It's a fact of life. The harder you make it for people to acquire or play a game, the more people will try to find a way around it to spite you and make you lose money, ESPECIALLY if you aren't preserving your games for future generations to play.
Unity set up a runtime fee, making it so that anyone using the engine had to pay monthly royalties EVERY TIME THEIR GAME WAS INSTALLED! This united devs AND the community against them. So much that Unity backed off and made the fees more avoidable by using an older version of the software.