DRMSheeArEm

With a few exceptions, DRM (for stuff being exposed to the general public) isn't intended to be a long-term solution. It's meant to be just enough to slow things down that it doesn't affect the first week or so after a release where sales are critical. Especially if supply is short which can cause more people than usual to start looking to obtain it by 'other means'.

There are some longer term things it addresses too. It stops 'joe average' from simply giving their friend a copy of the DVD/downloaded file and have it work. That kind of 'casual' piracy is very dangerous because the knowledge barrier is much lower.

As for cost I can't really say. It's on a individual basis depending on their needs and how much supporting them is going to cost. Generally speaking though it'd be out of the reach of single-person developers.

Unless there are other merits to being always connected for the particular product, I'd say it's stupid. We don't do anything along those lines (we do hardware profiling + oneshot activations, or hardware dongles)

You don't need me to tell you why its stupid of course. Too much demand can make the product unusable.

It's an inevitability so it's not something that gets to you. It's more a case of holding the fort long enough for everyone to evacuate rather than ever defeating the incoming onslaught.

I recall either Photoshop itself (or some expensive plugin for it) using a USB dongle to run it. It's pretty rare now in the consumer space since its inconvenient and not massively more difficult to crack than any other type of protection. It's still used in places though where you don't have internet access to do the verification.

So you've seen those keychains you get for 2 factor authentication used by banks - you press a button and a number appears. It's basically that but in a USB plugin device.

The device has a serial number on it, you type that number into the software as the activation key, and plug it in. Every time the software starts, it verifies a new one-time key from it.

In at least one case a customer used these, and then soldered the keys to the motherboards of some hardware they shipped via the USB headers. That was a funny phone call. No idea why they did that, but if they pay then they can tell me it's raining frogs and they need a trombone to stop it - I will gladly sell them that trombone.