First, best plugins are not solely limited to the domain of iLok. Waves, PA, NI, U-he, Waldorf, DMG, Fabfilter, Valhalla and countless others do not use iLok and are making plugins that are better or equally as good as any of the iLok using plugins. Waves, which was the second biggest Pace customer after Avid and the industry standard when it comes to plugins, actually dropped Pace.ghettosynth wrote: But it is. The reason that the better software is on iLok and you find yourself willing to deal with it is because the firms that make those plugins aren't willing to take greater risks given the state of piracy in the plugin market.
So, in other words, without the stronger methods of protection, those firms might not choose to engage in this market and, consequently, you would not have the plugins that you have.
I should point out here that arguing that iLok has been cracked isn't a counter to this point. If it were, those firms would say "hmm, iLok is costing us money and we can make more money if we don't pay Pace and instead use something less crackable, since iLok is cracked anyway." No, they don't say that because their perception is that, despite that some efforts have been made in cracking iLok protected software, they still view it as one of the safer, if not the safest methods of copy protection.
Secondly, some of the protection that is not iLok is still uncracked more or less. iLok plugins get cracked very fast these days, so as far as protection goes there's certainly better systems out there. Obviously there are other reasons for companies to stick to iLok, the most important probably being no need to deal with license management in house.
As far as developers seeing Pace as the most secure, it's probably true to some extent but it's obviously very hard to admit for any of the iLok shilling developers that Pace sucks overall.
Great example being Empirical Labs. When iLok was breached they put the release of Arousor on ice for months, while the dev was shilling for Pace in Gearslutz. While they got to the release, Slate had their own version coming out and so did SKnote, so their competitive advantage had greatly diminished. After it was eventually released the end result was exactly as expected. Then they went on to release v2 and again put the Windows version on ice for half a year because Pace was supposedly fixing their system. Dev was again shilling for iLok on Gearslutz while Windows users were mightily pissed off. So eventually they released the Windows version update and a week later the expected happened again.
Actually it would be very interesting to know how for example PSP is doing after their recent switch to iLok. Their plugins get still released mostly the next day as they ever were, but now they must be paying Pace insane amount of money, while I and probably many more have sold all their PSP plugins and stopped buying anything from them.
