If that was true then drm would not exist. These big companies are notorious for gauging the market for every penny they can, but people think they mysteriously just choose to take a loss on expensive third party drm? That's crazy. If it wasn't protecting sales, it wouldn't be getting used. What do you think their sales pitch is? "We will charge you hundreds of thousands of dollars and all this service does is reduce your sales and annoy people"?
There's obviously data points proving to these companies that the drm helps.
This kinda begs to question, if piracy is such a huge problem that they have to waste millions, how come high profile games like Baldur's Gate 3, The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 can release DRM-free on PC without any issues, I've never seen anyone from CDPR or Larian complain at all about piracy being an problem.
Bit of a non-sequitur, a C-level executive who believes that DRM is necessary would say they could have made even more money with DRM enabled during the release window.
Let them defend multi billion dollar corporations. I use steam because it allowed me to afford games so I don’t have to pirate and risk virus, malware and ransomware. Some people will pirate just because and they were never customers. Others do it because prices are too high
Those are like the most pirated games out rn but they didnt get cracked at launch, the vast majority of game sales are in the first couple weeks/months then it drops off unless theres a big update or the game goes viral. Companies that eventually launch DRM free versions usually wait a year or so and by then, any sales stolen by piracy is offset by the people who will buy a DRM-free game.
People will pirate and piracy hurts sales up to a point, the best way to fight piracy is making legal purchasing more convenient because people will pay to save time, at least in america we are addicted to convenience. Music streaming for example pretty much killed mainstream piracy in developed countries
They never were cracked because there was never a need to crack them, they never had DRM, CDPR and Larian games were DRM-free since launch, and once again that didn't hurt sales to the point of making them consider otherwise, this has happen multiple times, the whole paying millions for DRM is just higher ups sucking money out of each other to appease investors.
Maybe they do have the data or maybe they dont. Maybe they're wrong. Or maybe they were sold lies and they just believe it to be true. Sometimes the people in charge actually are just dumb and aren't going with data.
Without a doubt, they do lose some sales to piracy, but how much really? There's no way you can actually test it since it's not like you can release it twice, one with DRM and one without to actually do test.
Anecdotally, I can say for sure that for the games I pirate, I would never have bought it anyway.
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u/Mork_Da_Ork 2d ago
If that was true then drm would not exist. These big companies are notorious for gauging the market for every penny they can, but people think they mysteriously just choose to take a loss on expensive third party drm? That's crazy. If it wasn't protecting sales, it wouldn't be getting used. What do you think their sales pitch is? "We will charge you hundreds of thousands of dollars and all this service does is reduce your sales and annoy people"?
There's obviously data points proving to these companies that the drm helps.