Surely, this has nothing to do with the fact that live service and subscription games generate more revenue, whether or not piracy is involved.

Ah, yes, a problem so huge it killed the industry… wait.

This is the same thing with music / cinema piracy : it’s a mix of "pirates will always pirate" (whatever the reason, be it financial issues or not), and anti-piracy solutions always hitting legitimate customers first.

People want convenience first and foremost. Piracy being a « massive issue is a lie defended by lobbies.

Case in point, I have a legit copy of a EA game I cannot play legitimately anymore, because SafeDisc relies on a vulnerable Windows driver (basically a free rootkit) that was blacklisted by MS. See also the other comment mentioning SecuROM that basically killed SPORE on launch.

SecuROM back in the day caused plenty of legitimately purchased copies to not work. You'd have a physical disc with the game on it from the store, and SecuROM decided it won't work on your computer for unknown, undebugable reasons. .

Piracy may be a problem, but that's a problem to customer who were willing to give a company money. We stopped buying anything with SecuROM on it after 1-2 of those situations.

It's fairly well demonstrated that piracy is a service problem. For example, many people will pay hundreds of dollars for a game on Steam rather than play it for free on Epic (Rocket League). So clearly the free price point is not the problem

Do we have a reasonable metric of pirate -> customer conversion rate of Denuvo?

I don't think piracy has much to do with it. AAA (of even AA) single player games sell really well. Just not well enough to be the equivalent of a money-printing machine like Fortnite. Spiderman 2 sold something like 17 million copies between PC and PS5. Still nothing compared to the $30+ billion in revenue that Fortnite has generated so far. So everyone is chasing that Fortnite $$$.