Produce an example of a copy protection scheme that actually works -- short, again, of MMO's which require an account to play -- and you have a point.
So, what exactly has to be accomplished for copy protection to "work"? Is it just a bottom line thing, like having gained more (theoretical) money from averted piracy than what (actual) money the company invested in implementing copy protection?
Yes, things requiring an account to play at all will deter piracy for a while. Even online-only games (MMOs/other shit requiring accounts) don't have perfect copy protection. The client/server communication often (eventually!) gets intercepted and the server winds up getting reverse engineered, leading to the appearance of private/free servers. It takes a while for that to happen and most consumers don't wait around for the pirated servers to show up.
Star-/Warcraft, and other games with significant, but not exclusively, online components also sometimes provide decent incentive for purchasing the game. Some keygens' output will fool the installer, but not the online verification system. Distributed serials can't all be used online at once (and typically get banned) in a
remotely secure set-up. In the case of mixed online/offline content games (e.g., most stuff using BNet) this obviously does fuck all against getting a free single-player experience, but most of the replay value comes from playing with/against other people.
Things like the BNet games, if they include LAN support, can can still be multiplayed over LAN (or the net, with IPX->IP programs) but it could still be argued that pirates miss out on non-trivial services that purchasing the game would offer (e.g., matching systems, larger online economy, official forums, skipping the IPX->IP software learning curve).
I'm not sure how things would have gone with Spore. It's my understanding that the game is more fun if one can use the youtube features and download other players' creatures. (Will Wright talked about social gaming during those old hype presentations.) Unique accounts wouldn't wouldn't stop copies from being shared within a household. The BNet thing probably wouldn't have worked for Spore, as one isn't constantly online with it, only hopping on to download. I'm not really sure what would have worked for them.