I'm not completely convinced. When I was a teenager I pirated games because I didn't have money (and games were incredibly expensive back in the day). The people who I copied them from did it to show off their collection and connections, or just because they were my friends.

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buran77 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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mindcandy 5 hours ago | parent [-]

> especially if you are willing to wait for some days or weeks after launch (an important sales window for the publishers).

“Important” is an understatement. Even for long-term success stories, the first three or four months often accounts for half of a game’s revenue.

And, despite so many people theorizing that “pirates don’t have money and wouldn’t pay anyway”, in practice big publishers wait in dread of “Crack Day” because the moment the crackers release the DRMless version, the drop in sales is instant and dramatic.

	▲	fwipsy 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Do you have a source for sales data when a crack becomes available? If so, that seems like definitive proof that piracy does affect sales.

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badsectoracula 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> 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.

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andrepd 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

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NegativeLatency 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Also teenagers grow up eventually having money to buy the games on their own.

I’m a Diablo and StarCraft fan because of pirated games played during my childhood when I couldn’t convince my parents to let me buy them.

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Ygg2 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

As a broke ass teenager, yeah I didn't pay for them. Now as big money adult I bought them almost 1.5 times over. Once on GoG and sometimes on Steam.

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nurettin 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

When I was a kid, piracy was the norm. If your friend had a game you liked, you would just grab the tape, go home, insert into the recorder and make a copy. I didn't know about buying games or what I did was bad until well into the 90s.

	▲	technothrasher 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> I didn't know about buying games or what I did was bad until well into the 90s. Really? When we were pirating games off each other as teenagers in the early 80s, we absolutely knew we were getting games for free that the publishers wanted us to pay for.