Exactly. DRM your initial release. Go ahead, protect that sales window. Then patch it out after 3, 6 or 12 months. Don't punish your paying customers to try and coerce non-paying customers to become paying customers.

If the options are a small number of DRM-free games or a large number of DRMed games, then yes, the former is indeed the superior option to the customer who gives a damn about owning the things they buy. You know this, which is why you word your post as "games available to play" rather than "games available to buy" or something of the sort that reveals the effective rental aspect of Scheme and other DRMs (often layered on top of the Scheme DRM). A lot of good that "game availability" is doing users in an example like the one given in OP, where the game is now unplayable.

Show us on the doll where the ability to own things you buy touched you.

He fights for the users!

Except it takes certain amount of effort to find the cracked version of the game. Plus, tech support for "torrent editions" is worse than for official (usually, at least). Thus you are wrong - some people can be demotivated from pirating the game via DRM.

If torrents are your safety valve after buying a DRM copy on Steam, why would that change the publishers actions? They already have your money at that point.

Why would people not pay for what they want?

Because they are not (supposed to be) pre-order, day-one-dlc, feel-good, premium people.

There should be a law on pain of death or very very very heavy fines (like half the company liquidated and given to players scorned), that they are not allowed to stop any services (including reupping on highly expensive services said service relies on) on a game to which requires said services in the future of the game when using always-online-anything if it was paid for, as it may prevent a customer from playing their owned game...

Such a law might have required Valve to support Windows XP in perpetuity. Or provide offline installers.

I'd probably prefer the latter.

Operating Systems with integrated marketplaces are also interesting. If you have charged money for a game or other program, can you release a software update that breaks said game? (See Apple killing off all 32 bit software).

Microsoft might then be forced to support both Windows Mobile users for another 10 years...

As would i prefer the latter, then again if they provided offline installers without a always-online required connectivity the law does it's job by throwing all those micro-transactions and unethical monetary methods out the window because they say 'oh my god, if we make this product we have to keep it going for 100+ years' and the multiple games that have been killed off because it was a live service like some racing games, Dark Spore or others would have had a very different experience.

Also you know the DRM services knowing they'd get money in perpetuity would keep raising prices where any profits from early on, would soon enough be quite negative. Or so i see it...

An interesting question. I would say you could, but you need to provide a compatibility sandbox to run old software that had worked before. Which means apple would have a sandbox app for each and every version of the OS when it changed something so it plugs in how it used to. (Would take a little startup work, but otherwise would be easy to implement afterwards). Exceptions being related to a critical security update. (Being unable to close a security hole would be annoying, then again sandboxing it would make it fairly useless to make use of probably anyways)

Remember, Spiderweb games stopped putting their games on iOS because the updates keep breaking his games and he couldn't afford to keep changing it every time the OS changed in some obscure way.