GTA V and many others are like this.

People say shit just for down votes all the time too.

that attitude will change as soon as there’s a game in your wheelhouse you want.

Oddly enough, I have managed to avoid DRM-infested games quite well so far.

I have far to many other games on my list I still need to play without DRM, to worry about new ones infested with it.

Or they might just pirate the games that do that. Save money and play offline all you want.

I’ve been doing well with offline games so far. Personally, I think that there are so many, so, so, so, so, so many games out there, both free and paid, that obsessing over “that one game” makes little sense to me.

How very bold and presumptuous of you to dismiss almost everyone here claiming they prefer not to buy buggy DRM ridfled games as liars.

Judging by your history though it’s not exactly surprising to say the least.

Essentially, it’s probably some manufactured guesstimated metric that some sales executives pulls out of his ass for each release.

There is definitely a benifit, it just doesn’t necessarily have to be for the bottom line. If you are running a major publisher you are likely spending public shareholders money or executive partners money (with some skin in the game yourself) on these games.

At the very least based on the consistency some publishers use Drm we know getting Drm buys piece of mind/job security that whoever is managing the project is doing something to prevent shrink/theft.

It’s like the ad line goes, nobody ever gets fired for buying an IBM.

There is safety in doing the best practice or industry standard.

That all said, it’s entirely possible there is hard data out there that strongly suggests there is a cost benifit too it, and it’s just not public data.

… there is probably some benefit.

I was not thinking about the business side but rather about what the customer gets out of it. What bothers me about DRM systems is that they cause problems that you don’t have with pirated game, which is the opposite of how it should be. I don’t want to struggle to get a game running, when the pirated version does not caus those problems. That being said, I haven’t bought any large AAA title in years and my experience is from 7+ years ago. Maybe things have changed but I kinda doubt it.

I don’t think that astroturfers claiming to be pirates who “gave in and bought the game because of the DRM” is what people have in mind when they say reliable data.

Sure I don’t deny that those people actually exist but I do also know that there is an incentive to push that narrative because they are spending money or time (in the case of In-House DRM) on implementing these measures so they got to make it seem as worthwhile as possible (especially in the case of publicly traded companies with shareholders).

The one time software as a service comes through in our favour…

but it’s not like they add it for no reason.

I didn’t say anything about that. I’m saying the main reason Bethesda removed Denuvo from Doom Eternal is likely because of cost reasons, not because it’s a marketing play to drive sales (like OP suggested).

That’s the intent behind it, how well does it actually work in that front well it’s tough to say. Fact of the matter is I know this from hanging out in these communities people who aren’t willing to pay for the game but still play it usually aren’t willing to pay for it just to play it.

The actual amount of people who “give in” is tough to estimate, because many people who do it are either astroturfing or are pretending, and most of the people who do “give in” typically will keep quiet about it, it’s not in their best interest to Brand themselves as a shill to other pirates.

So the legitimate people almost never speak up about doing this, and most of the people who speak up aren’t really doing this either. So it’s hard to say just how much the DRM actually curbs it, and since the companies and their shareholders are paying for it they would probably want to imagine that number to be as high as possible because if it isn’t they really are paying for it for nothing more than an imagined benefit.

Edit denuvo lasts longer than I thought… https://fossbytes.com/list-of-all-popular-games-cracked-by-pirate-groups/

Removed by mod

Oh, I didn’t know it was this bad. But I already heard that Nintendo wants to start to work with Denuvo. Which will take a toll on the already outdated hardware. Not to mention that you probably wouldn’t be able to play Nintendo exclusives with 60 fps or more on PC anymore.

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/07/denuvo-wants-to-convince-you-its-drm-isnt-evil/

Of the 127 Denuvo-protected games released since 2020, only half have had their DRM protection successfully cracked, according to a list maintained by the Crackwatch subreddit (this includes some games that officially removed Denuvo after being cracked). And among the half that have been cracked, the median title received a full 175 days of effective DRM before a crack was released, according to that same list. That’s a lot better than the “under a week” Denuvo cracking times that were making headlines in 2017 and means the vast majority of recent Denuvo-protected titles can’t be effectively pirated in their first month of two of sales, “where the bulk of the money is made for a premium game after being made available,” as Huin put it.