The assumption of a lost sale has already been disproven multiple times... even by personal sales of a commenter on this thread.
Correct, and I myself am one of those commentators you've mentioned, who has previously pirated something and then since bought it. However, even I can't pretend that people exist who pirate stuff and then still don't buy it.
This thread is off the rails and ended about piracy and not drm and reverse engineering and the right to fair use being blocked by drm and DMCA. The right to use what you paid for is enabled by the cracking of drm. Otherwise when their servers go down, your purchase is no longer able to be used... THAT is theft.
And I'm completely against any type of DRM. However, I'm sure you'll find some legal mumbo jumbo somewhere that says you can buy a game, then the servers go down, leaving said game which you bought unusable, and that's completely fine.
Here's a good example of something like that. And one of our favorite players (EA) is involved! So, Battlefield 2142 was released, and many gamers had fun fighting a virtual futuristic war for some time. Then, the servers (Gamespy) went down, and the game was effectively dead in the water. A certain community arises to counter this, offering an installer which redirects the usual connection to the Gamespy servers to their own, enabling people to play the game again. EA had clearly given up on the game; they made no effort to keep it running when the Gamespy servers shut down, but after the alternate servers were running for so long, EA put an end to it (at least that specific iteration) because they also offered the full game files, citing copyright infringement or somesuch nonsense.