They "worked" in the sense that, when I managed to save up for a game on my minimum-wage salary, I bought a game that none of my friends had a cracked copy of.

They "worked" in the sense that, when I managed to save up for a game on my minimum-wage salary, I bought a game that none of my friends had a cracked copy of. I remember buying EA's Caveman Ughlympics for that reason (it also came with some cool extras in the box). But it didn't work in the sense of making me buy more games. I had hundreds of copied games and a couple dozen purchased ones, and if copy protection had been perfect, I would have had a couple dozen. The publishers always acted like I would have purchased the hundreds, which was impossible. So it was really a competition between the publishers to out-protect the others more than between the publishers and the customers.