So for a lot of Big Games, they do secondary piracy protection. The idea is that you know your main copy protection will be broken quickly, but you try to slow down the hackers so that you'll get some time when there isn't a cracked version out there, and you make people distrustful of possible partial cracks.
For example, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City for PC uses Securom (a reusable DRM system applied to a lot of games in the 2000s-2010s) as it's primary copy protection, but there's a second layer of protection that doesn't directly check if your copy is pirated, it checks that the first layer of protection is still active.
So if you've hacked out the Securom, the game will let you play it, but it intentionally introduces bugs. It glitches out the weather, it disables the spawning of nearly every NPC, it breaks some weapons, garages, radar, and save games.
The idea being that the hackers trying to make a cracked version of the game would have to spend a lot of time tracking down the dozens of places the code was booby-trapped before they could release a working crack, or risk releasing something broken and unplayable.
That'd delay the pirated version's availability by weeks or months, during which the legit version would be the only one available. That's when sales are most important, right after release, anyway!
So how long did all their work on these secondary anti-piracy measures delay the release of the fully-cracked, pirate version?
Well, the official PC release came out on May 12th, 2003, and the pirated version hit the internet on...
