Of your production budget for games of yesteryear, ~90% went to creating art/story assets (which can be trivially stolen) and ~10% went to creating the multiplayer mode (which, if you host it on your servers, can't be trivially stolen). Multiplayer programming is more sophisticated these days than it was previously, but hasn't increased in expense by orders of magnitude. Asset budgets have gone up by over an order of magnitude.
Gamers influence the production of future games by voting with their wallets. They overwhelmingly vote for value locked down on servers (or consoles, I suppose) because that is what they actually buy.
Similarly, why do games with persistent characters keep doing well? Is it because gamers are completionist and we are learning how to push their buttons with regards to avatar attachment really well? Yes, true to a point. Is it because persistence is achieved via the server and this acts as DRM-by-stealth? Also yes.