Zantos said:
Short answer, yes. Long answer, a couple of developers and publishers have explicitly stated that piracy of their games on PC has directly led to them not wanting to port future games onto the platform.
Unfortunately it seems whenever piracy gets blamed, it always winds up being a lame excuse. The most blatant example was Epic Games after they released Unreal Tournament 3. When it came to pre-release excitement, the PC version was being considered the one to have, and pre-orders of the PC version were even given a map editor to create and upload their maps to play when the game launched. IT looked like the PC version was going to be the big ticket seller of the year.
Then it launched and what came out was not the stellar game that was expected. Instead PC users got a rather poorly made PS3 port that practically required a gamepad to even come remotely being able to play properly and a substandard quality otherwise. In addition, the maps that all the PC pre-orders made wound up only being useable by the PS3 version. In a press release after the launch, it was revealed that it was not a mistake, but intended that the PC users would be blocked off from the maps that they made. End result was that PC sales tanked and rather than say "we fucked up by alienating our primary user base", they decided to blame piracy for the low sales. Incidentally, with no final release demo available (only a beta one), I checked for a torrent to download. No one bothered to make one that didn't require an inordinate amount of hoops to jump through just to play the single player.
Another example is Crytek. When Crysis launched to less than expected numbers, they blamed pirates and "cheapskates" who couldn't afford to upgrade their system to play it. Same with all subsequent games. Considering that the specs at launch on their titles is extremely high just to run it a bare minimum for a pretty generic shooter outside of graphics, their declaration did little more than alienate their user base. Once again, sales tanked and piracy was blamed, despite relatively few pirated copies floating around because no one wanted to play a game that they couldn't accommodate.
To say it's the fault of piracy is just buying the lame excuses. Better causes are publishers either being lazy to only want to devote resources to consoles (which requires less testing due to the static nature of the specs) or outright alienating the PC user base. Is piracy an issue? certainly. But when a publisher focuses it as the sole cause, all they do is push away their current user base. Look at Ubisoft. Even with big sales of top tier games, they cannot get into the PC market anymore because of how poorly they treat their PC user base (Starforce, missing CD-Keys, always on required DRM) and unless they stop thinking that the PC market isn't the enemy, they won't be able to get back into that market. Same for any publisher.
