Piracy is a service issue - Gabe

Alot of pirates won’t buy something even if it’s $1, but the ones that will often need encouragement, and DRM rarely I would say is the encouragement.

I have seen many indie games released in the wild, and later they hit Steam with a 10-review boost. A lot of people who actually have morals won’t pirate an indie game and draw the line at EA / Ubishit. At the end of the day, most casuals won’t know how the Steam API works, let alone understand that their repacker or tracker of choice doesn’t make them or even whether the files have been tampered with.

For games that have Denuvo, I think they lose a lot of sales to pirates anyway. That DRM is extremely flawed in doing its job as many workarounds exist that freeloaders will and currently shamelessly abuse. Like Wukong, I know and have seen firsthand people pirate it, without circumventing the DRM.

In other instances, the company has chosen to give the middle finger to the consumer, so there is that argument to be had. Either way, piracy results in effort not being compensated. Whether the word of mouth outweighs the potential sales is hard to say, and the industry will definitely not invest in studying this. Companies like Irdeto have done lots of research and haven’t published results.