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Of course, the number of sales lost to piracy tends to be a purely speculative venture. Way back before linux first came out, I knew a guy who wrote a unix like shell for windows. It was actually a very clever piece of coding. He didn't sale much of it though. He was absolutely positive that everyone and his brother was pirating his program, but the truth is that as clever as the code might be, it only had a very limited market.
Marketers tend to blame piracy when they don't get the sales levels they projected, but I suspect the real issue is that they misjudged the market. Of course, it's pretty hard for many people to admit they made a mistake, so they look for rationals. In general, piracy is common in groups where the idea of copyright isn't accepted - kids and teens, many non western countries. Pricing is rarely a factor in such cases. They want it free, or they want to make money by selling it to other people.
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