But that would clearly be wrong. Games companies have been reliably investing in DRM for 30 years and it's not because they're all idiots. Occasionally executiv

But that would clearly be wrong. Games companies have been reliably investing in DRM for 30 years and it's not because they're all idiots. Occasionally executives talk about this. Piracy rates for PC games without DRM can approach 95% and they can see in their sales curves the huge drop that occurs when a working crack is released. For a large enough game with a stable and predictable enough sales curve, it's easy to work out lost sales, because the curves start high and rapidly decay to zero in any case. That's why people outside the industry often think game copy protection doesn't work. They judge it by a standard of "it is never ever cracked" which games companies don't care about. Most sales are within the first 3 months or so. After that it dwindles and after 6 months it's become long tail; the studio has moved on unless it's an indie shop that plans to work on the same game for years. If a copy protection lasts 3-4 months it's ideal, if it lasts a year it means they put too much effort into it and could have made more money by making a faster but weaker protection. The resulting equilibrium is thus frequently mis-understood as "failure" by armchair studio executives.