How much does piracy actually impact the sales of a video game? A potential answer to that has come by way of a new research article titled “Revenue effects of Denuvo digital rights management on PC video games,” one in which author William M. Volckmann II suggests that the total revenue of a video game will decrease by 20% if its DRM is quickly cracked, or doesn’t launch with any sort of protection at all. A promo for one of Denuvo’s latest products, Mobile Games Protection, can be seen below.
When Denuvo is cracked very early on, piracy leads to an estimated 20 percent fall in total revenue on average relative to an uncracked counterfactual, but that effect is weaker the longer it takes for Denuvo to be cracked. When Denuvo survives for at least 12 weeks, piracy leads to nearly zero total revenue loss on average. The results suggest that Denuvo does protect legitimate sales to an estimated mean of 15 percent of total revenue and median of 20 percent, but there is little justification to employ Denuvo long-term (i.e. for more than three months), especially given that Denuvo can have negative technical side effects and is generally disliked by users.