Publishers have it in their head that piracy equals lost sales.
It's this belief, that DRM can recapture those sales, that is pushing them in this direction.
Sales of PC games, which are dead-easy to steal, dropped off sharply at right around the dawn of the Internet. Meanwhile, the market for console games, which have a much higher barrier to entry to pirate, is booming:
Rightly or not, PC game makers have it in their heads that piracy is killing their business. I can see it both ways: On one hand, I find it hard to believe that not even a small fraction of computer game pirates would purchase more games if they couldn't easily steal them. But I also wonder if declining PC sales aren't just a byproduct of the "serious" gamers' shift towards preferring console games.
Regardless, the market for PC game sales has flatlined, and Ubisoft is trying desperately to jumpstart it by enacting a system that makes piracy significantly more difficult, at least for a little while. I'm sure they'll use the 3-4 months of nearly-zero piracy rates as a yardstick with which to measure the potential of the industry sans piracy. It will be interesting to see if you're right.
> a byproduct of the "serious" gamers' shift towards preferring console games.
Or maybe the complete opposite: Casual gamer's are a much bigger audience than serious gamers. And PC games tend to be more serious. So the shift could be explained in this way, too.
(Just a hypothesis. Your argument has more going for it.)
There are plenty of other data points besides 'dawn of the internet'. Complexity of PC games shot up. Prices shot up. Consoles began to get titles in genres that were traditionally 'PC only'. Also, PC games have always been dead-easy to pirate. It's thoroughly unconvincing to wave your hand at an aggregate sales graph and note a single data point.
And, frankly, none of that matters.
All that matters is that publishers believe DRM can turn would-be pirates into customers. It's a belief that's never been borne out by the data. But still they try.
Whether their cause is noble, or reasonable, or justified is irrelevant. It's their belief that DRM is worth-while that causes DRM. Not piracy. Not sales.
Publishers have it in their head that piracy equals lost sales. It's this belief, that DRM can recapture those sales, that is pushing them in this direction.