[oriolid]

I'm not completely convinced. When I was a teenager I pirated games because I didn't have money (and games were incredibly expensive back in the day). The people who I copied them from did it to show off their collection and connections, or just because they were my friends.

[buran77]

For people who have no money to spare for games it really doesn't matter if games come with DRM or not. They wouldn't afford them anyway so "for free" is the only option that matters.

For people who have money for games but don't want to pay, the presence of DRM matters very little. 99% of games are usually trivially cracked, especially if you are willing to wait for some days or weeks after launch (an important sales window for the publishers).

For people who have money for games and are willing to pay, DRM turns out to be maybe an inconvenience, but definitely a guarantee that they don't actually own the game. The game can be taken away or even just modified in a way that invalidates the reason people paid in the first place.

[mindcandy]

> especially if you are willing to wait for some days or weeks after launch (an important sales window for the publishers).

“Important” is an understatement. Even for long-term success stories, the first three or four months often accounts for half of a game’s revenue.

And, despite so many people theorizing that “pirates don’t have money and wouldn’t pay anyway”, in practice big publishers wait in dread of “Crack Day” because the moment the crackers release the DRMless version, the drop in sales is instant and dramatic.

[lazylizard]

when i was younger there were more games i wanted to play than i had money to pay for..and i pirated.

then i had some money and i bought more games than i had time to play.*

now i neither buy or play games.

*the point is that at this point, there is no point wasting time trying to pirate games. every humble bundle. every steam sale. u just click and its yours. you dont even have time to play. why waste time pirating?

[badsectoracula]

> I'm not completely convinced. When I was a teenager I pirated games because I didn't have money

Yes, but if it was impossible to pirate, you'd still have no money to buy the games, so in the grand scheme of things nothing would change.

[andrepd]

The thing is teenagers or poor people or people from third world countries that pirate for financial reasons just would not buy those games regardless. I'm unconvinced that those pirates affect sales in the end to any meaningful degree.

[NegativeLatency]

Also teenagers grow up eventually having money to buy the games on their own.

I’m a Diablo and StarCraft fan because of pirated games played during my childhood when I couldn’t convince my parents to let me buy them.

[Ygg2]

As a broke ass teenager, yeah I didn't pay for them. Now as big money adult I bought them almost 1.5 times over. Once on GoG and sometimes on Steam.

[nurettin]

When I was a kid, piracy was the norm. If your friend had a game you liked, you would just grab the tape, go home, insert into the recorder and make a copy. I didn't know about buying games or what I did was bad until well into the 90s.

[immibis]

So basically your sources weren't lost sales because you don't show off your mad sk1llz by buying a game, and you weren't a lost sale because you had no way to buy it. But I'm sure you did talk about how cool the game was, including to some people who could buy it. This sounds fairly typical.