What I can see with my own eyes is thousands of torrent sites, files on usenet and so on. It's not really hard to understand where publishers come up with the idea.

The only thing that torrent sites prove definitively is THAT a game is being pirated. It does not prove how much. To whit, can you say for sure that half of the downloaded torrents of Spore were not downloaded by owners of the game who wanted a DRM free version or more flexibility in the form of multiple accounts? Of course, it is an obvious fact that many people feel no shame in helping themselves to others' hard work for nothing. But I maintain that a majority of these people, and perhaps even a vast majority, are not what you could consider "customers" in the real sense of the word; that is, they would not have bought the game had piracy not been an option. They would have more likely just not played it. I'll admit that this is equally speculative on my part, but I always wonder how wise it is to saddle your legal, paying customers with such restrictive, obtrusive crap as DRM based only on an assumption. The fact that DRM by and large pisses off paying customers is NOT speculative; it is known fact.

Some of them monitor their master servers and can see pirated copies attempting to login. Guess those people just hated the game so much they wanted to hop online too!

Again, did you consider alternatives to that assumption? Here's a personal scenario.

Remember how LAN gaming used to work? If I had a copy of Age of Empires 2, I could install the game on every PC on my LAN, and with just one physical disc, play the game with 3 or 4 other people. Nowadays, it is not that way at all. If I buy a game, say for example Company of Heroes, and want to play it on my LAN at home with 2 or 3 other people, Relic expects me to buy 2 or 3 more copies of the same game to do so. Not being a rich guy, but someone who loves to game with friends and family, this is simply not a practical solution. So I install the game on all the PC's on my LAN, run a cracked .exe for all copies, and use pirated serials to play my legally purchased game over my personal home network. While this is, in the strictest sense, in violation of the EULA, in my view it is in no way whatsoever in violation of "fair use", my own (much more practical) guiding light. The developers have been justly compensated; the game stays in my house and does not get used outside of my own personal network.

But in the narrow view of the developer, if I log in with my legal serial and my kids and/or firends with the pirated serial, then what they see is one legal version and 2 or 3 pirated version. And then they claim a pirated to legal copy ratio of 3 to 1. See how numbers can lie?