I am really sorry to say that, but all that guy says is nothing new. Basically he reiterates lots of points that have been made a dozen times. The only new thing he tells us is how their own DRM probably damaged Titan Quest and Iron Lore Entertainment even more than piracy itself.
Piracy is a bad thing, I concur with that. But if your attempt to fight it consists of the game deliberately crashing, without any message like "hey, guy, think about buying the game, this crash was intended because your copy is illegal!", you're downright stupid.
Why? Here's why:
1. It's a well-known fact that, no matter what copy protection you use, you're game will with a probability nearing certainty end up cracked and out there in the wild.
2. People, who use a pirated copy, will complain about crashes nonetheless. That might be pretty awkward, but it's a fact.
3. With the possibility of the "security check" failing with original discs there will also be legit customers complaining about problems caused by your DRM, which a) adds to the believability of other reports and b) makes these customers look like and probably being called pirates every now and then.
Now add those three things together, put a DRM in your game, that makes your game crash without any message to the user that this crash was intended, and you're definitely going to see lots and lots of people who complain about the game being buggy. Simple logic.
While it's great for him that he knew these crashes were because the game probably was a cracked version, it's still bad to have these reports out there on the net, because the potential customers don't know that and it shines a really bad light on your product.
Sorry, but to blame that fact on piracy isn't putting "piracy in perspective", it's blaming others instead of seeing your own fault. DRM and piracy are not the same thing, and no matter how you look at it, the way a game is protected is up to the company releasing it, not to the pirates. If you choose a stupid way to protect your product you can't blame the pirates for that. That's like blaming burglars when you get shot by the sentry gun you installed.
I'm not going to "rationalize" piracy, as Michael Fitch puts it "been there, done that". It definitely is a crime and it's a shame that it makes it harder to be successful on the PC. But I think his reasoning is seriously flawed. To take the 5 to 1 "360 to PC" ratio for Bioshock or the CoD4 10 to 1 ratio and go on and say "hey, it would have been way different without piracy" is a theory, nothing more. Another reason for those ratios could be that both of these games require a fairly high-end PC to run and look properly, or that the console versions simply don't have to struggle with hardware issues (the next big thing he rightfully curses) and just work. In fact, you can come up with lots of reasons for those ratios. But it's probably way easier to blame piracy alone for that.
Another thing he completely ignores is that there are games that sell damn well on the PC. Games from the Half-Life franchise for example sold over 16 million times according to Wikipedia, with Half-Life 2 selling over 4 million copies prior to June 2006, Half-Life sold over 8 million copies prior to November 2004. "The Sims" is another franchise selling awfully well.
It is simply not true that games cannot be successful on the PC and to blame the moderate "success" of both Bioshock and CoD4 on the PC on piracy alone is just convenient for the point he's trying to make. Both Bioshock and CoD4 are pretty big games from well-known companies, so it's not like they "failed" because they were done by a small company or something like that.
Besides all that I agree with Michael Fitch: Piracy is a problem, and the other problems plagueing the PC are drastic, too.
