Single player games are often protected by Denuvo, which sometimes takes weeks or months to crack. Except that the duration during which the game stay protected doesn't seem to have any impact on the sales.

> Single player games are often protected by Denuvo, which sometimes takes weeks or months to crack.

The first Denuvo game was in 2014, more than a decade after the trend towards multiplayer games got rolling.

> Except that the duration during which the game stay protected doesn't seem to have any impact on the sales.

The game publishers who continue to pay to use Denuvo indicate otherwise. In a hit-or-miss industry like video games, publishers are not in the habit of being stupid with their money.

> The game publishers who continue to pay to use Denuvo indicate otherwise. In a hit-or-miss industry like video games, publishers are not in the habit of being stupid with their money.

I could say that the game publishers who continue to release games without additional protections indicate exactly this, as publishers are not in the habit of being stupid with their money. That doesn’t seem like a good argument, does it?

The only reason, at least the one I could think of, why some publishers still push aggressive DRMs into their products is that someone is selling them this solution and management believes that they protect themselves from “bad pirates”.

If someone wants to buy the game, he will buy it. If someone wants to pirate it, he will do just that. The only 100% working way around it are multiplayer games.

The other almost as successful method seem to be just making good games, as Nintendo, From Software, CD Projekt etc show again and again.