Hot take: if you bought the game, but need to download a crack or cracked version to play it because the anti cheat or product key validation or whatever is broken, then you haven’t pirated the game. You’re only reclaiming access to something you paid for.

Side note, this isn’t legal advice and IANAL.

I feel the same about downloading movies that you bought which became so damaged that they can no longer be watched from the original media. You own the content, but because they packaged it in a way that was prone to becoming unusable, you lost access to the content. You still paid for a license to the media, but lost access to that media. If you regain that access -by whatever means- then you still legally have the right to it.

I know the courts and copyright lawyers would argue about the license being for that particular copy on that particular media or something, but I disagree.