Comment by AnthonyMouse

> Both "absurdly onerous DRM making the game unplayable, especially once abandoned" and "Rockstar spends $265m making the game, one person buys a copy, and everyone else pirates it" are bad outcomes.

Fortunately the second one isn't a real thing. There are many games that have already been cracked, or that never had any DRM to begin with, and there are still large numbers of people who pay for them. Because they want the publisher to continue making games more than they want to avoid paying <1% of their annual income for something.

Which is in turn why the DRM not only doesn't work but is actively harmful to the publisher. Getting people to want to pay is a lot easier when you're not actively pissing them off. Meanwhile the DRM gets cracked anyway and then you're worse off than when you started, because not only can they still pirate it, now more of them want to.