Sadly, it's far from healthy, and it has been very unhealthy for at least 10-15 years. Just last week I listened back to some old GDC talks (from 2004, I believe) to that effect. I don't remember the exact number, but the estimate was that something like 80-90% of bigger-budget titles never turn a profit… not a healthy industry. It's not DRMs fault, but it didn't help prevent it, either.

I completely agree. But there's also some things that are considered "consumer rights" for good reason. One thing that is necessary is that people are informed of what they get before they buy. Even I buy the occasional Steam game when, given all the downsides of the distribution system, I still think it's worth the price. But I'm sure that most Steam users, for example, are not aware of the fact that, should Valve go bankrupt, their entire Steam library would disappear. It happened with several DRMed music stores, and also some casual game stores. Still today, most people are surprised and very upset to realise that their libraries were tied to an external service beyond their control.

For me personally, there is the additional factor of knowing that a company invested time and effort into technical limitations that I know are misguided, also makes me less likely to want to buy. When I bought GTA IV for PC, I was very pissed off that Rockstar bragged about how much money they paid for their "unbreakable" copy protection, which had already been broken by that point, but they didn't feel the need to spend more money on badly needed QA, to ensure that the game wouldn't crash on most systems with AMD video cards. There's also the long-term effect: people who have been burned by misfiring DRM once, are going to be very wary of buying another game from the same company for a while.

Just as a back-on-topic note, as wrong and annoying as this publisher's previous statements have been, I don't support still boycotting them because of it. The new game is now here, DRM-free. The right signal to send, if one thinks their "GOG leads to piracy" statement was wrong, would seem to be to buy the games here instead of elsewhere. The argument I want to make is best supported by helping GOG.com gain a bigger market share in digital games distribution :)

Which is one of the reasons why the PC gaming market is in such a sorry financial state ;) when I see how people over at Steam forums, and sometimes even here, get upset when an Indie game costs upwards of $20, I'm not surprised how the business is a loss for most companies. I don't think Steam normalising 90% discounts was good for the industry. In fact, I think it's done exceedingly more damage than piracy.

Thanks for the details, as I said my memory about the Denuvo history is not perfectly clear.

Of course it also always depends on developer talent. From what I know, Denuvo is pretty open with regards to what, and how often, you want to check. I still understand the frustration when, in the case it happens, you learn that the guilty code is part of a copy protection that should be of absolutely no concern to you as a licensed player.

That's all true as well. The problem is that both sides are practically impossible to support with proof.

The GDC talks I've listened to included an industry panel on piracy, with representatives from some major publishers and industry associations (ESA was one). One of the statements was that the worse your game is, the more likely piracy is going to hurt your sales. The better the game, the higher the promotional effect of piracy (although still not easy to quantify).

Although one statistic that supported the "not many lost sales" argument pretty well was where someone looked at how many games (I assume private) torrent tracker users download a month. I think the average was about 20. Not many people would spend that on full-price games, let alone have the time to play that much (hence be willing to spend money on it). A lot of piracy is hoarding. Getting it for free because you can, even if you never look at it. That goes a long way to explain the sheer volume of file sharing, and why only little of it translates to economic effect.

It's all so muddy though, so I tend to revert to this principle: publishers should listen to their potential paying customers, in order to figure out how to create a product that the most people will want to buy. It's more effective than directing their attention to pirates, trying to figure out how to keep them from pirating, while many of them would never buy their product anyway if they couldn't get it for free.

That is, again, trusting that this will be possible. The "No One Lives Forever" mess is just one example of how and why this can end up not working out.