A few of the attempts at non-DRM DRM have been clever:
Batman: Arkham Asylum leaked a version of the game that had the cape glide maneuver disabled, making the game impassable after a certain point. Hordes of irate pirates demanded their money back (really).
Indie Game Developer seeded torrent sites with a version that, after a point, would have your sales drop to 0 due to piracy…pirates again outed themselves by requesting help for an issue that only happened if you didn’t get the game legally.
I am just guessing but I think it comes from public companies.
The board of directors and shareholders rarely get the nuances of all this. They just see that “Game-X” was pirated and lose their collective minds that people are stealing from them.
The executives can say that profits would have been even better had it not been for all those pirates. They disingenuously tally up all pirated copies as a lost sale. Hell, I wonder if they even mark it as a loss for tax purposes?
Of course, to make this all work for them they need to show they have done their due diligence and made every effort to stop the evil pirates!
Unfortunately it seems next to impossible to get shareholders to understand any of this and to realize the company is squandering money rather than making it with these sorts of DRM.
And it seems with the Trans Pacific Partnership we will see, among other things, much more harsh and draconian IP laws. Stuff we thought was dead with PIPA/SOPA is resurrected.
I’m not sure people that high are even thinking about in those terms. They probably look at DRM as a standardized and generic business practice that may have some level of return. But they don’t really consider the issues of implementation or consumer backlash unless people make them think about it.
One of the Serious Sam games had a giant red scorpion enemy spawn in the pirated version that was invulnerable and would hunt you down and kill you, no matter what.
Pretty sure it didn’t turn the bad guys bullets into chickens though, so unless your opponents were programmed to be alektorophobes* you wouldn’t get very far in the game.
I’m certain there are video’s online.