Is it just a game mod, or is it “facilitating piracy”?

and, you could spend that time to make the game actually better, ie higher-res textures, and the most important - horrible console controls. it seems this is what is done usually, but the result often feels like 1 developer was dedicated to this effort, for 50% allocation.

How do you confirm it? Word of mouth at the water cooler?

Am I the only rube who pays for games? Hell, because of the way Steam manages family sharing, there are dozens of games on that platform which I own multiple copies of. Caveat: if it weren't for the low prices in Steam sales I probably wouldn't own a second or third or fourth copy of any of these games.

As far as the subject of OP's post, I expect this to encourage more piracy, since the anti-piracy measure also affects paying users.

I bloody love games too.

> So.. it's a hard sell to management: the least selling platform which also weakens the copy protection of the other platforms

I'd thus (see above) say that console and PC players are two very distinct audiences. Thus it is a reasonable assumption that even if the copy protection is weakened (reducing sales) the sum of the sales for both platforms increases.

> I understand the frustrations of consumers, but realistically, if you were the publisher- you probably wouldn't be so generous in releasing PC editions of certain games.

On the other hand: If you don't release PC editions of the games that consumers want, the PC master racers will hate you as publisher, leading at least to bad publicity. Thus in my opinion being generous in releasing PC editions is a really (business-)wise decision.