"Artificial scarcity" - which here is code for in-game ads and DRM - helps encourage people to purchase the game and guarantees revenue even in pirated copies. It doesn't mean guaranteeing the game will eventually break, but it does mean guaranteeing it will get a certain number of sales/revenue for a period of time.
I was active in gaming in the early-mid CD-ROM era and saw this in practice. If something can be trivially pirated (copy the files on the disc to a new one) it will be copied like wildfire. If it takes a bit more effort (bad sectors that make naive copying fail, etc.) then piracy won't go away but will become rarer. As the effort to pirate becomes more intense, if buying it is easier people will. If ads let you drop the price to a point where it's more affordable, more people will choose to pay it. Etc.
Are you saying that if old games didn't eventually break because people didn't maintain them, new games wouldn't be made?