Games will always be cracked. DRM kind of worked a few years back when Denuvo was released. It took like a month to pirate a game until groups started to figure it out and became a race on which group can crack it the fastest. A month became days or even just hours.

From what I gathered, pirates might actually prefer cracked steam games over DRM-free GOG because there's tons of cracked steam emulators or some such to allow multiplayer. GOG games, apparently, are mostly DRMed in that regard and there are no widely available tools to crack GOG multiplayer.

I think the whole question is quite complicated and it is hard to give a concrete "yes" or "no" answer to the question (how (the lack of) DRM affects sales).

An unbreakable DRM, or streaming the game through a game streaming service, would make sure the game is not pirated at all, especially through casual piracy? YES! That's simple logic.

Does that guarantee better sales for the game, than if it was e.g. without any DRM at all? Well, hard to say really.

I don't think anyone has made an extensive blind study with a bunch of games, releasing one set of games with unbreakable DRM, and then a similar set of other games without DRM (also marketing them as DRM-free releases so that people know when they buy it, and releasing it on the same service than the DRM games), and then seeing which, if any group, of games sell better. There may be single experiences where one publisher has released one game with DRM and another without (might even be on a different service several months after the first release), but those are not an "extensive study", but anecdotal cases.

Some have argued though that if ALL games in the world would have unbreakable DRM, then more money would be channeled to games because then even the cheapskates wouldn't have any other options but to pay for their games... or not play them at all. This thinking MIGHT have some merit to it, but it is hard to say, and even then we might have some developer(s) still deciding to make DRM-free releases and get extra boost in sales for them, because people think they are so cool for not having DRM in their games that limits people's options.

Developers and publishers are people too, so many of them would rather even see less sales, IF they know that no one, and I mean NO ONE, gets to play with their precious creation without paying for it.

From my limited perspective,it's pretty simple actually. It's like computer viruses on PC vs Mac: the latter barely gets any because there are so few of them, comparatively speaking, so virus makers prefer to target the large PC base rather than the small Mac base. Same with GOG vs Steam - steam is so much more popular, it's got the largest selection of games, so pirates target Steam the most, develop tools for cracking and so on, so steam games are pirated a lot more than GOG even if GOG is easier to pirate due to DRM-free nature.

Yeah... I wasn't really replying to the OP's point whether the pirated games online are more often Steam or GOG games (I presume Steam simply because it is more popular, as you say).

I was talking more generally, does DRM or the lack there-of, increase or decrease publishers' profits. Frankly, I am unsure, and it may differ case by case.

For myself I know that my PC game buying rebounded a lot when a digital DRM-free option, GOG.com (and DotEmu), became into existence. Currently 2072 GOG games, baby! (while on Steam I have "only" 637 games or so, the vast majority of which either from cheap Humble Bundles or freebies in the past).

Back e.g. in the dark ages of DRM when retail games had Starforce or limited installs etc., I didn't buy any new games anymore, and even Steam didn't quite make me buy lots of games. GOG did.

But this was only my anecdotal case, so I am aware this doesn't apply to the masses.

Given how many brainless "OMG. Dis guy asked to buy GOG version. ur a pirate!" level of comments I've seen on there, I'm hardly surprised it's still filled with "No Steam, No Buy" halfwits who thinks everything not Steam is evil.

The "every illegal download is a lost sale" has always been industry-wide BS. Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot once claimed a 95% piracy rate on PC. The same man still fails to explain why the revenue brought in by Denuvo'd Ubisoft games during their period of uncrackability isn't even 2x higher let alone 20x higher vs other studio's similar unprotected titles released within a year of each other. Eg, Witcher 3 sold 50m copies, Far Cry 4 sold 10m shows it isn't games that are harder to steal that make more sales.

I think another issue today vs the past is that entertainment is now competing against other forms of entertainment more than ever. Eg, back in the late 80's / early 90's there was no mainstream Internet / smartphones / social media. If they had put completely uncrackable DRM on DVD's, back then the value of that would have meant much more in a world where "entertainment = watching TV" vs today where if someone couldn't steal an uncrackable DVD, they'd just spend another hour on Facebook or whatever else is constantly clamouring for the attention in their online social world. So in that respect, the uncrackable DRM may "work" in not allowing pirates to watch / play, but it isn't actually bringing in more revenue for the format in question the way it used to when people now seem much more likely than in the past to just shrug and do something else in their busy online world.

Though, it seems Steam users have slowly but steadily changed to the idea that GOG, not only exists(!), but also is a legal alternative.

I've been honest about it before - I either turn to cracked games or crack them myself (pre-made of course, as I can't program :D ) because I want to play it when I want and how I want without being tied to a certain system and/or due to the ever-growing surveillance. I still have a lot of games on CDs/DVDs that came with these nasty DRM's that are literally root-kits... Some anti-cheating systems can also be considered root-kits.

(EDIT: And this is the main reason I don't want to boycott GOG, or stop supporting them. Unless Epic forces them to put something nasty inside the installers...)

And, it's not even a conspiracy theory that governments and big companies are working together to not only limit peoples freedoms, but also hide facts they don't want to be shared that goes against their propaganda/narrative:
https://www.ibtimes.com/eu-buried-study-found-no-impact-piracy-entertainment-industry-2592661
https://gizmodo.com/the-eu-suppressed-a-300-page-study-that-found-piracy-do-1818629537
https://cdn.netzpolitik.org/wp-upload/2017/09/displacement_study.pdf

Thankfully we have one pirate party (German) that exposed this, but it's sadly not enough...

Coffee Stain Studios (Satisfactory) was notified about the use of EOS would literally tell Epics' systems every time a Steam user starts to play, but it's almost like there is a contract with EPIC that prevents them to talk openly about it.

"Want to see what Satisfactory is phoning home to EPIC" (closed now, naturally)
https://steamcommunity.com/app/526870/discussions/0/2451595019859486526/ ------------- Do you have a title or two as an example of that?

Diablo 3, Starcraft Remastered, Warcraft 3 Reforged (this last one is a bit more recent)

Well, Diablo 3 is relatively popular and is actually available off store (emulated), and Reforged especially is considered a major failure (and people still use and prefer the original version), so again, why bother?

But yes, perhaps the two(/three) others will eventually be cracked, but I highly doubt Reforged would be much popular anyway... (though, I've been wrong before).

all these repixellings are failures
imho pointless to drm them , those who are fanatical fanboys will buy em , those who are not woulndt buy em anyway for these horribly overpriced cost

I wrote emulated and pirated, not that it was cracked ;)

Haven't tried it myself so I have no idea how exactly, but my guess it's like when activating Windows 10 "Enterprice" by emulating an activation server. All of this happens locally (and automatically with unattended scripts).

EDIT: Don't want to mention the emulator name here, but yes, it's emulated (and then activated it seems). Sometimes it's easier (and faster) to emulate than straight up forcibly crack something.

So much this. I usually download games to test them out and see if I like them, and if I do, I buy them. And while I preordered Cyberpunk 2077 and wasn't even specifically looking for it, the 1.12 update was on one of my frequented venues on the SAME DAY as the official release. GOG release, no GOG release, games will get pirated. People need to accept that and move on. If they want to protect a sales window, fine, but don't deny us for fear of pirates. I mean, most big companies probably avoid GOG for the "perception" that pirating GOG games is easier, and bad perception leads to loss of investors and stock prices falling. DRM-Free also means lack of control on the product. They can't cut it off or change things you don't want to change if you control your copy of the product.

Absolutely.

What's interesting to see is that some developers, artists, and musicians are using p2p to promote their product (especially if they lack money to market and promote it properly and they're largely unknown), because many, as you say, will try before buying, or buy later when they get more money or when the game gets on sale.

Just like hackers got painted as little evil devils by companies and media in the 90's, pirates are still feared by some developers and publishers when the numbers clearly shows that it's the opposite. *Christ, they're stealing our money... (we haven't gotten yet!*.

I remember Mitnick only got man-hunted and put into isolation after several years of hacking/cracking? around the internet when he apparently saw some very sensitive gov documents on a private company the gov had a contact with. They started painting hackers as these evil god-things that should be hunted like animals (because they apparently could start a nuclear war just by whistling in to an electronic com-system or a phone), when ironically hackers was literally building and upgrading electronics and software we use today. I mean, why else start calling it "ethical hacker" just to distance themselves openly.

When do we call ourselves "ethical pirates/ethical archivists?" now that private companies can hunt down pirates like they're worse than murderers and rapists... and yet most real crime cases remains unsolved in every countries.

Anyway... I digress in ramblings. :D

It's weird how the same rhetoric just kinda cycles through Steam. The same response as like years ago.
Japan also likes DRM. dunno why i wrote that i need sleep