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.
Discussion (19 replies)
Join Discussion →I hear requiring a psn account for a single player game or one after the fact for a coop mp game causes even bigger drops in revenue.
I bet they have done what every other study on this subject does, and estimate the total number of pirated installs out there, and treat every one as a confirmed lost sale, not factoring in that in many cases piracy was the only way that particular install was ever going to happen, and if piracy weren't an option, they would never have bought it either due to being a kid without money, or let's say - protesting things like paid one year store exclusives, forced publisher launcher/stores and requirements to always be online to play single player games?
When I was younger (but this goes back to the DOS days) I would pirate games because I could, and I didn't have the money to buy them. If Piracy hadn't been an option, I just would have had to go without.
As I have gotten older I have grown a conscience. I thoroughly believe the developers deserve to be paid. (though I am not as generously minded towards the publishers who can eff right off in many cases)
I do still help myself to the occasional "community edition", but it is only in protest against anti-consumer behavior from a publisher. Sometimes (I go back and forth on this*) I even buy the game and just never install it, and install the community edition instead so I don't have to deal with things like Store Exclusives, unwanted launcher/stores/accounts, and always online requirements.
*I am torn on this subject. On the one hand, I believe in devs getting paid, and if I buy a game they do, but if I am protesting and still giving them my money, what incentive do they have to change? Of course that assumes they actually see my rants and complaints online, and understand why they didn't get my money, and there are sufficient numbers of others who do the same such that it makes a financial difference. It's a grey area.
I am in the same boat. I used to get the occasional "free" copy of a game at our LAN parties back in the day, but now I'd rather just pay for it if I like it enough.
If it wasn't for piracy. I probably wouldn't have become the gamer that I am today. Granted I buy games now that I can afford them, but as was mentioned above me. When I was a kid and couldn't afford to buy the games, I would get them using other avenues. All of those games I played as a kid I later bought them as an adult for the nostalgia play through.
Which also brings up another point. Game demos in magazines/downloads back then introduced me to a bunch of new games that I probably would have never bought. Such as, Battlefield 2. I played the BF2 demo for a long time and eventually ended up buying the game and playing it for a really long time as well. I loved that game. Had it not been for the free demo that I played I most definitely would have never given it a chance.
Then, after enjoying Battlefield so much I also bought the Bad Company games and enjoyed them as well. All because of that BF2 demo.
I'm just reminded of those Doom shareware floppies that everyone seemed to have back in 1993. :p
(Though I could have sworn the label was red...)
We investigated ourselves and found that our product is really beneficial - Denuvo
I'd trust criminals to police themselves rather than trust any "study" by a DRM software maker on piracy.
Make Game Demo's Great Again
I obtain linux distro's because there are no game demo's anymore. If I like the game within the first 5-10 minutes I'll buy it.
Sure there still are https://www.bluesnews.com/s/276781/demos-freebies
If I'm not convinced a game is good and there is no demo, I just ignore it. I wouldn't even bother to set sail.
Not for the games I'm interested in.
This was my thought exactly.
When I was young yeah we used to pass around floppies all the time - we didn't really think anything of it. But I haven't done any of that since I got out of a dorm - It started out as too much hassle to find a working copy, then turned into many rips loaded with "extra bonus" software like malware.
Today - there's no way I'll fork out $50+ on a game I'm walking into cold. If it's a franchise or developer that I know, and I've seen enough pre-release info about the game -- maybe. But that's been ... maybe 1 game in the past 5 years? Most every other game - it needs to drop to a price point where I am willing to take a chance on it actually being a good game.
There are two things I've found that sell games better than anything else:
A) If it's a genuinely good game. It may take a while to get noticed, but word will get out.
B) If your friends are playing it. I guess this could also extend to "influencers" with younger generations, but they don't influence me at all.
You can always refund via steam after you "demo" the full game :p
Agreed.
I think they believe a pirated install is a lost sale and I don't think that's often the case. If you are interested in the game and can't afford it, you pirate it so you can play it. If you aren't interested in the game you aren't going to install it either way. Take Concord for example. Very few people played the open beta.
They weren't interested in the game for free. Even fewer actually bought the game when it launched and I'd bet no one pirated it.
Chocolate is good for you, finds Hershey's study.
I think they count downloads not even installs.
I truly couldn't afford games in the 90s and early 2000s in Eastern Europe because they cost the equivalent of 2 weeks minimum wage.
You can't convert people into paying customers with DRM who can't afford to pay for games.
You also can't convert habitual pirates who just download everything and might not even try the game.
There are so few good and interesting games today that money is really not the issue. I often pay for the deluxe / ultimate / whatever edition of games that look really good. Because there is maybe one or two games like that in a year, if we're lucky.
IDK what happened to the gaming industry, there used to be so many great games. On second thought: I do know what's happened: DEI.