Yup.
I was vaguely interested in Dark Souls for years, but every time I tried, I bounced right off it. I went through a cycle where every year or two, I would pirate one of the souls games, try it out, give up on it after an hour or so, and do it all over again the next time I was sufficiently compelled to give the series another shot. This happened until several years ago when I tried Dark Souls II, and for some reason it finally clicked. I played my pirated copy of Dark Souls II for about 10 hours, before a random crash corrupted my save file.
After that happened, I immediately bought the game on Steam and proceeded to play it for the next month and a half, until I eventually beat it. I’ve since purchased every souls game plus Elden Ring on Steam, and recently imported a copy of Bloodborne GOTY edition after spending $700 on an exploitable PS5, just so I could play it at 60FPS. None of these legitimate purchases would have ever happened if I hadn’t been able to repeatedly pirate Dark Souls for about five years.
CDs have been making a slow comeback for the past year or two, and global CD sales actually went up last year for the first time in over a decade. If it’s anything like the vinyl or cassette resurgence, I imagine it won’t be too difficult to find places that sell CDs in a few years.