Every minute you waste on the specter of piracy is a minute you're not spending making something useful. Given the choice between spending time on people who are paying you versus the people who never will, the choice seems obvious.
No one is going to crow to their friends about your awesome anti-piracy mechanism. Make their life better? That would be something worth sharing.
Piracy is inevitable, loyal users aren't. Put effort into the fight you can win.
> Whenever you find yourself starting a sentence with, "I don't want people to pirate my game, so I am going to ..." you are very close to making a big mistake.
Which is absolutely 100% correct. Because your goal shouldn't be preventing people from pirating your game. The number of people pirating your game is basically irrelevant. What matters is the number of people buying your game. Reducing piracy is only relevant if you're converting those pirates into paying customers - if you're not, then you haven't actually achieved anything.
You can't reduce piracy per se. You can just make your product more worth buying and as a side-effect piracy may go down a little, i.e. some who used to pirate it will instead buy it. Or then more people are buying and more people are also pirating it: that'd still be an improvement.
Trying to reduce piracy will just give you a void and you still have to fill that void with buying customers. So starting from the latter part in the first place makes more sense.
Every minute you waste on the specter of piracy is a minute you're not spending making something useful. Given the choice between spending time on people who are paying you versus the people who never will, the choice seems obvious.
No one is going to crow to their friends about your awesome anti-piracy mechanism. Make their life better? That would be something worth sharing.
Piracy is inevitable, loyal users aren't. Put effort into the fight you can win.