Piracy is not the same thing as theft since there was no guarantee of it even selling.

What a load of rationalizing bullshit. Product X is produced with the intention of selling to recoup its production costs and to make a product. It doesn't matter if Product X is a banana or a video game; in both thievery and piracy, the end product is obtained without the compensation that was expected.

The legality may be different, but the morality is not, and as with most people who try to drown out this stupid piracy vs stealing debate with pedantic conversations about word semantics, you're missing the point; if someone makes something with the intention of selling it, and you take that something without paying for it, that is wrong. Forget material loss, forget physical property, forget all that nonsense for a second.

If you want to argue morals, argue morals. Don't argue economics. They're not the same.

As far as why I do pirate the Touhou games, it's because it's incredibly difficult to get a legitimate copy of the games due to their limited print runs (typically they're only sold at conventions) and even the ones that are legitimate only exist in physical form and would cost roughly 25 bucks in international shipping fees alone for a 10 dollar game. If ZUN ever went through the Steam approval process to sell his work through them, I would buy them.

And I'm 100% sure that when we talk about game piracy, we're referring to people pirating games that are limited print runs from super indie developers who sell them only at conventions.