2)But then you agree, that the "Lost sales" are not " " and that there is an impact on sales. It doesn't matter if it is miniscule or not. The point is that the pirate is depriving the company of money. Again it doesn't matter if a companies that's worth billons is complaing about losing one sale, it is their sales
I know you said it doesn't matter, but just for shits and giggles, I went to one of the biggest, if not THE biggest private game tracker and sorted the torrents by most snatched. The most snatched game was Sims 3 with the base game having just over 2000 snatches, and the updates and DLCs barely breaking a few hundred. Even if we pretend that each of those snatches was unique (they aren't), we can extrapolate that only about 10% of the people who pirated the game, stuck with it long term enough to get the subsequent DLCs and updates. Now, at $60 a game (this figure is flawed as well, since the publisher actually doesn't get full retail when they distribute the games), that's a loss of $120,000. Now Denuvo acts like it's a big trade secret to discuss license fees (probably because they're swindlers and charge some publishers more because they can), but I can't imagine it being any less than $100,000 for a Denuvo license, so if anything they're probably breaking even or in some cases maybe losing money by implementing DRM.
Yes, publishers have a right to protect their games, but no, we don't have to respect their wishes either. We have a right to boycott the games, music, movies, TV until their respective industries enter the 21st century and stop treating their customers like criminals. Hell, even fucking Wal-Mart doesn't do that anymore. Speaking of criminals, it should not be an international felony to bypass DRM. There are legitimate uses for removing DRM. One is to make a backup that you can keep forever, where the publisher can't decide to remotely deactivate the license one day and make your library unplayable. Another is to improve performance. All DRM schemes have some overhead by their nature. Some are negligible, but many aren't. On a low-to-midrange PC, it can sometimes make the difference between 20fps and a much smoother 30. Cracking DRM can serve uses in education too. Things like learning cyber-security. Openly cracking DRM and sharing your methods could also help those companies (as much as I hate to say it) learn and improve their own DRM schemes. Hell, even distributing pre-cracked executables should be legal. BUT MUH COPYRIGHTED CODE I hear you say, just relax, the .exe and .dll files by themselves are useless without the rest of the game assets. Those are the people you need to hunt down, the ones distributing the entirety of the game. Not some random cracker who lives in a country where you have no official market for your games to begin with (btw, I would venture a guess that most piracy happens in regions where these publishers have no official market, so how many sales are they actually losing?).
My philosophy is that if your product is good enough, that's DRM on its own. If I were to make some sort of creative work, like music, a game, or a book, I wouldn't be disheartened to see it on a torrent or DDL site. I'd be somewhat flattered that someone cared enough about my work to go through the effort of distributing it. I'd even distribute some of my older works on there to get extra exposure. It's a good PR move. Trent Reznor realized this. That's why he has official accounts on major public torrent trackers, and distributed many albums there, and even the "Broken Movie" which would have never seen an official release otherwise. Plus, I think just reading the comments can give you a good feel for how your potential customers react to your product. That's what they should be called: potential customers, not lost sales.
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