I worked at Blizzard a generation ago and there was no copy protection and then copy protection was added to products while I was there. IIRC what a producer to

I worked at Blizzard a generation ago and there was no copy protection and then copy protection was added to products while I was there. IIRC what a producer told me was they had sales numbers for Starcraft in Germany without copy protection. Based on projections (prior Warcraft expansions) they expected the expansion to sell 1/3 the copies of the original game. But they added a simple CD copy protection scheme to the expansion and sales of the expansion in Germany were 3x the original game, so about an order of magnitude greater sales, which one can sort of infer that piracy accounted for 80-90% of Starcraft player base in Germany. This is just my one anecdote, YMMV.