copyright was seen as a sort of necessary evil to give an artist a few years of a legal monopoly to incentivize art creation.

That's about the cutoff I use. If it's older than 7 years, you've had your chance to make a buck. Even moreso today... 7 years is far more time today to actually exploit your monopoly, information is just so quickly disseminated. I tried to show my kid Charlie Brown Christmas this last holiday season... absolutely criminal that people can still gatekeep that for money, that kind of thing should belong to society as a whole. Zero qualms about going to the high seas for that kind of thing.

tl;dr I think the ethics of piracy are nuanced, but I absolutely do not buy the argument that the current law around copyright is ethical as it stands and as an unethical law, it should be subverted.

Not lots sadly. There are certainly some that have a big enough public profile to demand a share, but those are few and far between, and are often doing pretty well for themselves already. To 99% of the people in the industry the response to "I want to get a cut of the game's profits" is "you can find another place to work then."

I don't entirely disagree with your bigger point. At some point you have to just step away from companies that are set on abusing you. But I don't agree that it's immature or skinflinty. That seems to be a rather uncharitable take perhaps lacking in understanding and perspective of why people pirate. There are pirates that take for the sake of it, but that's not mostly the case. Piracy is trackable to a certain degree, and so it is feedback that people want to give you money, but are protesting your decisions. As has been said, piracy is a service problem. People tend to have no problem parting with their money in a fair exchange, and so they often don't, even if they could.

Wanting to be treated fairly and not taking abuse is the opposite of immature in my opinion, how much it costs doesn't even factor into it. Some fights you fight on principle. Too many people accept being taken advantage of in this world, making it worse for everyone else. And without those people piracy would also have been unneeded, because these companies often opt to not fix their issues and instead enshittify harder to squeeze more out of the people that keep paying.

There's also a huge psychological aspect to it. Pirates often still bond with friends over games and those friends can end up buying, and pirates often still contribute to fan communities. Both of these are hard to let go of. They also happen to still help the original game stay relevant despite pirating, so yes, quitting entirely is more effective of a boycott. But also not being able to sell the experience to someone that has already experienced it is also more permanent, and allows that person to remain in their respective communities. Piracy just hits the sweet spot between quitting and no longer directly supporting, which is why people often end up there. And for creators that have to live under the thumb of executives that sabotage their success with hostile business practices, they would much rather you be there than somewhere else, while they try to improve the situation from the inside.