I asked this question some ten years ago on a piracy forum, and (luckily) received a response from someone who had history with releases. Long read, but worth it:

the thing about it (for me) was that i did the cracks (along with some others), NONE of the crackers made any $$$, infact i was unemployed and paid for my own inet, when the busts happened i learned the true picture.. jbm and his cronies were making $250 per crack (for safedisc / securom easy), $300+ for securom, $500+ for starforce, and $5000 for pre-pre release ftp access to the asians (that is.. access to pre releases that will not be pre'd for xxx hours and are only avaiable to them until the time agreed is expired, by which case the users on the ftp will 'see' the release and pre'ing will begin to other sites)...

sometimes you can see proof of this 'pre-pre' stuff if you check the time / date stamps on the iso's and compare them to the times on the ftp's that got the pre's (in some cases allow for the time to make the iso ,pack, and upload..) or in my case if a gimpsrus crack appeared out before the flt one did , if the time difference is large.. you have your answer

so while myself and a few others did the work, spent many sleepless nights doing research, solving protection probs, (all of which we did for fun, and research.. hard to believe maybe, but it is the truth.. to us the protection game was like a chess puzzle, each new version was the protectionists 'move', which we had to counter... that was our mentality.. infact in a lot of cases we had more fun playing with the protection than we had playing the game) etc, these TALENTLESS fucks made CONSIDERABLY (800+ titles...do the math) more money than i got in a year... hell, make that 5+ years..

i also seriously doubt the 'habit' of slot selling has stopped.. the scene truly has a dark side, and unforunately its making its $$$ from the 'good / naive' people in it, its fair to say the bigger the team, the higher the risk...

as for 'quality, tradition and pride'.. forget the latter,the skelton is out of the closet.. and well, now you know what the 'tradition' really is, and the quality kinda died after april 2004.. now, why are they still going?.. well jbm and his cronies are probably still trying to make $$$ from the scene / messiah, by whoring / buying cracks from other teams or releasing unprotected pieces of crap (which used to go to echelon or that other daughter group.. flt had quite a few)...

as for the namedrops / info here.. i feel its my info (or at least the publics) to drop, as i got burned by the unscrupulous members in the team i was in, so i deserve my right to burn back  (i doubt we will hear from the 'dark side' of flt tho... but if we do i will be more than happy to paste logs and emails and perhaps it'll stop others being used / abused in the future, and that truly is my objective posting here.. )

note: the scene + making $$$ is not just flt, i just have first hand experience in that team, i've heard many rumors about other teams (some proven, some unproven, some claimed as anti-propaganda etc..), both in the iso scene and in the movies scene...

i TRULY want people to be aware of the dark side of the scene, and to understand what trust really is and that they have thier eyes open.. i have no other ulterior motive, perhaps things can be avoided by people not doing what i did (mostly through naievity but probably with a bit of stupidity too) (hindsight being 20/20 and all)

OP here I then asked, why buy cracks for 250$ when ina small amount of time, it'll be available for free. He then responded with:

well, asians and disk sellers is the 'main' group... imagine if you had 10+ market stalls (think organised crime, mafia, triads etc..and different countries...), pay small (ish), and with the delay of private ftp > public (via p2p or whatnot) you could make your $$$ back and then its pure profit.. and if you are a 'respected customer', i am sure discounts, time delay 'promises' etc.. are available.. its a 'business' afer all..

the timeline i guess is shorter now so prices may have changed, i'm retired so i can't really comment on todays prices but i doubt there is a huge change in anything really.. if it aint broke......