system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: Why can't game pirates just copy the binary code, start to finish, from a disc and then just copy and burn it?

Why is there a need to crack consoles? Aren't all game discs exact copies of each other?
gpt
That is basically how it works for the most part. However there are numerous schemes that software makers have come up with to prevent just that.

The current generation of video game consoles uses a combination of schemes, some of which are built into the specification of the disc system.

The one most relevant to your question would be ROM-marks. Basically there is a difference between what commercial disc players and what the disc writers used to make the game discs can see and write.

It uses a system like the watermarks used in money or important documents.

The creator marks the game discs with these ROM-marks, that software using consumer level players can use to check if they are indeed the right discs but that consumer level writers can't easily recreate.

Earlier systems used similar ideas. They went around and beyond concepts in the standards for these CD or DVD systems and for example made queries about eh physical location of the data on the disk rather than the logical data or wrote extra data outside the bounds where you are normally supposed to write data or simply created their own slightly different standards.

All this can be worked around of course and is generally used in combination with ideas like having software that needs to contact a server to be activated or that needs to have an always on Internet connection to the server to function at all.

In the old days when we were still having game on floppy disks they sometimes included stuff in the games that you would need a manual or other type of hard to copy physical object included in the game's boy to proceed.