But the games people want to buy on steam aren’t on GoG, and there’s no Steam vs GoG sales charts for people to point publishers to and say “look! Look how much money we will spend if you go drm free on GoG!”.
Also there’s just no denying it, and even trying is disingenuous - a game like GTA 6 releasing on GoG without DRM would sell significantly less than it would on a platform with DRM. It’s just the truth. It would be on torrents and every download site the minute it’s released, and millions and millions and millions of people who were going to buy it would get it for free instead.
In the terrible state that the video game industry is in for developers, releasing a big AAA game DRM-free would be the last game they ever release.
Last I looked into it video game piracy actually had a net benefit on sales. Any advantage DRM has from a sales point of view is null after about 3 months post launch anyway. It can and does kill small indie devs but any big boy in the industry, piracy usually benefits sales.
Don’t be so sure. Apparently they publishers don’t make hard numbers publicly available anymore so there’s no good data but there was a survey of denuvo games.
A Denuvo-protected game cracked in the first week after release can expect to make about 20 percent less revenue than if the DRM had remained in place, according to the study, while a crack six weeks after a game’s release only costs an estimated 5 percent of theoretical total revenue. After 12 weeks, new sales are so negligible that “developers could eventually remove unpopular DRM schemes with minimal losses (and possible gains from strongly DRM-averse consumers)
Unfortunately that still doesn’t answer the question but until publishers post honest numbers we’ll never have the proper metrics to measure the actual impact piracy has. But in the day freeware like Doom basically relied entirely on piracy for sales so it’s not an out of pocket take that piracy could benefit sales. It is an old take though. I’m old.
That right there says that piracy hurts gaming. A game with drm cracked in the first week can expect to lose 20% of total revenue. That’s a gigantic loss.
Software sales are heavily front loaded. Releasing with no DRM would absolutely annihilate game sales.
And how much worse would they have sold if they weren’t DRM free? You can’t assert they would have sold better without actual data, and there isn’t any available. But in the case of cyberpunk specifically, made by cdpr, the company behind gog, I can safely say that if they had DRM they would have instantly alienated a significant portion of their fan base.
The company that owns the store can take the financial hit of putting their own game on their drm free store, because they make aren’t having to pay other stores fees, and they’re drawing attention to their store.
That’s not exactly what it’s saying. It’s specific to denuvo games which generally means AAA publishers, it’s a small sample size, and it’s about the impact DRM has on sales, not piracy. It’s not an arbitrary distinction. I’ll grant it definitely implies piracy has a net negative effect on sales but that’s not at all what it’s actually saying.
That’s 100% what it’s saying though. If the drm is cracked within a week they lose 20% of their revenue……because of piracy. 20% of total revenue they miss out on because those people pirate the game instead of buying it.
DRM fights against piracy. Without it, piracy runs rampant and costs developers and publishers massive amounts of money.
That’s not how data works. It doesn’t say anything but what it says. You’re making inferences, which sure fair but until there’s data specific to your inferences (there isn’t) you can’t say that. You can say denuvo cracks in the first week in the case of some 90 games resulted in up to a maximum of twenty percent loss of sales. It is an important distinction. And the massive success of DRM free titles also goes against your assertion.
Plenty of the games people want to buy are on GOG. Definitely not all of them, but you can find GOTY winners like Clair Obscur and Baldur’s Gate 3, games that should have won more awards like Kingdom Come: Deliverance II and The Alters, awesome indie games like Mina the Hollower and Escape from Ever After, plus the old stuff that GOG restores like Dino Crisis and Alpha Protocol that had pent-up demand. There’s no chart to compare sales, but developers talk, and they know their own sales data. Firms like Circana buy sales data and then sell the analysis back to help companies figure out what will help them make more money, including where people are buying video games.
Also there’s just no denying it, and even trying is disingenuous - a game like GTA 6 releasing on GoG without DRM would sell significantly less than it would in a platform with DRM. It’s just the truth.
That’s easy to claim and impossible to prove. Baldur’s Gate 3 released day 1 without DRM and still went on to sell over 20M copies; how many people do you think pirated it? Millions and millions? There are some people who are always going to pirate, but I think most prefer the experience of just buying the damn thing and getting better service out of it, not the least of which is quick and easy patching. We also now live in a world where Denuvo is fully broken open. There’s no difference in one’s ability to pirate once the game has been cracked at all. Piracy is going to happen one way or another, and GTA6 is basically guaranteed to make more money than any other video game that came before it.
In the terrible state that the video game industry is in for developers, releasing a big AAA game DRM-free would be the last game they ever release.
This is demonstrably false, given the AAA games that release on GOG all the time.
You’ve already moved the goalposts so far, what does it matter? If Kingdom Come: Deliverance II just last year doesn’t show that DRM-free won’t just invite piracy, or Baldur’s Gate 3 just two years before that, no answer will be good enough for you. Few AAA companies choose to release their games on GOG. More will choose to if that’s where the money is. Indiana Jones didn’t come to GOG less than a year after its initial release because they just wanted pirates to have it, finally. When Divinity, The Witcher 4, and the new Cyberpunk games come out, a few things will happen: they will sell in the tens of millions of copies and make a boatload of money; they will be available DRM-free on GOG; they will still sell most of their copies on Steam anyway; people will pirate it (but they would have even if the games were only on Steam anyway). Mina the Hollower was make or break for Yacht Club, but they put the game on GOG because they wanted to make money from those customers as well. If they were so sure that people would have just pirated it, surely they would have opted not to release it there.
Yeah, so far, the same as the number of games that bankrupted their studios by releasing DRM-free. Maybe the new Silent Hill this year will be the first, but the last two released on GOG just fine, so it’s not looking good for your thesis.
But the games people want to buy on steam aren’t on GoG, and there’s no Steam vs GoG sales charts for people to point publishers to and say “look! Look how much money we will spend if you go drm free on GoG!”.
Also there’s just no denying it, and even trying is disingenuous - a game like GTA 6 releasing on GoG without DRM would sell significantly less than it would on a platform with DRM. It’s just the truth. It would be on torrents and every download site the minute it’s released, and millions and millions and millions of people who were going to buy it would get it for free instead.
In the terrible state that the video game industry is in for developers, releasing a big AAA game DRM-free would be the last game they ever release.
Last I looked into it video game piracy actually had a net benefit on sales. Any advantage DRM has from a sales point of view is null after about 3 months post launch anyway. It can and does kill small indie devs but any big boy in the industry, piracy usually benefits sales.
Piracy never has a benefit on sales. Where are you getting that from?
Don’t be so sure. Apparently they publishers don’t make hard numbers publicly available anymore so there’s no good data but there was a survey of denuvo games.
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/10/the-true-cost-of-game-piracy-20-percent-of-revenue-according-to-a-new-study/
Unfortunately that still doesn’t answer the question but until publishers post honest numbers we’ll never have the proper metrics to measure the actual impact piracy has. But in the day freeware like Doom basically relied entirely on piracy for sales so it’s not an out of pocket take that piracy could benefit sales. It is an old take though. I’m old.
Edit - Also found this which looks at how piracy can help outside of direct sale conversions: https://jier.org/index.php/journal/article/view/3453/2764
That right there says that piracy hurts gaming. A game with drm cracked in the first week can expect to lose 20% of total revenue. That’s a gigantic loss.
Software sales are heavily front loaded. Releasing with no DRM would absolutely annihilate game sales.
Cyberpunk sold well. Kingdom Come Deliverance sold well. Launching without DRM does not absolutely annihilate sales.
And how much better would they have sold if they weren’t DRM free?
And how much worse would they have sold if they weren’t DRM free? You can’t assert they would have sold better without actual data, and there isn’t any available. But in the case of cyberpunk specifically, made by cdpr, the company behind gog, I can safely say that if they had DRM they would have instantly alienated a significant portion of their fan base.
Your own link you previously posted says that they would have sold approximately 20% more, remember?
https://lemmy.world/comment/24911701
The company that owns the store can take the financial hit of putting their own game on their drm free store, because they make aren’t having to pay other stores fees, and they’re drawing attention to their store.
That’s not exactly what it’s saying. It’s specific to denuvo games which generally means AAA publishers, it’s a small sample size, and it’s about the impact DRM has on sales, not piracy. It’s not an arbitrary distinction. I’ll grant it definitely implies piracy has a net negative effect on sales but that’s not at all what it’s actually saying.
That’s 100% what it’s saying though. If the drm is cracked within a week they lose 20% of their revenue……because of piracy. 20% of total revenue they miss out on because those people pirate the game instead of buying it.
DRM fights against piracy. Without it, piracy runs rampant and costs developers and publishers massive amounts of money.
That’s not how data works. It doesn’t say anything but what it says. You’re making inferences, which sure fair but until there’s data specific to your inferences (there isn’t) you can’t say that. You can say denuvo cracks in the first week in the case of some 90 games resulted in up to a maximum of twenty percent loss of sales. It is an important distinction. And the massive success of DRM free titles also goes against your assertion.
Such a massive success of DRM free titles that every publisher is releasing all their games DRM free now, right?
No? Why not?
Plenty of the games people want to buy are on GOG. Definitely not all of them, but you can find GOTY winners like Clair Obscur and Baldur’s Gate 3, games that should have won more awards like Kingdom Come: Deliverance II and The Alters, awesome indie games like Mina the Hollower and Escape from Ever After, plus the old stuff that GOG restores like Dino Crisis and Alpha Protocol that had pent-up demand. There’s no chart to compare sales, but developers talk, and they know their own sales data. Firms like Circana buy sales data and then sell the analysis back to help companies figure out what will help them make more money, including where people are buying video games.
That’s easy to claim and impossible to prove. Baldur’s Gate 3 released day 1 without DRM and still went on to sell over 20M copies; how many people do you think pirated it? Millions and millions? There are some people who are always going to pirate, but I think most prefer the experience of just buying the damn thing and getting better service out of it, not the least of which is quick and easy patching. We also now live in a world where Denuvo is fully broken open. There’s no difference in one’s ability to pirate once the game has been cracked at all. Piracy is going to happen one way or another, and GTA6 is basically guaranteed to make more money than any other video game that came before it.
This is demonstrably false, given the AAA games that release on GOG all the time.
Why could you only name like 3 then? Which 2026 AAA games have released on GOG?
Which GOG release bankrupted a company by way of piracy?
Which AAA developers released their AAA game on GOG day 1 in 2026?
You’ve already moved the goalposts so far, what does it matter? If Kingdom Come: Deliverance II just last year doesn’t show that DRM-free won’t just invite piracy, or Baldur’s Gate 3 just two years before that, no answer will be good enough for you. Few AAA companies choose to release their games on GOG. More will choose to if that’s where the money is. Indiana Jones didn’t come to GOG less than a year after its initial release because they just wanted pirates to have it, finally. When Divinity, The Witcher 4, and the new Cyberpunk games come out, a few things will happen: they will sell in the tens of millions of copies and make a boatload of money; they will be available DRM-free on GOG; they will still sell most of their copies on Steam anyway; people will pirate it (but they would have even if the games were only on Steam anyway). Mina the Hollower was make or break for Yacht Club, but they put the game on GOG because they wanted to make money from those customers as well. If they were so sure that people would have just pirated it, surely they would have opted not to release it there.
So “none” is your answer.
Yeah, so far, the same as the number of games that bankrupted their studios by releasing DRM-free. Maybe the new Silent Hill this year will be the first, but the last two released on GOG just fine, so it’s not looking good for your thesis.