"And a result of this public outcry, we've decided to remove the DRM that is crippling this otherwise great software." - Said no company ever
Apparently this group is group is not actually that big/influential and/or there is a significant group of people who pirate regardless of developer goodwill, etc.
2) Most of the "fervent anti-DRM crowd" are actually the people who pay for the games. Real pirates could care less about traditional DRM schemes; they could always circumvent them until now.
3) As algorias already mentioned there are multiple communities in gaming. I'm sure video game piracy stats also greatly vary by country. I'm going to take a wild guess that it's the worst in Asia (excluding Japan) due to the culture.
In fact, there's little evidence this is so for most games. It makes sense that a game that can be pirated will be so by a higher number of people than those who pay for it, but this alone does not support the conclusion that the rates of purchase for a game that is extensively pirated are necessarily lower than if that wasn't the case.
In the case of The Witcher 2, after the patch that removed the onerous SecuROM DRM fully 4 million additional copies of the game have been purchased to date, compared to around 1 million copies total purchased during the few months after release while the DRM was still in place.
Also, the 4 million figure is total sales of the first and second games on all released platforms, not solely PC nor following the removal of the DRM, unless you have a source that wildly disagrees with mine. It would certainly be an impressive vote of no confidence in DRM if 4 PC million sales had occurred subsequent to the removal of the DRM, however that appears not to be the case. http://gamespot.com/news/the-witcher-series-sales-hit-4-mill...
It's a bit of a different type of game, Diablo 2-esque, but if anyone hasn't tried Path of Exile, I suggest it. A small, independent studio just launched much more smoothly than EA can, is pretty good about how they treat players and is adding content weekly.
I imagine SimCity has enough publicity the warez crowd is jumping all over the opportunity to be first to crack it. People I know that have played it called BS on all the allegations that anything critical to the game running is server side, because the servers can go down while they are playing and they only lose saves and achievements.
I guess every time a customer buys a game, they are basically signing a contract to keep that infrastructure runing for an unlimited amount of time...
Is not like Xbox that you have to pay your membership every month...