I suspect (but cannot prove) that it was greater back then.
This was before the Internet was really a thing, so even after the copy protection was cracked pirating software was still a hassle. Pirate BBSes took some effort to discover, and often had download quota systems you'd have to play along with. Even after that, you couldn't download a file without tying up the phone line and if a local BBS didn't exist you'd need to pay long distance charges, both of which risked the wrath of your parents.
So the "dedicated attackers" needed to be somewhat more dedicated, and were therefore rather less common. You could get a lot further by just preventing casual floppy copying, which was sometimes sufficient to discourage friends copying a game instead of buying a copy for each of themselves.
By contrast, warez present essentially zero hassle nowadays. That dramatically alters the equation.
I was very young at this area , but we exchanged a lot of pirated game in school when we was 10 :)
We even find way to copy password manual protection by copying the disk or tunning the photocopier for the password manual in red.
During the school recreationnal time we talked a lot about games and we exchanged games, there was always someones who had a cousin or an uncle.
Great time, i owe a lot to this time and games.
I buy it now as much as i can (gog , re edition etc ...)
I get the atari at this time , and a lot of my friends too. I remember that i may have buy only one game or two with my pocket money because the package and manual were awsome. At this time the box and manuals was what makes me buy games more than pirate then :)
This was before the Internet was really a thing, so even after the copy protection was cracked pirating software was still a hassle. Pirate BBSes took some effort to discover, and often had download quota systems you'd have to play along with. Even after that, you couldn't download a file without tying up the phone line and if a local BBS didn't exist you'd need to pay long distance charges, both of which risked the wrath of your parents.
So the "dedicated attackers" needed to be somewhat more dedicated, and were therefore rather less common. You could get a lot further by just preventing casual floppy copying, which was sometimes sufficient to discourage friends copying a game instead of buying a copy for each of themselves.
By contrast, warez present essentially zero hassle nowadays. That dramatically alters the equation.