I think the 75 days is mostly due to games that nobody cares about. High profile games tend to be cracked within hours or days. For example, Star Wars Jedi Fallen Order was already cracked by the time that my favorite gaming magazine printed their launch review.
That seems unlikely. If there were truly so many games nobody cared about then the underlying studios would go bust and stop applying DRM to anything, then fall out of the stats. Also these schemes aren't free so obviously the game companies cared enough to apply it.
For cases where these schemes have cracks days after release, it has historically meant the game was in the hands of crack teams quite a way before the release, usually due to corrupted insiders somewhere in the supply chain. DRM/anti piracy schemes are much more than the software you see on your computer, and the good ones have traitor tracing functionality so corrupted insiders can be found and fixed.
BTW 75 day lifetime for a DRM is about perfectly optimal. It looks like Denuvo have really hit it out of the ballpark if these stats are accurate.
Game/movie sales are very spiky. People wait for cracks but not very long. Most sales are within the first few days. A DRM that lasts even a week can be easily profitable for the firm using it as many will break down and buy the game rather than keep waiting. After a few months sales are reduced to a trickle and nobody cares if it gets hacked at that point.
The thing that most people miss about DRM is that not only is it very temporally dependent but being too strong is just as bad as being too weak. Due to the sales curve if your game DRM takes two years to crack despite huge attention from adversaries, then that implies you engaged in massive overkill. That almost certainly (in the PC space) means you wasted time that could have been spent on the game, or did things that hurt compatibility or would reduce sales in other ways.
The exception is when you have one DRM scheme for everything, like in games consoles. Then of course the cost of a break is much higher and the ROI of unbroken DRM is much higher. But the same principles still apply. For instance, cartridges were historically harder to clone than DVDs, and commodity DVD drives were less secure than the rest of the consoles, but the winning consoles used commodity storage tech anyway and accepted the reduction in security. It's all about ROI.
online multi-player games tend not to get cracked, because then you'd just get banned
I think that's another way of saying they're too hard to crack properly, i.e. the servers can always detect cracked copies of the game because the modifications aren't perfectly disguised.
For cases where these schemes have cracks days after release, it has historically meant the game was in the hands of crack teams quite a way before the release, usually due to corrupted insiders somewhere in the supply chain. DRM/anti piracy schemes are much more than the software you see on your computer, and the good ones have traitor tracing functionality so corrupted insiders can be found and fixed.
BTW 75 day lifetime for a DRM is about perfectly optimal. It looks like Denuvo have really hit it out of the ballpark if these stats are accurate.
Game/movie sales are very spiky. People wait for cracks but not very long. Most sales are within the first few days. A DRM that lasts even a week can be easily profitable for the firm using it as many will break down and buy the game rather than keep waiting. After a few months sales are reduced to a trickle and nobody cares if it gets hacked at that point.
The thing that most people miss about DRM is that not only is it very temporally dependent but being too strong is just as bad as being too weak. Due to the sales curve if your game DRM takes two years to crack despite huge attention from adversaries, then that implies you engaged in massive overkill. That almost certainly (in the PC space) means you wasted time that could have been spent on the game, or did things that hurt compatibility or would reduce sales in other ways.
The exception is when you have one DRM scheme for everything, like in games consoles. Then of course the cost of a break is much higher and the ROI of unbroken DRM is much higher. But the same principles still apply. For instance, cartridges were historically harder to clone than DVDs, and commodity DVD drives were less secure than the rest of the consoles, but the winning consoles used commodity storage tech anyway and accepted the reduction in security. It's all about ROI.