That definitely is the line we hear from CEOs when they raise prices, cut labor costs, and over monetize. Do you have any proof that production costs for games have gone up more than any other industry has? They pretty famously don’t pay game developers very well compared to other programming positions so I don’t know where this inordinate cost inflation would be coming from.
Through various stages of my life I have used torrents, streaming, Usenet, Napster, limewire, aol/IRC chat rooms, discord, and even google searches. You must adapt to whatever works.