Note that you can legally get free games, like on r/FreeGamesOnSteam that list such deals.
Some special cases to the rule also exists : Minecraft used to provide the old Classic for free in browsers, nowadays provides a time-limited demo, and Raspberry Pi OS still bundles a very, very old legal free copy of Minecraft with features to integrate the virtual world with IRL devices.

And sometimes you can pay for an illegal copy, like Uplink in 2000 : the publisher never paid the dev for the copies they sold, which means the people who paid for the game weren't more legal than the ones who pirated.

While I'm on it, devs prefer that you pirate games rather than using key resellers. It is a legally grey area, but those keys are often obtained with stolen details, or by scamming the devs out of press keys. Both cost money to the dev's customer support team, while pirating doesn't cost them a penny. It's technically a legal copy, but it's a very unethical way of getting cuts.