The popular model of piracy is a cracker versus a vendor. The data looks more like distribution: one cracked build reaches thousands of installs, and almost none of those installs were ever going to be sales.
Three patterns worth naming
- Casual sharing between collaborators on the same project, usually within one studio
- Regional pricing gaps, where the licence costs a meaningful fraction of monthly income
- Genuine cracks, concentrated in a small number of high-profile products
The first two are addressable with product decisions: better multi-seat handling, regional pricing, and offline grace periods. The third is addressable with enforcement, and enforcement is expensive.
Most of what vendors call piracy is a licensing model that does not match how their customers actually work.
Our position is that licensing infrastructure should make the first two categories disappear so that vendors can spend their enforcement budget on the third.