While I agree with this sentiment, this is exactly the problem - those who don't buy the game show up to publishers in the same category as pirates.

In a normal store, the store stocks a certain number of items and then annually records the amount they have left over. The kind that turn up missing are counted as stolen, broken, etc.

Gaming isn't like that at all; one person can buy the game, rip it, put it online, and then hundreds of thousands of otherwise purchasers never have to enter a store, online or otherwise. This circumvents game distributors like Gamestop, online vendors like Amazon.com, digital distribution via Steam, etc. There is literally no way to measure traffic via piracy. Any attempt to measure it is lying. The only way to measure it is through looking at the amount of peers/seeders on torrents, but that doesn't count how many different torrents there are, physical illegal distribution, or straight upload/download sites.

I'm not trying to say 'pirates are right in stealing games, because' but companies have no way of knowing when piracy contributes to their annual losses. I think I remember Nikose losing his job as a game tester, and they told him it was "due to piracy." It really is just an excuse companies use to validate DRM dickery to squeeze every last pirate out.

TLDR; even if every pirate in the world didn't steal and instead refused to buy, companies wouldn't know the difference and would keep blaming them, because there's 100% no way to track piracy.

So ultimately, regardless of what we do, anything apart from bombing publishers with angry emails makes us look like pirates?

Yes. Bombing with anything just makes you look like an angry pirate, just fyi.

This is doom to fail, just like all attempts to stop piracy.

They can stop using piracy as a scapegoat to staple more and more utterly obnoxious, ineffectual DRM onto games.

I could understand them adding DRM to squelch piracy if it worked but Ubisoft themselves have already pretty much said, "yeah, in the end DRM doesn't do much more than stop it for a week, but we're doing it anyway." All they're doing is steamrolling the everday consumer.

Exactly! Ideally publishers would stop using piracy as a scapegoat, but it'll never happen as long as people continue to pirate games for any reason whatsoever, but draconian DRM schemes are just one of the many reasons people use to justify pirating games, so the cycle continues. Shit, even if games DON'T have DRM they'll get pirated anyway, so most DRM doesn't really affect shit. Look at what happened with World of Goo.

It's more realistic to wait for publishers to get a clue and give up spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to create DRM when pirates are just going to spend more (completely free) time getting around it versus pirates stopping stealing games.

EDIT: I just realized that when Assassin's Creed II becomes obsolete or if Ubisoft tanks and collapses as a company, nobody can ever play AC2 ever.

On PC anyway...

For about a week. A month at the most.

This makes me think, DRM like this could be used as a sneaky way to force consumers to buy sequels! Game a year too old? Fuck you, you can't play it anymore, BUY OUR SEQUELS!! Hell, EA already did this by deactivating online servers for games a year old, forcing people to upgrade to the newest versions if they wanted to keep playing online.

This is actually a huge problem for archives, libraries and similar institutions. Games are a part of our culture just like music or movies, but how do you document this stuff for, to be a bit pathetic for a moment, the following generations when it's basically designed to be used only within a certain timeframe? Ubisoft and everyone who uses online activation DRM is absolutely going to shut down authentification servers sooner or later and, call me crazy, but I don't trust these guys to patch out the DRM requirements before they do it.