Honest question, before touching the spoiler: What do you actually think piracy protection exists for?
piracy protection exists to stop other companies or black market groups making duplicates to sell themselves. This was part of the reason for the videogame crash because product quality could not be vetted or trusted. Beginning with a simple message that could only checked by a certain type of drive saying 'real' that would not be included in a dump when copies were made to embedding things in sound files these were methods to fight chinese and russian companies from lifting games and forcing the devs to suffer lost sales at best and at worst have to go to court in copyright battles to retain their ip and pray their licensing deals dont fall through meaning their business would die at a time when movie licenses were a huge deal in the early PC64000 and Famicom era . The individual consumers were always swapping and sharing files since the ability to do so on cassettes and printed BASIC code was possible. The piracy was never to stop the end user because one pirated game by one individual doesnt mean shit compared to some shell company selling bootlegs by the hundreds or later thousands and actually impacting profits and company reputation in a big way
Now before someone goes full tumblr outrage and assumes this is some defence of things like denuvo its not, point is when did it become assumed that the copyright was just some flaccid defence against individual sales losses on the end consumer point?
Is it just people to young to remember the days stores were unknowingly buying pallets of bootlegs with massive faults that drove things like 'the nintendo seal of quality' to exist to begin with?
Did these kids never go down to a market and buy a "GAME" gameboy cartridge with 250-in-1 romdumps on them?
Its kind of reminiscent of the whole deal with Nintendo shutting down fangames. Anyone who knows anything about copyright law knows they MUST do it because if they allow others to make products -for profit or not- using their intellectual property then they can lose that copyright entirely which again makes corporate level piracy a real issue. The solution there is the often mentioned "shut the fuck up, if you love your fan game release it on the downlow and circulate it, dont advertise with trailers and sites that can easily be traced back for a DCMA order" but instead its "le ebig ebuul coporashun" because people are simply ignorant of copyright law and how completely without quality control the pre crash videogame enviroment was.
Go look at steam early access. Look at its worst examples. That was all of videogames before the crash, thats why these systems are in place. Nothing will stop individuals pirating games eventually and devs dont care because you arent the people trying to steal millions in revenue and void copyright by actively fucking the market over with your one torrented game. There is a difference.
Question is why do people not know that difference is there? is the history of vidya that unknown to the younger anons?