the research on decision making to my knowledge has all gone down the same path of showing that it is related to availability and quality of service
As far as I have read, availability and QOS are both factors, but the predominate one is that stuff for free > stuff for money. And that's what I think too.
Ashes was never advertised as "Early Access" or anything other than a full release AFAIK (despite the RRP being 30% of a normal RRP, PLUS having an additional 30% discount at launch, which perhaps indicated something was odd).
Worth noting that MS and Sony (or Steam) might NOT have been a gatekeeper against that: the game wasn't "broken", it was just awful. Like the health and safety people exist, but McDonalds is still allowed to operate: Their food is "clean" per say... it's just poison.
Finally on piracy, I'd say one thing about that paper: the notion that "piracy does not cannibalise sales in developing countries" may well be true. But that doesn't mean I feel OK about just letting them just have it for free on principle.
Having a look through it all, that was meant to be a full game release, not an "Early Access" of any sort. I have no idea why they even tried it, after so many delays. The quiet release was particularly odd, especially with the discount. It seems that the impression of it being "test" was that they had delayed the console releases and were still, at time of release, not in a position to completely cancel them.
As for piracy, I entirely agree that you shouldn't just let it happen, but I just dislike it being treated as this cure all excuse, particularly when it comes with massive intrusive DRM which in many cases is poorly justified. What I particularly hate is paying for a game only to be punished for doing so (i.e. Settlers 7 I think it was that was virtually unplayable on my internet connection, despite being single player), but that comes under quality of service.
Steam seem to go about it the right way, and have managed to offer that quality of service without being overly intrusive and protecting against piracy. They went about it the right way and are now a major force in the market for it. Valve's overall approach has worked wonders.
In terms of the "free > stuff for money", this is one of those odd discussions that tends to come up. The overall situation appears to be however that it's never really free, and when given a paid alternative people tend to use it. People tend to cite moving with piracy, and an odd thing that comes up is that pirating movies tends to actually have a positive effect on sales, i.e.
This paper (this is a PDF download) is study of university students, which again finds that piracy tends to increase demand in the real product, and didn't decrease going to the theatre. An overall theme though is that people, when it is available will in general prefer the "legit" option, as long as the quality of service is there.
Hopefully the issue of piracy can be further dealt with, but again, it is frustrating to see it used as a cure all defence by many. Personally though, the way that Valve in particular tackled the problem is worth serious attention considering their success in the last decade or so.
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but I don't think they can save the Wii U, it's too far gone.
Don't think they're that far gone, and with the sales of the 3DS they'll probably turn it around if they can get some more hype like Mario Kart 8 going. It sold of the order of 1.2 million units in the first week apparently, so if they can have Smash Bros U perform similarly and get hype going for their Zelda game in the works, you never know what might happen. It's completely understandable to see third parties backing away at this point though.
On that matter though, if the Wii U does have a turn around, would Big Ant consider a Don Bradman Cricket version for the Wii U in the future?
GTA5 for PC 
