It costs on average 7$ to buy a craft that took maybe 2 years for a team of 10 developers (since we are speaking of DOS era games). Are you suggesting such works should have been paid 7$ just once by one person? Reasoning like this is why most gaming companies pivoted to either use Denuvo or to make pay-to-win, ad-filled products. I cannot blame them, seeing people that are wishing to spend hours on a game, but not to pay the rightholders the equivalent of 5-10 minutes of average SWE salary.
Because it costs $0 to copy the game, all the resource cost is in production; and popularity is an OK motivation for good games but not the best, as evidenced by the prevalence and revenue dominance of microtransaction slop.
No, I think people should just be paid a livable UBI and not have to worry about proving their worth to you to be allowed to live.