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Comment by joe-collins | Hacker News Reader

It is always anticipated that DRM will be cracked quickly. The point is that it steers most customers away from piracy, because that option is more complicated than buying it legitimately, or simply not yet available.

https://askagamedev.tumblr.com/post/88725419221/why-do-publi...

It doesn't need to last forever. For most games, most of its revenue comes in the first few months after its release. Mitigating piracy during that window is the name of the game.

https://askagamedev.tumblr.com/post/179082079276/when-it-com...

Which isn't to say that Denuvo in particular isn't an absolutely awful, terribly implementation of DRM. But DRM in general works.

https://askagamedev.tumblr.com/post/155630338791/a-question-...

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There's a lot of words, but no data in these posts. The only argument is that sales are expected to decline very fast, so stopping piracy there is very efficient. I would argue it is quite dishonest to pretend Steam is popular because it is a DRM solution, it is popular with consumers because is is a convenient marketplace. It seems like confounding publisher and consumer mindset.

Conveniently, there isn't a single downside mentioned! Some games have stutter at launch or take a 20% performance hit, so there must be an impact on sales. Adding DRM is also far from free, it is always a good idea if you don't talk about the cost.

I would expect the picture to be quite different depending on the type of games/market. But these posts only show that there's a belief that it works.

The publishers absolutely do have the data, but they sit on it. You can see that they actively try out variations on DRM in games from time to time as test balloon. Look for the odd titles without DRM or DRM implementations different from the usual ones. These are their experiments. If DRM wasn't worth it, they would drop it (it costs money after all - licensing, customer support etc.).

That's absolutely possible but I would add another. The tendency in large corporations for someone to get some software or thing for the whole company because they've got bamboozled by the marketing and now inertia has stuck with it.

It's an easy enough one to sell to management, "stop lost sales!", Oh crikey we can't have that, this software company says all the right things and sounds professional, I'll buy it!

Good links, thanks. I'd say that just points to the need for very basic DRM instead. If a game isn't distribute by steam or some other DRM'ed platform, a simple activation code should be a sufficient hurdle for opportunistic pirates. Not these complex systems that run alongside the game and sometimes do all sorts of other system monitoring too. (Excluding anti-cheat systems-- they're half a root kit, but somewhat of a necessary evil for competitive games)

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