The software industry certainly didn't give up. Most smaller game studios outsource their copy protection to Steam. Larger studios use Denuvo which works better than ever. Some Denuvo games stay uncracked for years. Non-entertainment software mostly moved to SaaS with a subscription model which is essentially uncrackable or, where that was not feasible (CAD and video editing), use extremely invasive copy protection measures. For example, Dassault can catch your Solidworks cracks even on an airgapped computer. They taint every file you create as pirated and when you give that file to a licensed user, their legitimate copy will phone home and have their lawyers force the legitimate user to betray you.
Steam's DRM is completely symbolic. There are widespread cracks available and Steam is AFAIK not even bothering with the cat and mouse game, and Denuvo games released this year are being cracked in < 24 hours.
I would never underestimate the lengths people are willing to go to to 'crack' games. Countless online-only games have been cracked with users reverse engineering the network protocol and writing their own servers. LLMs will probably greatly ease that process as well.
The SteamDRM wrapper tool itself, freely distributed through the Stramworks SDK, used to straight up ship with a feature to strip the DRM from any exe.
Steam effectively solved game piracy as far as I can tell.
The solution is: make purchasing legitimate copies an easier and better experience than piracy. That's it. That's all you need to do. There will, of course, always be piracy by those who can't afford to purchase the software or have other ideological goals, but for the vast majority of users, making it easy and pleasant to fork over cash for goods is how you stop them from stealing.
Meanwhile music, movies, and TV have decided to sprint in the exact opposite direction. It's now so onerous and expensive to even find let alone watch something that normal users are flocking to piracy. Not because it's cheaper, but because the experience is better in every conceivable way. To most people, the fact that you now own a real copy forever is merely a bonus. The real killer feature is that if you want to watch something it is always available. You can search for anything and get a result. Torrents don't usually go away on a rotating weekly basis. If you want something, it's available, and nobody gets in your way (if you do it right).
But they did it. Buying, installing, and updating the game is incredibly easy. That’s exactly why I haven’t downloaded pirated games for at least 15 years.
Oh wow that's really smart of them, now you have a reason to send your hacked version along the cad file so the user on the other side can escape from their spyware :D
> They taint every file you create as pirated and when you give that file to a licensed user, their legitimate copy will phone home and have their lawyers force the legitimate user to betray you.
Can this be manipulated to frame arbitrary users for piracy?