Okay, so if I come up with a game idea, start a company and hire 10 game programmers at $75K per year, rent a building, buy hardware for them to work on, and then we spend two years developing this game, spending over $2M in the process, of my money (or other people's invested money), then the money from the sale of the game is supposed to be considered bonus?!?
Now, if I sell 100,000 copies of this game for $49.95 retail ($30 or so wholesale), then the gross revenue for the company would be about $3M. Once all debts are paid, with interest, the net profit would probably be less than $500K. That may seem like a fair amount, but if 10% of sales are lost because of piracy, then this number falls to $200K. If 20% of sales are lost, then suddenly the company is losing money.
To say that money from sales suggests that you don't understand how the industry works.
Back on topic, in many ways the movie industry works the same way. When someone wants to make a movie, they need to get financial backing. If Joe Bloe comes up to me and asks me to invest $100M in his new movie, I'm going to want some level of assurance that I'll get my money back, plus a profit. If the industry is rife with piracy, and movies aren't bringing profits into the studios, then the financial backers aren't going to want to invest in making the movies.
All of that being said, I think that the degree of greed, even at the cost of the consumer's "rights", that seems to be present in many of these big industries is getting a bit out of hand.
