Today there really is no excuse. If you are a game dev looking to break into the industry, you do need a lead - something good to show off what you can do - but really all you need is a demo of your capabilities, and with something like Unity you can get something out the door really quick. You just need to demonstrate competency. And you should probably give that one away.

Then if you actually intend to make a legitimate project, of scale, with huge developer costs et al, go kickstart it. If you don't have the finances to gamble on if or if not enough people will voluntarily give you an arbitrary amount of money effectively as a donation for making the game after the fact, find out if they are willing to give you a fraction of it beforehand. If not, your game would not have sold anyway.

And if you say something along the lines of "they have no audience, how can they kickstart?" then I ask you how they can sell their game in the first place, if they have no audience. For better or worse most digital media sales are not about quality or effort but are about publicity and consistency. Fundamentally piracy does not mean you would have or not had a succesful launch - the pirates are just users who mostly would not have paid at all, and you won't get an order of magnitude more sales from somehow making it so you cannot transmit data online freely anymore.

Of course, in actuality, piracy is demonstrably benign. Isn't it strange that in the age of digital piracy, indi-game developers are more successful than at any other time? Movie studios are making more money than ever before, HBO continues to completely destroy the likes of Netflix in profitability despite producing the most pirated TV-show of all time. The fact is: pirates are mostly people who've already paid or would never have paid anyway. I think we can all agree that piracy is ethically wrong, but I think it's also pretty clear that it's not very harmful.

Not that piracy is OK in my eyes, but failing to protect oneself from it is outright ridiculous.