In other words, piracy is inevitable but they are too stubborn to accept that reality
Well, piracy is no more inevitable than DRM;* both are the result of people making decisions, not immutable laws of nature. (* DRM might be easier to stop because there are fewer decision makers, and those decision makers can more easily be held accountable, of course.) All I'm saying is that pirates who say, "We aren't hurting anything!" are factually wrong even if you accept the premise that they would never have bought the game.
Makes me wonder how they even manage to stay in business with such poor decision making.
When successful companies engage in some behavior that seems obviously foolish -- or when large numbers of people make choices that are seem plainly wrong -- I tend to try to second-guess my own assumptions. (For example, if you think, "Disney's decision with respect to Pixar/Marvel/Star Wars is dumb even to me, the company clearly doesn't know how to manage a brand!" -- and who hasn't thought that at some point? -- it's a useful corrective to remember that Disney has long successfully managed brands, while we never have.) So, for example, it seems to me quite possible that companies have gone through an analysis like: (1) DRM makes things worse for our paying customers; (2) DRM also makes things harder for pirates; (3) we've run the numbers and only a small but vocal minority of paying customers will actually stop buying because of DRM; (4) by contrast, a relatively large number of stupid people will be unable to pirate the game. I mean, I haven't run any such numbers or wouldn't even know where such numbers would come from, but it seems possible.
As someone who scrupulously buys products -- since I don't watch/read/play all that much any more, it's not too expensive -- the thing that amazes me most is not gaming DRM but the unskippable shit on DVDs. BBC repays my courtesy in buying their product with a semi-unskippable set of ads, an unskippable FBI warning, an unskippable "commentaries are not our official policy" warning, an unskippable logo sequence, and then slow-ass menus. This is true for basically every company. (Disney is in some ways the most outrageous, announcing that their DVDs are "equipped with fast play" that can be "bypassed by pressing menu"; "fast play" actually means that if you press nothing, you watch a long series of ads, while pressing menu puts you through an unskippable series of warnings.)
At this point I'm waiting for a big developer/publisher to release a good game with no DRM whatoever and enjoy massive success, just to see the faces of all the "b-but it's a necessary evil!" people.
Galactic Civilizations 2 is a decent example, but despite what they claimed, it
did have a form of DRM, namely the release of a piece of shit game that required dozens of week-one patches that could only be downloaded with a valid purchase. Of course the patches were themselves ultimately cracked, etc., but as far as a I know, no developer has set it up so that pirates enjoy a game no worse than bona fide customers.
For myself, I've always tried to help Primordia pirates when I see them on Twitter, etc., mostly for the performance-art reason.