It doesn't matter at all how out of reach it is for most people. As long as one kid in Russia can do it, the torrent is available for everyone in the world just as soon.
This has already been shown with videogame DRM like Denuvo. It's so hard to crack that only a handful of people know how, and yet they end up racing eachother so eagerly every time a new game comes out that it's usually done in under 24 hours. Unless you can beat "so secure that only a handful of people in the world can crack it" the situation will always be the same.
Denuvo has pulled back into the lead lately, it's taking a very long time for cracks to appear, if they ever do. For example Dragons Dogma 2 came out in March and still hasn't been cracked. Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora hasn't been cracked for a full year.
DD2 is a single player game, those generally don't maintain their active player counts forever. It peaked at 228,285 concurrent (not total) Steam players which are pretty good numbers.
Even if we do go by concurrent players, Black Myth Wukong had one of the biggest launches in Steams history with a peak concurrent of 2.4 million players, and that hasn't been cracked either after five months.
Apparently the people doing this kind of work have been disproportionately in Eastern Europe and what's going on in Ukraine has so disrupted that part of the world that they currently have bigger problems.
So then you're waiting for either that region to stabilize or demand for cracks to cause people somewhere else to get into the game, and in the interim you effectively have a temporary supply chain issue.
But it's hard to give credit for the ravages of war to the DRM pushers and it's not at all obvious that they've secured any kind of permanent advantage.
Not quite. The problem is that when you involve hardware, things are exponentially harder. When you tie it with content streaming, it's essentially a losing battle.
Hardware: makes cracking much much harder and out of reach for a lot of people. Even the people that can do it are going to be drastically slowed down due to this.
Streaming: means you can block specific device keys once you know they are compromised (the hacker managed to mod the TV to be able to record from it).
Back in the day when piracy was quite literally just copy and paste it was a very active scene.
But cracking Denuvo takes real skill- and there's no financial reward in it.
Back in the 90s bootleg DVDs and CD-ROMs had organised crime making money from it.
I took a cursory look at breaking it and it seems rather trivial in retrospect, just annoying at best since you have to rebuild the executable’s imports, relocations and section headers, along with removing the giant bloat sections that they add (seriously, when the main .text section of a game is 4MB, and then their extra obfuscation sections end up being over 250MB, something is ridiculously wrong.)
This has already been shown with videogame DRM like Denuvo. It's so hard to crack that only a handful of people know how, and yet they end up racing eachother so eagerly every time a new game comes out that it's usually done in under 24 hours. Unless you can beat "so secure that only a handful of people in the world can crack it" the situation will always be the same.