Comment by buran77
1 day ago
For people who have no money to spare for games it really doesn't matter if games come with DRM or not. They wouldn't afford them anyway so "for free" is the only option that matters.
For people who have money for games but don't want to pay, the presence of DRM matters very little. 99% of games are usually trivially cracked, especially if you are willing to wait for some days or weeks after launch (an important sales window for the publishers).
For people who have money for games and are willing to pay, DRM turns out to be maybe an inconvenience, but definitely a guarantee that they don't actually own the game. The game can be taken away or even just modified in a way that invalidates the reason people paid in the first place.
> especially if you are willing to wait for some days or weeks after launch (an important sales window for the publishers).
“Important” is an understatement. Even for long-term success stories, the first three or four months often accounts for half of a game’s revenue.
And, despite so many people theorizing that “pirates don’t have money and wouldn’t pay anyway”, in practice big publishers wait in dread of “Crack Day” because the moment the crackers release the DRMless version, the drop in sales is instant and dramatic.
Do you have a source for sales data when a crack becomes available? If so, that seems like definitive proof that piracy does affect sales.
When the Nintendo Switch became hackable, ie can play any game, Nintendo saw a massive decrease in sales in Spain. Btw people in Spain pirate the most games in Europe. The decrease was at least 40%. The idea that this is a service issue and piracy doesn’t affect sales is just PR speak. If the game is offline, it’ll be pirated a lot.
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when i was younger there were more games i wanted to play than i had money to pay for..and i pirated.
then i had some money and i bought more games than i had time to play.*
now i neither buy or play games.
*the point is that at this point, there is no point wasting time trying to pirate games. every humble bundle. every steam sale. u just click and its yours. you dont even have time to play. why waste time pirating?