Yep. My first developer position was at an audio software company that made a plugin used by EDM artists. The year our software was cracked (2009ish), our sales dropped by 65%. Support tickets also nearly quadrupled including a massive increase in refund requests and chargebacks because customers realized they could get it for free instead.

ReFX Nexus perchance? If not it's another example of the crack destroying sales.

Oof. How did the company cope?

> No game studio would want to spend resources (developers work and licensing cost) implementing anti-piracy for nothing.

They are doing exactly that. Pretty much all research has shown that DRM schemes are ineffective and mostly just cause problems for legitimate users.

The reason for DRM is mostly

1. Cargo culting.

2. Liability ass-covering (we did our best, it's the DRM company fault our game leaked!)

"Company wouldn't do anything unreasonable." is a really unrealistic takes - companies do unreasonable decisions due to managerial cargo cult pretty much constantly and consistently.

> … "and mostly just cause problems for legitimate users."

This is so true right here. The crackers who break the DRM just find it an amusing puzzle to solve, and the pirates who use what the crackers create never suffer the annoying side effects of the DRM thanks to the crackers work. Legitimate buyers on the other hand have to deal with situations where their paid for game literally won't run for them without a crack being installed because of DRM or broken-by-design anti-cheats.

(I know this from first-hand experience. Some of my paid games run fine after DRM removal cracks are applied, despite breaking in various fun ways prior to that.)

saying drm doesn't work is a bit naive, as it only has to prevent emulation long enough for the hype driven sales to be completed, not forever.

that and always-on gameplay generally do the job I think, atleast for games.

Movies publishers does it as well (DRMs on movies media) since decades and we all know this have absolutely no effect : every movie is available on p2p networks even before being available in stores. I’d add that they even manage to get negative effects since only legitimate consumers are annoyed.

So it would not be surprising to have a similar situation there.

Apparently a lot of devs included SecuROM in their products not as an actual hindrance to pirates, but to placate investors who are concerned about piracy reducing sales.

The people who actually make the software are fully aware that any DRM will be cracked within 48 hours of release (with a few small exceptions).

As far as I know SecuROM is popular because it takes a bit longer to crack, thus helping the publishers secure the critical sales of the first week. Afterwards many studios remove it again to make it actually playable.

I guess that's also why AAA games are hyped so much before release, so that many people preorder it.

Ahh, fair enough. Thinking about it, that comment was probably from 10 years ago when almost everything was cracked near day one and Steam hadn't yet reached 100% penetration.

> I guess that's also why AAA games are hyped so much before release, so that many people preorder it.

Never thought about it this way, but it does make perfect sense. Thanks!

Sounds like corporate IT buying snake oil "antivirus/data protection" software just to tick some checkboxes on security audits.

This is probably why most new games have some sort of online multiplayer requirement - the DRM/purchase check is required to use the online, so a pirated copy means little.