The difference is that you are keeping up playing their games, thus stealing from them. I used to pirate games to see if they were any good, then buy them. These days, I barely see the point in even pirating first as there are several review sites and places to research games prior to buying, not to mention friends. In addition, games are stupidly cheap these days. The age of $60 AAA releases is coming to an end, and only a few companies still desperately try it and fail over and over (Hello EA).
On stealing: Equating piracy with theft is a bit wonky IMO. Theft is taking advantage of a service without recompense? Then the service I'm expecting is the game as advertised by the devs, not just the game as-is. If the game isn't as good as advertised, the service wasn't provided - and yet I'd have no way to get my money back. (I don't trust steam refund etc. very much; might have to get more used to that.)
keeping up playing their games, thus stealing from them
I'm not really playing pirated games for very long. That's not really the point, for me - it's meant to serve as a sort of demo; and if I keep playing for longer then yes I'm supposed to pay already.
On cheapness: True enough. These days it usually takes 0.5-2 years for a game to drop in price by some 95%, making piracy rather redundant in the majority of cases.
On piracy
I suspect we're really just very different kinds of player. I don't play a lot of games, and the mainstream EA/Ubisoft/Whatnot devs really are entirely not interesting to me - the AssCreeds, MassEffects and other big budget games bore me by their concept alone. What I'm interested in are usually lesser-known indie games, which in turn usually turn out to be pretty shoddy because the most interesting concepts tend to be fairly hard to implement. If those games come for 5€ a pop, I'll just buy them and consider it a donation to the good cause of making interesting games. If they ask full prices in the 20€-60€ range though...yes, I could just skip that game. But I really would want to support them if they deliver on what they promise; which leads us to the issue of reviews.
On reviews
I'm not saying all reviewers are bad, untrustworthy, crooks, hacks or shills - many may be, but that's not the main issue: I don't know any that are on the same wavelength as me and happen to frequently review games I'm interested in. Reviews just don't work for me, practically speaking. The things I like or dislike about games are too specific and are often completely ignored by reviewers, my priorities are very particular, and the games I'm interested in are very niche and often don't even get reviewed a lot.
I'm not arguing for piracy as a political or ethical act; to me at least it's just a pragmatic way of better knowing what I'm spending my money on. I realise this may be abused as an excuse by people who really do just steal, and that I don't have much of a way of proving how I really do end up paying for all those games that I also play (or just like), other than recounting the long history of what I pirated and yet paid for afterwards - and I doubt anyone would care.
Maybe it really is a matter of philosophy, though? Speaking purely of digital wares, I really do feel that giving money directly to good devs is more beneficial to the whole than just waiting for games to become dirt cheap or free; even if there is an intermediate step of piracy involved.
This obviously doesn't work for non-digital goods and services, and I wouldn't propose stealing those in any case.
