| > The people that pirate games are not the one that would have bought it day one There is also a nonzero number of people who would buy a game if piracy was not an option, or if there was significant enough friction in pirating it. Denuvo and other DRM of varying levels do work in their intended function, for some period of time. Sometimes it's cracked before release, and sometimes it takes a while, depending on interest in the game, the current status of cracking groups and all sorts of other things. So the calculation is pretty simple: Will the sales gained from the few pirates who would buy if they can't pirate, be higher than the sales lost due to the impact of a bad DRM implementation and/or the "stink" of it? Publishers think that's a gamble worth taking every time, because 1) they assume their devs will get the DRM implementation right, or right enough 2) gamers don't really vote with their wallets, and/or the ~15% performance loss of a bad DRM implementation doesn't really eschew or discourage the supermajority of buyers. The market simply doesn't care. There's also the PR and sales bump from the later "Denuvo has been removed!" patch (and it gets the game back in the news, after all) but I'm going to assume that it's negligible for this discussion. |