Warez

I counter that many copy protection methods are known to cause problems from low performance, to crashing, to simply not being able to run the game on certain brands of CD drives. Perhaps the producers care enough about the end users not to use forms of copy protection that could potentially cause such problems.

As for the hackers removing the copy protection, the fact of the matter is that any copy protection is a separate entity from the game engine and that once the hacker has your binary code, it's simply a matter of disasembling it and figuring out what parts to skip and what return values to fabricate. Even if the program code is encrypted on the hard drive, the programmer can run it in a debug environment and capture an image of the code after it has been decrypted and can likewise create such environment and patch the code after it has been decrypted. The only two effective methods of copy protection are:
1) in the case of an online game, a unique identifier is shipped with each copy and the UNIDs of people playing are monitored and verified for uniqueness (this method can be worked arround by the creation of private servers or simply by running on different servers)
2) ship a piece of hardware that performs a function integral to the game engine with each copy. For example, StarFox for the NES had a 3D proccessor in the cartridge, IIRC. This can usually eventually be bypassed by determining the characteristics of the hardware device and emulating them.

That first method is extremely effective. Look at Diablo and Warcraft. There are keygens that let you play the game offline only (which is only 1/10th of the game). Besides, just because there aren't better methods today doesn't mean that we can't work towards better ones. In fact, it means just the opposite.

The keygens also let you play online as long as you don't play on an official server.

As for better methods, I already explained that any method that does not depend on allowing or disallowing integral online service or an external hardware device is so easily worked arround that it's almost not worth the effort.