Games are art, not commodities, and this adds a monstrous degree of complexity to economic analysis of the genre, especially around different business practices

Games are art, not commodities, and this adds a monstrous degree of complexity to economic analysis of the genre, especially around different business practices. You can't compare sales of a game year over year because demand is different, just as you can't always compare sales of games to each other. Certainly games compete with one another, if on no other basis than dollars out of limited household budgets and hours out of limited leisure time. And certainly some games tend more towards sport than game (MOBAs and online military FPSes come to mind) and choosing between games can be a matter of choosing between different mechanical aspects. However, in the main choosing between games to play tends to be closer to choosing between musicians to listen to or books to read. Competing games may have similarities but there is still only one Katamari Damacy, only one Mass Effect, only one Sim City, and so forth. Why is this relevant? Because it means that the factors behind the relative success of a given game are as much due to aesthetic factors as to anything else, including DRM. Hypothetically, if a band releases an album in a way that is heavily DRM encumbered and the album doesn't do well is that due to the album itself or consumers reacting to the DRM? The simple answer is that you don't know because the whole thing is subjective. More so, it means that people tend to be more willing to tolerate onerous burdens (including DRM) because there typically aren't commoditized alternatives. This means that it's almost impossible to determine the impact of the use or absence of DRM on the success or failure of any particular game or even on the game industry as a whole, especially since this current period of widespread sophisticated DRM is only around a decade or so old. We know that in the short term companies can certainly get away with shoving DRM down customers' throats without always incurring hugely negative consequences to their business. However, game publishers are very much in the brand image and brand loyalty business, and persistent long-term trends that are ignorable in the short-term could be quite significant over the course of decades. I can't predict the future, but anecdotally it certainly appears as though major game companies are squandering a lot of customer good-will, and sometimes DRM is the cause of it. And I suspect that in the long-run such effects will have significant impacts on the industry as a whole.