Its quite genial idea by stardock.

They ship fundamentally broken gold version. With almost no pirate protection.

Than on first day launch a patch that only way to download is to have legal version of the game connecting to stardock client.

Pirates only care about 0 day version. So the cracked game is useless.

Its win win for Stardock

They are both very easy on user with DRM , and the game is essentially not pirated (properly)