"The sims is targeted towards a casual audience that normally don't play games"
People that don't play games, don't play games. They don't play some games, or one game, they simply don't partake in the medium; they are people like my parents, who just, "don't see the point."
Now, if there are a large number of people out there that are not averse to playing games but don't often do so (all those mothers of friends that are around), it would make sense to make a game for them. They're not very likely to own a console, since as we already stated, they do not very often play games. But everyone owns a computer! So right there you've got the widest possible market for any game, and that's not by going onto consoles, even the handheld ones, that's simply by not discriminating against a huge potential market by having ridiculous system requirements, and not going for the 13-year old male mentality by throwing together aliens, special forces soldiers and guns. We can call 'The Sims' a 'casual' game if we like, but it's far more original than Crysis and far more compelling to a wider audience. So was Myst in its day, and so is the Wii now. Even GTA4 is trying to offer something to more people with the depth and breadth of gameplay on offer.
Piracy is not even worth mentioning when there's such an obvious fallacy in the design of a game that leads it to appeal to a very limited number of people, most of whom aren't on the platform they're developing for. They can go to consoles, they'll get a few more sales, but they'll lose the opportunity to have something far greater if they continue to make those types of games.