You're acting like Sony intentionally designed their systems to encourage piracy. They did not. You're also overestimating how much piracy actually happened; it may have been popular in smaller markets but we're talking about significantly smaller markets back in the day, who cumulatively did not contribute much to the PS1 or PS2's sales numbers for hardware and software.
In the biggest markets, piracy was much less common in relation to the number of people who didn't have the skills or knew the people to hook them up with pirated games. And, as game rentals were still pretty popular, for many it just made more sense to rent a game from Blockbuster or whatever for a few days, play it, beat it, and return it within the 5 days or so vs. jump through hoops to pirate the game. Mainly because even those getting the games through pirating, still had to pay for the game and/or the service.
And, again, you had to know the right people to even be in that circle to pirate. And also, the situation you describe is absolutely not the only or main reason Xbox lost non-US/UK markets in the 360 gen. The simple truth is, Microsoft didn't give a shit for markets outside of those two, and pretty much stopped trying in Japan after the first three years in that gen outside of getting Square-Enix to make a version of XIII for the 360, and stuff like that. Which would mean, you had a decent number of people in those ROTW markets who were buying the games legit, and felt Microsoft wasn't catering to their needs for printed copies or localization, or advertising etc.
That's been a problem for the Xbox brand for over a decade, actually.
