Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

Yeah, Napster was released in 1999 and was huge. Everyone in college in the early 00s was using file sharing networks to download stuff. It wasn't everyone but it was pretty big.

The real answer is that many people in this thread are personally pirating less because they are old; when you have the money, it's often just faster and easier to pay, and for games there are some genuine advantages to eg. owning a game on Steam so you can use cloud saves. Most piracy has always been teenagers and college students, since they often can't buy the stuff they want.

This is the same reason why, in the late 90's and early 00s, anime piracy in particular was huge - distribution barely existed for most shows and when it did it was wildly overpriced.