But just reading through this thread I would say above 10% of people are saying they would not buy with Denuvo protection incorporated. Surely that must be factored in to any calculation. It must count in some way.
Of the game projects i've worked on (and there have been some AAA) the best selling ones have been the ones with no protection. Anecdotal I know, but in my experience, protection on games causes more problems for the end user and the developer.
Sure, some way, but how influential it really is, is just as much guesswork as saying Denuvo magically recovers 20% of revenue even though you can't possibly measure that either on a per game basis.
Not directed at anyone here but my observation is that what people say on the web and what they actually do can be two very different things. The last time I paid any attention to the vocal minority was the crusade to boycott Origin when it opened because EA wanted to make some of their games exclusive to Origin and not put them on Steam (just like Valve did with Steam) and about a month later EA boasted that there were over 40 million accounts on Origin. I wonder how many of those crusaders really boycotted Origin or did they not want to miss out on some EA games but wanted others to boycott for them?
If any of that is being taken as a defense of Denuvo, it's not. I don't like Denuvo or any DRM. If it is possible I always buy from GOG first.
This is another internet truth. The vast majority you read is lies or twisted truth. The numbers don't lie though - gamer outrage can and has definitely turned into reality for numerous titles lately. When an argument really sticks, you'll know it: pay to win for example really did hurt sales. Ubisoft leaving Steam, really did hurt sales (another example of extremely poor corporate judgment, something extremely common to Ubisoft apparently). And when Denuvo did damage performance, it really did hurt sales too. Its also probably true, going by sales numbers of Denuvo itself, that the solution does not pay off for a vast majority of games, or is not assumed to pay off, because of the high cost of entry, which is interesting. The cost of piracy is probably not much more costly than $ 200k even for mid-sized releases. Denuvo has to be cheaper than the cost of piracy, after all, or it won't be selling at all. So every implementation of it, is a guessing game based on projected sales and projected attempts of piracy.
But there is another angle to 'truths' as well. When it comes to company performance and 'success of policy' you barely if ever hear the truth if the company can keep it hidden. A lot of bad policy is simply changed over time and forgotten about, but you can rest assured that ANYTIME you see radical changes in approach (for example, when games switched to Season Pass-driven content) its clear the industry figured out a new way to extract money, that was clearly better than the old one, or is at least potentially better. When that, then, changes again shortly after (a sequel or two later), you know they were simply wrong, the numbers didn't pan out well, and a few millions were lost along the way.
Let's look at Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed franchise and how it got revamped and then rebooted again. Its the perfect example of how a company juggles the recipes it already knows and still can't figure it out proper. And alongside the constant 'radical' (aherm) changes to the franchise they also keep pushing different monetary tactics in their games, up to and including 'single player pay to win', or put differently, paid cheats by being able to buy boosts in a shop alongside DLC content, MTX cosmetics and season passes. They basically tried all of it, so now they're just throwing everything at the wall seeing what sticks.
Meanwhile
