The phrase comes to mind: "it's impossible to make a man understand something if his salary depends on him not understanding it". You're acting like those argu

The phrase comes to mind: "it's impossible to make a man understand something if his salary depends on him not understanding it". You're acting like those arguments are unbelievably novel, strange, like gamers are practically aliens. The alien in those conversations is you, my friend. The average person - and gamers are very average indeed given the industry's mass appeal - does not struggle to understand why hardware security exists. It's obvious, especially so because games companies say explicitly what the features are for and always did. It's because lots of people will break the rules if they aren't forced to follow them, and that leaves those who do follow them at a disadvantage. If you are an honest person who does buy software, the optimal outcome for you is that a really good, transparent implementation of DRM (that never gets in your way) wipes out piracy completely. In that situation the expected price you'd have to pay will be lower (for a fixed level of quality) because the costs are being spread over a greater number of people. Additionally you won't feel like a mug for paying for something that your friends are pirating consequence free. The cheating angle is by the way not specific to video games. The sort of tech that video games use to block cheating could also be used to block other kinds of "cheating", like bulk spamming, many kinds of hacking (e.g. SQL injection). Many kinds of software or network can be abused, but EFF and similar organizations typically act as if networks and two-sided transactions don't exist at all. Indeed it's really only on places like HN, the EFF, the free software community etc where this stuff is actually controversial. Outside those worlds a rant about DRM will just result in people being baffled. Gamers migrated to consoles en-masse because they understand the tradeoffs.