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Comment by choo-t | Hacker News Reader

The number of pirated copies doesn't translate to missed sales.

Someone playing/watching/listening to something for free doesn't mean they would still do it if they had to pay for it.

It’s certainly not a 1:1 loss, but it’s also not zero

Sure it can be zero. It can even be negative. As larger player numbers, including piracy, are a natural form of marketing. That means it's not hard to see this additional marketing could lead to larger sales figures compared to if piracy was not possible.

One reason anti piracy companies make a living is because companies that buy it see concrete increases in revenue as a result. It may not be every pirate who converts to a customer but DRM solutions are priced to be below the expected additional revenue. And it's not always cheap.

Do you have any data to support that? I'd actually be really interested to see. There are a lot of weird ass games with Denuvo (like Handball 17, Bus Simulator 18) I think at least sometimes paying a big DRM subscriptions is part of a money laundering scheme.

There's data against it. The EU conducted a study then suppressed it until an MP eventually made a FOIA request to get the results, because the results weren't what they wanted it to say. https://www.engadget.com/2017-09-22-eu-suppressed-study-pira...

That report wasn't suppressed. It wasn't published because the methodology had a 44% margin of error, and subsequently it was totally useless.

(https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/09/eu-study-finds-piracy...)

It doesn't provide data suggesting that piracy doesn't hurt sales. It literally doesn't provide any data at all.

Only anecdata which I'm not allowed to publicize. All I'll say is that places that use this stuff are often operating at low margins and if they didn't see benefits they wouldn't pay for it.

Don't have public data, but industry contacts confirmed to me in private on multiple occasions that DRM increased sales. One really old example was a copy protected expansion pack selling much better than the unprotected base game that is required.

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