But what if we grow? What if more people pirate?
Good. Unlimited piracy on media and software corporations.
I’m a communist first and foremost. Private property is wrong in all its forms, this wrongness is just most obvious when talking about intellectual property, because intellectual property can be easily copied and isn’t something physical like the tools in a factory. Of course corporations will always try to clamp down on piracy, they’ve been trying to do so my entire adult life. It doesn’t really matter how many pirates there are, because corporations don’t just want money, they want all the money. If even one person pirates, corporations will try to make piracy difficult.
I guess I fundamentally disagree with your statement that “The world can handle a stable population of pirates.” I don’t think that’s a meaningful statement. It’s not like there’s some “carrying capacity” for piracy after which point the intellectual property ecosystem will tip out of equilibrium and cause pirates to become an endangered species.
I’d suggest godot instead of unity. Godot is open source and quite powerful, unity is proprietary and might decide someday to charge you every time someone downloads your game. (Unity floated this already, leading to a huge backlash so they walked it back, but that suggests to me that they want to do it and are testing the waters but ultimately decided to put that particular money grab on hold, for the moment. Godot will never do something like that, because it’s open source.)