It'd entirely true, like locks. Locks keep the honest folk out. DRM keeps the honest people from taking your game. The dishonest who would pirate will find a way. It's not a good defense of DRM, but it is the truth.

my problem with this current age, you no longer buy a game (you buy a subscription?) but you also must agree to a eula.
but you can't refund if you no longer agree to them changing agreement in the future? nobody with legal background knows that company's are allow to change a agreement why are this thief's allow to do so?.

so buy really my games very selective

As Gabe Newell said: Piracy is a service issue, not a price issue. Give people a product with service worth paying for and they'll pay. (paraphrasing)

When it comes to movies, I absolutely second that.
Someone who plays a copy of the film has not to watch FBI warnings for example :)

I have a Blu-Ray drive in my PC and also updated PowerDVD to a version supporting 4k. So I put in my first movie ... the drive would not even accept the disk. So I tried to get information about the firmware. Turns out that a patch was applied, so protected Blu-Rays could not be played anymore .... say what? What did I buy a fuckin' Blu-Ray drive for then?
Also it would prevent downgrading to older firmware. So what I did was to visit a site for a software that would allow to rip Blu-Rays, since they also had a patched current firmware without that protection ... yay!
So I started PowerDVD again ... some settings in my BIOS were missing aparently which I never even heared of (and I even have TPM active).

My current solution is: Rip the movie and watch it with MPCHC.
That's a lot less trouble than using a sofware which you bought to watch it from the disc. Other than PowerDVD it also allows to take screenshots.

You don't have to be selling something in order for it to be stolen.

I would say the ugly truth of DRM is that it's not intended to prevent piracy but to simply track paid users for market research. Treating your customers like shit is not a good business strategy.

Uh... *gestures broadly at everything*

DRM is all about control, management of customers, which includes piracy and marketing, but also about fostering a mindset about DRM being a necessary evil. The truth is, that last bit means many, perhaps most, are convinced into tolerating it, unfortunately.

So the Piracy bit works, but only with those who weren't likely to engage with pirates anyway. That said, plenty of honest folk will engage in getting pirated copies, if just due to how they are being treated. Some will call that dishonest of course, but I call it fighting back in the DRM Wars. And of course, many genuinely see nothing wrong with sharing with family and friends, and think the world would be a much better place if more did that. I find it hard to disengage Greed from DRM.

It doesn't matter how good it is or how much I wanted to play it.

Now if it has DRM, I don't purchase it.

Whatever positive effect DRM is having on a company's sales I know it is losing them the cash in my pocket.

From what I've been seeing I think you are right and that many companies are using their DRM not only in an attempt to block piracy but also too monitor their user base either for internal marketing or to sell the information to a 3rd party.

I find it leaves a bad taste in my mouth, I've already paid the company for their product but they want to extract more from me and be sneaky about it?

For example Phoenix Point was a game I'd been waiting for, but I'll probably never buy it now due to them including telemetry.

Wow that's gold who was it?

Being generous, Im guessing the user is trying to say that DRM doesnt affect honest paying users because they do not need to go through the hassle of cracking DRM. Therefore, DRM has no impact on honest users and is only an issue for pirates.

Unfortunately, we know thats just not true. This statement would only be true if DRM only negatively impacts pirates and honest users would still have a perfect experience equivalent to DRM-free.

We already know that Denuvo impacts systems by forcing more CPU usage (and I guess ofcourse. Its an added program running in the background).

Second, as already stated by others is that DRM basically means your property is tied to the health of a third party you have no control over. If steam/EA/other DRM platform goes down, bye bye property I paid for. Nevermind the fact that the system doesnt even need to go down for DRM to rear its ugly head, just servers or even a license for the DRM for the property in question. Its also probably why steam users are dedicated to steam and have such vitriol for Epic. Epic's success and growth becomes a direct threat to their gaming library.

These two factors innately hurt the very honest people we are trying to keep honest and ironically do not hurt those who try to subvert the system. You could argue that DRM incentives honest people to become dishonest.

That was about piracy in Russia and China.

Otherwise there would be no Steam DRM.
OR you could at least filter according to usage of Steam DRM, which you can't, despite Steam knowing which games use Steam DRM, and which don't. Why is that?

Valve doesn't even care when publishers remove content, that happened w/ the older GTA games on Steam.
Valve COULD have stopped shit like this, made it illegal, but they simply don't give a shit.
Valve COULD also keep on supporting older platforms, like Windows XP, but they also don't.

That's also why they call customers "subscribers" in their Terms of Service. Because Steam as a whole is gaming as a service. You don't really own anything.
And you need to do where ever they go.
They stop Windows 7 support (will surely happen this year)? Now you "upgrade" to Windows 10.
If you don't, there go your games.

Why is it even that they stop support? Officially because of the web browser they embedded into their DRM client.
Wtf? Why would any developer embed a fucking web browser into their DRM client? They could easily use an existing installed web browser in their client (this is called "in place programming"), or at least create 2 clients, one without a web browser that continues to run on older OS and let's you download, install and run your games.

Embedding a web browser is a really stupid idea in the first place, especially when it's even a 3rd party web browser.

Heck, take the Steam Deck. Same problem. At some point they will stop supporting it, and there go your games.

There even IS a digital marketplace, but not for selling your games, only for selling digital nonsense like trading cards, and of course Valve gets a cut on everything.

They also don't give a shit about games not working.
They forced you to "upgrade" to Windows 10 and games you purchased don't work anymore? Tough luck, wait for a patch.

Or take their "game sharing" bullshit. One would think: great, sharing games, sounds good.
But in reality you share your account. And when you play any game at all, everyone else is kicked out of any other game from your account, which makes the whole feature pointless.

Let's compare that to how it works with physical games. I give a game to a friend and it works. And I can play other games without problems too. So Steam fails at that as well. And Steam destroyed physical PC games for the most part.

Meanwhile GOG tests the games they sell and I'm glad they do.
GOG is actually a better store than piracy. No DRM, just like pirated games. Trusted source, better than piracy. You download games to your hard drive and you can back them up, so even if GOG would go down, your games would still be there. You also don't need internet to play your games.

Actually Denuvo keeps them out for a while, sometimes a very long while, which is the point of it.

I personally think that Denuvo is good in that regard, but what should happen is that the publisher removes it as soon as it's fully cracked and/or let's say 2 years have passed.

Watch Dogs: Legion took over a year.
Zombie Army 4 took almost a year
Immortals Fenyx Rising took 3 months
Far Cry 6 took 8 months
Dying Light 2 Stay Human took 6 months
Rise of the Tomb Raider took 7 months.

Looks very good to me.
And if law enforcement went after these few crackers, which they should, it would probably be over.

I don't think law enforcement should go after software pirates. That's time, money, and manpower taken away from more serious crimes - like homicides and missing persons cases.