I don't think you even need the 30 day thing. Sure it could be cracked by physically altering the graphics card, but really, how many people would actually risk frying a graphics card, which may cost hundreds of dollars to play cracked games? Sure some, but the average pirate, who the companies are really trying to eliminate, probably isn't.
Agreed, my 30 day expiration idea could be kept as a worst case scenario in case simple DRM on graphic card isn't enough to deter pirates.
Sure, hacking a PS1 to play burned CD's was possible, but out of the millions of PS1's sold, how many actually had it done? How big was the 'market' of pirated PS1 games compared the 'market' of non-pirated games?
Pretty big. What happened with the PS1 though is that at the time Sony had nothing to compare with. They went from a situation (before the PS1) where they were generating 0 revenues to a lot. And since the PS1 was so successful and had already exceeded all their expectations that they didn't really care about piracy... at the beginning.
Things drastically changed later on with the PS2 and the PS3. It was no longer about setting a foot on the market, it was about gaining more market shares and maximizing profits
I don't have figures about how many people cracked their PS1. But to give you an example, at the time (1996-2000) I was at school in France. In my classes of about 30 teens, roughly half of them had a PS1, ALL of which had eventually cracked their PS1. And whenever one of us would buy a new game we'd lend it to our friends to make copies.
So I'd dare say a huge portion of PS1 were cracked. But again things were really different back then. Selling a PS1 alone was already profitable. Today when they sell a PS3 or XBOX they're actually losing money until you buy 3 or 4 full priced games.
Heck, if you're doing that why need a hardware solution at all? Have a unique product key, force periodic checking in online (if the internet is ever accessed) with that product key and if that key has been checked in from another ISP address it disables the product.
Whenever all critical data required to play games are stored locally, cracking them is easy. There's nothing easier than removing a periodic online check. For an internet check to be any effective, the game must not be able to function without it.
One way to do that is storing characters and save games on the publisher's servers: if you don't connect you lose any advancement in the game.
Forcing an online check on a piece of hardware is easier, because you can put internal clocks on that hardware and the only way to stop them is to physically tweak the hardware, something most amateur pirates won't do (by amateur pirates I mean people who occasionally download a game or a cracked exe, not the people who actually reprogram the games to remove the securities).