TencentInvestor: If I were not willing to hold up my end of the deal, I would have no right to complain about game developers screwing me over, either. All this is supposed to be is a fair exchange.
The bigger you are, the closer the scrutiny and the higher the standards should be. If nothing else, because your behavior has that much more of an impact. So a simple, lone user can well demand that all others in the chain (in this case, store, publisher, developer) do their part and show that goodwill before they do.
Now if you have the means, both financial and technical, to pay for a game that hasn't been abandoned in a broken or incomplete state, wasn't restricted from being sold by the publisher or developer DRM-free in any store that showed any interest in selling it as such, has update and feature parity in all stores it's sold in, and is sold for a reasonable price, and either at the same price regardless of the customer's location or only offering discounts for poorer regions, without differences between the better off regions and definitely without having poorer regions pay more than wealthy ones, and yet still choose to "pirate" it, that's unethical. If any of those conditions is false, however, "pirating" is a fair method of protesting, of sending a message, from where I'm standing. Though, of course, the protest/boycott should be active, spelling out why you didn't actually purchase the game, otherwise it may well be seen as just grabbing it for free and not supporting the devs because you could, and rightfully so.