Piracy cannot beat online gaming because online gaming provides a service that piracy cannot adequately compete with: online functionality and multiplayer. The rare instances where we have seen free-to-play/online games being pirated included online games that were either structured terribly or shut down to the point where it compelled a group of people to start their own private servers. I can think of Warcraft which did this and a few other older online games like Halo, Ragnarok Online, Phantasy Star Online. I would argue it is not as prominent these days since it is not as easy to get off the ground or cheap to maintain and since they are creating services that siphon money from companies then it would expectedly shut down.