And while it might be largely successful in stopping piracy (as Diablo III effectively has)

If it's true that always-online DRM has stopped piracy for a game like Diablo III, then it's unlikely to go away. Instead, the game publishers will stick with it until they can get it to work with the fewest issues on launch day.

Stapleton rolls out the usual, but now quite tired argument that consumers will never ever evar buy an EA/Maxis/Ubisoft/Blizzard title again, but this clearly isn't what's happening. Even as he picks an example of a bankrupted publisher, THQ, in an attempt to scare us with how bad it'd be for the gamer if the DRM servers went dark, he actually forces us to make the opposite of the intended thought experiment: what if THQ had implemented always-online DRM for Darksiders II, would they still be in business today?

I've been a SimCity fan since the first version, which was a pirated copy I got from a friend in high school on 3.5" floppy disk. Unfortunately he didn't copy the files with the color tile set, so I could only play the game in monochrome. I pirated SimCity 2000 as well, but I had a job by the time SimCity 3000 came out and so I bought it, totally legit, from MicroCenter.

I also paid for my legitimate copy of SimCity 4, which I still have with me, but that I can no longer play. After I switched to a Mac I thought I could just run it in a VM because I own a copy of Parallels and a copy of Windows 7.

Nope. It won't launch. Doesn't even install.

Since all versions of SimCity 4 are now discontinued by the publisher, my options for playing it must now necessarily involve piracy--specifically SimCity 4 Deluxe, because that's the only one available for Intel Macs with Mac OS X Lion or greater.

The bankruptcy of the game publisher might render the game unplayable because the DRM servers can't be adopted by someone else, but there are many other factors that can render a game unplayable. Computer software is not really a product the way that a hammer or washing machine is a product, it's always been in a fuzzy zone between product and service. Even if the DRM servers stay up, a few years of natural upgrading and platform migration, combined with a business cycle that ceases to update the game after a few years, will be just as effective as a THQ-ish bankruptcy.

I'm going to put up with the aggro to play the new SimCity because I'm a fan, and this is true for millions of gamers for hundreds of titles, and this is why the publishers will continue to push the limits of DRM even if it pisses us off, because we'll keep coming back for more.