Did anyone really expect them to come out and say "its clear our ludicrously intrusive system has problems which keep legit customers from playing?" They cant. ubisoft has taken a huge gamble with this drm method, and its blowing up in their faces exactly as nearly everyone, including the overwhelming majority of game developers, foresaw. The company had already taken a huge loss of face and respectability (not to mention sales) just by announcing their new drm method (on some silent hunter forums as many as 85% of poll respondants say they will either not purchase sh5 at all or will wait for a non-drm version), and then add on top of that the massive negative backlash from launching it and discovering that all it does is screw over paying customers, and ubisoft is backed into a corner to where they HAVE to lie.
Piracy is not the sales killing monster that the media companies would have us believe, the real culprit is lack of a quality gaming experience (including portability, customer service and support, few/minor bugs, local language support, and the actual content of the game itself). Ask valve how bad piracy is, and they'll tell you it's not even in the top ten of their list of worries...why? The make a good game, make it easily available, highly functional, and offer excellent support. Greed based publishers, who approach making video games from a making money stance, will have you believe that pirate gamers are all theives that want to steal from them, dont want to spend money, or that we are otherwise scum of the earth.
The truth is that we own $2000 gaming rigs, spend $50 a month on our internet connections, and own dozens (sometimes hundreds) of legally purchased titles. What valve discovered is that if you make a quality game, back it with quality support, and add just a little bit of completely non intrusive copy protection in the form of a digital activation, you create a high value gaming experience which gamers not only WILL spend money on, but WANT to spend money on. Rule #1 in the scene (the pirate gaming community) is that if you like the game, go buy it, support the companies that make great games. Companies that desire making money above all else with draconian copy protection and by making cheap rehashes of previously successful titles (im looking at you activision and EA) are the only companies that have piracy problems. They create this problem for themselves by demanding $60 for a game that quite frankly is not worth the money to gamers.
Piracy will never go away entirely...companies are outnumbered by millions of extremely talented hackers/crackers on the internet who view cracking their software as a fun challenge, and attempting to fight it directly is fighting a battle that litterally cannot be won. The correct approach, which only the few gaming companies which value their consumers more than they value their own greed have adopted, is to create high quality content backed with high quality support. Create value, and people will give you their money for it....but i wouldnt pay $250,000 for a '79 pinto with a ferrari emblam glued to it, and neither would you.
