There's a lot of things going on that lead to this.
One, the developers spend more time running this code than we do, and they have to get the program working before we can even use it. So any parts of the program that are hostile to the developers risks killing the entire project. Obfuscating the copy protection can hit a point where it makes bug fixing difficult.
Two, lack of training. If you, me, and Steve each have a bag of tricks we all use to crack games, whichever one of us figures it out gets bragging rights but the game remains cracked. Meanwhile Developer Dan has to be aware of all the tricks in all of our bags together if he wants to keep the three of us out. Only there's not three of us, there's 300. Or today, probably more like 30,000.
Three, lack of motivation, which is itself several different situations. There's a certain amount of passive aggression you can put into a feature you don't even really want to work on. You can lean into any of the other explanations to defend why your code didn't protect from cracking all that much, but it's a checkbox that's trying to prove a negative, and nobody is going to give you any credit for getting it to work right in the same way they give you credit for fixing that corner glitch that the QA people keep bitching about. Or getting that particle animation to work that makes the AOE spells look badass.
One, the developers spend more time running this code than we do, and they have to get the program working before we can even use it. So any parts of the program that are hostile to the developers risks killing the entire project. Obfuscating the copy protection can hit a point where it makes bug fixing difficult.
Two, lack of training. If you, me, and Steve each have a bag of tricks we all use to crack games, whichever one of us figures it out gets bragging rights but the game remains cracked. Meanwhile Developer Dan has to be aware of all the tricks in all of our bags together if he wants to keep the three of us out. Only there's not three of us, there's 300. Or today, probably more like 30,000.
Three, lack of motivation, which is itself several different situations. There's a certain amount of passive aggression you can put into a feature you don't even really want to work on. You can lean into any of the other explanations to defend why your code didn't protect from cracking all that much, but it's a checkbox that's trying to prove a negative, and nobody is going to give you any credit for getting it to work right in the same way they give you credit for fixing that corner glitch that the QA people keep bitching about. Or getting that particle animation to work that makes the AOE spells look badass.