But if you still enjoy their work I think that’s fine too. Especially if they are dead and can’t profit from it, if they would profit from it I, personally, just pirate it and that keeps my conscience clean.
This is pretty close to something I’ve been saying for a while now in regards to the whole ActivisionBlizzard sexual misconduct thing any time someone brings up separating the art from the artist. You can easily do that with a book or a movie simply by going to a local library. And for many games through piracy like you said.
For a live service game like World of Warcraft there is no real way to experience it without supporting them, either monetarily or in their precious monthly active users metric they switched to after they stopped reporting on subscriber counts. In that kind of case the only real option is to walk away.
I’m sure they probably are still around, and would probably be decent for someone new to experience the content for themselves in an ethical way. But going that route for a long time player means giving up your current character that you’ve invested a lot of time into and any guild friend groups you are part of just so you can go play an approximation of an older version of the game. At that point it starts seeming like an addiction to me. Better to let the past go and seek out new experiences elsewhere.