Tbh the harder companies try to protect their games, the more determined it makes people to crack them.
Funny story. GTA IV which is generally agreed upon as having the to date most ridiculous DRM, was actually released by Razor1911 12 hours before my copy of GTA IV, ordered from play.com arrived in the mail.There is no way to prevent piracy, other than by doing what Stardock are doing. Stop making games that mostly appeal to pirates.
and most large producers still make a killing and many are still around (or have been swallowed up by bigger ones)
More accurately, the ones that did die, did so when they embraced DRM. Ocean was doing okay on the Amiga, supposedly the most pirated platform ever, but died shortly after moving to "pirate-free" consoles like N64 and PlayStation.