For people who have no money to spare for games it really doesn't matter if games come with DRM or not. They wouldn't afford them anyway so "for free" is the only option that matters.

For people who have money for games but don't want to pay, the presence of DRM matters very little. 99% of games are usually trivially cracked, especially if you are willing to wait for some days or weeks after launch (an important sales window for the publishers).

For people who have money for games and are willing to pay, DRM turns out to be maybe an inconvenience, but definitely a guarantee that they don't actually own the game. The game can be taken away or even just modified in a way that invalidates the reason people paid in the first place.

> I'm not completely convinced. When I was a teenager I pirated games because I didn't have money

Yes, but if it was impossible to pirate, you'd still have no money to buy the games, so in the grand scheme of things nothing would change.

The thing is teenagers or poor people or people from third world countries that pirate for financial reasons just would not buy those games regardless. I'm unconvinced that those pirates affect sales in the end to any meaningful degree.

Research from the University of Amsterdam’s IViR “Global Online Piracy Study” (survey of nearly 35,000 respondents across 13 countries) found that for each content type and country, 95% or more of pirates also consume content legally, and their median legal consumption is typically twice that of non‑pirating legal users.

Before it was really expensive and difficult to get access to movies or music. Then came Netflix or Spotify. So money is the primary discriminator now, not access. And users without money would not bring revenue anyway

One does not have a debit/credit card at all (e.g. they're young, or don't have enough documents, or are an immigrant from a sanctioned country).

Alternatively, the card is rejected because "fraud prevention", see e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46424584

Or the game is not available in my "account's region", which is chosen arbitrarily based on God knows what.

They say they own the game so presumably did purchase it.

Not having to deal with Ubisoft/similar game launchers frequently forgetting my login, nagging to update itself, etc. is one reason I might choose to run a cracked copy.

The main reason that Russia had a fame for pirating a lot of software was that a lot of publishers either skipped it as a market or did shitty localisations and pirates offered a far better service.

I can pirate games easily, but I buy them on Steam because it's more convenient. If it's too expensive for me, I just never play it (or wait for a deal). I can't be bothered dealing with the installers and the potential viruses and the hassle.

If someone pirates 100 60$ games it does not mean that had piracy been impossible they would have spent 6000$ on those games

thieves lie to protect their self-image. i pirated because free games let me spend my money on stuff i couldn't steal like food at the mall.

i don't pirate anymore because i have a job now.