''He made a game along with his team, created a world, populated it with characters, and now has no say over any of it''
Yeah, but he got PAID to create that world and populate it with characters, paid by someone else, to create content for them, not for him or his team, for the people paying his and his teams salary.
If he really wanted control over Metal Arms, then he should have developed it himself. There is an option for these holy developers, go indi, or stop moaning when you don't have control of something you never owned in the first place.
Creators will never have control while they work for a company, duh! - they are being paid to create, and most likely paid pretty well.
The problem is that pirates don't have thief values, they take anything and put effort into providing it for free. A shoplifter probably wouldn't steal much from a corner shop, but might fill thier pockets in Marks and Spencer - Pirates don't even have that standard of decency. You think that pirates somehow prefer to hack big corporations games?, no - they want to be the first to hack a game, any game - whether it's funded and published by Activision, or a solo indi developer just trying to make a living.
Most people don't consider the publisher when downloading an illegal copy of anything, they just want it, and personally I don't think it should be so bloody easy, that anyone and everyone can have it for free. Once people discover how to get stuff for free, they don't all of a sudden decide to start paying again, they might intend to pay for the games they actually like, but how often does that happen. The main saving grace is multiplayer - much more difficult for pirates to hack multiplayer games, so they're more likely to lead to proper sales - but that tends not to apply to indi games. If pirates had any respect for indi developers, they would simply leave those games alone, not hack them anyway and add a karmatically appropriate message about buying the game if you like it. It would be good if this new militant attitude on the internet extended beyond peoples wallets.