Well, there's no real simple answer to this kind of thing. Like a lot of stuff in life, there's far too many "what ifs" to simply create a single, easy solution that applies to everything.
When it comes to works that have a physical medium, like video games and movies, the question of how much profit is lost depends on how many copies are made. If a game is no longer being produced and all copies have been sold to their distributors, how much money is the creator actually receiving from their work? Game developers make a grand total of zero dollars off of used game sales; once every copy has been sold to its first owner, that money is it. Many old games (a category that includes even 7th generation games, as we're almost 10 years past the release of the Xbox 360) are no longer being made new, and thus no money is going to the developer despite these games still existing and being played.
Digital distribution is a whole 'nother ballgame, as it's essentially a never-ending "print run". The developers that get harmed the most by piracy are indie developers who sell their software exclusively online, as their market dries up massively if everyone can easily get themselves a free copy. The only way to counter loss of sales to piracy is to either make the game impossible to crack (which can't be done, no matter how hard the biggest security companies try) or increase the price of the game to make more money from each individual sale. And because increasing the price too much past what the market will willingly pay will cause a loss in sales as well, small-time developers who exclusively distribute online need to be very careful about how they charge people.
Regardless, Ironchew is an idiotic baby. Whether or not piracy is inherently less harmful than strapping rocket launchers to your car doesn't matter, and nobody cares about that kind of bullshit; if the doge had any sense, he'd realize exactly what kind of logical fallacy he was committing while pretending to be logical. I'll wait for him to figure it out.
Moreover, shifting the focus to spyware and secretly installing counter-piracy software on computers is a red herring that has nothing to do with the debate at hand: is it actually defensible to pirate games, software, and films in such a way that it denies profit of any kind to the creator? Whether or not DRM is morally defensible doesn't make piracy morally defensible any more than you can claim that it's okay to punch babies because the NSA spies on us: other people doing bad or morally gray things doesn't make what you do any better.
Yes, I do pirate games. But I do so in ways that do not deny money to the creator: either I've already paid for a copy and I need to get a new one for whatever reason, the game is out of print or the developer simply doesn't exist and thus I'm not denying them a paycheck, or I'm only demoing the game on my system and do not plan on keeping it and will actually willingly purchase the game if it runs and I want to permanently have it around to play. It's difficult to say "moral piracy" with a straight face, but I try to be careful about not stepping on artists. And I absolutely do NOT try to deny indie developers their money, as God knows my individual sale counts more for them than it does for Bethesda Softworks.