This present a sort of problem in that there is still a need for computers which can run software that wasn't bought through some particular channel such as an app store, therefor there are still computers that can run pirate content.
I have a bunch of games on Steam, I have no idea which ones use DRM but I'd wager strongly that every single one of them is available DRM-free on a torrent website.
Speaking personally the main incentive not to pirate games is the Steam sales and humble bundles which give me games so cheap that I'd really feel like a bit of an idiot jumping through whatever hoops in order to get the games for free.
DRM costs money (dev time, QA, etc.) and may hurt legit customers when done wrong (all too frequent). Rightfully, the onus should be on proving it to be worth the costs, but people add it without even testing the effects.
Why should the onus be on the party making the DRM? It is their product and their copyright, why should they have to prove it is effective?
I don't really think you want them to fail, so I can't see why you would argue that they should continue wasting money?
When people give out best practices, or gives out necessities of the market based on nothing but opinion and theory, it become pure myth and superstition. Sysadmin work which is my line of work, has a bunch of myths. Some people still making firewall rules against win95 ping of deaths, even if everyone in the company is running around with this years gadgets.
But you did ask if I have any evidence of my own, and here I relied on common sense and observations. DRM cost money, in both time, effort and support. Additional, I looked at the indy crowd of movie makes which has only has weak/no DRM, and the indy crowd of games which has all from strong to no DRM. What I can see, there are no major difference what so ever, and both groups often suffer from low revenues in products that later get critical acclaimed as a master piece.
But Im sorry, no, I do not have any research paper to support that observation. That would be the second step, through one can glimpse some truth by checking if anyone are disagreeing with it. Also, since DRM cost money, it should naturally require a higher burden of evidence to become best practice or necessity in the industry.
Minor note about Blade runner: It took several years before the movie reached a cult status. By the time it did, people started to have dual VHS players at home or could call some dude in the campus to do a copy.
Each three of those are what I call common sense, ie, we know them all to be true. Those are also the only assumptions I included in my "I relied on common sense and observations". The rest is observations, which is the first step in a honest and scientific discussion about the effect of DRM. First you do observations, second you collect evidence, third you do analysis and last you create theory. Only once you done each step and reached theory should economic decision be made in the case of including DRM to increase revenue. Before that, only the cost of DRM is know and everything else is speculations. Those speculations has both those that say its great and those that say its crap and there is nothing in the world that will convince them beyond a scientific approach.
The same game released with and without DRM? Different games with and without DRM?
Then I would collect data on piracy rate vs initial buy rate vs long tail and find product types that share those. Then, with all that data, one can start looking into DRM and individual products from groups with shared economic traits but which differ primarily on the DRM question. With a decent sample size, some kind of answer should pop out.
That would be my guess of a simplified study. Statisticians and economics has surely more to say on this and where the corner cases are. There might also be smaller studies to do if one accept some early assumptions.
How do you tell whether the sales delta is driven by DRM or a much, much higher quality artist?
If someone is out there on HN with some ideas, I'd love to hear them, not for this problem (I don't really care), but for other problems that may be difficult to solve later on.
>How do you tell whether the sales delta is driven by DRM or a much, much higher quality artist?
I'm not going to weigh in on DRM vs. non DRM, but you'd get around that problem by explicit randomization. If you have enough observations then differences in quality, etc., literally average out. If you have more information up front you can randomize conditional on the observed characteristics, which reduces the number of observations you need.
Although I'm no statistician either, so whatever.
I agree that the existing data aren't much like the random experiment I was talking about.
There are really just massive statistical hurdles to overcome with this type of analysis.
You could prove that indie games with strict DRM will perform differently than indie games without strict DRM, but extrapolating that to feature, blockbuster games is problematic.
I'm not aware of a peer-reviewed study saying the other way, either. This is such a weird thing to say. Do you only believe information that comes from peer-reviewed studies?
Many indie developers who might be sympathetic to the anti-DRM cause still choose DRM platforms, because they perceive it makes money for them. Or maybe they choose to make webapp type software, which conveniently avoids the issue while being the most unfree method of all.
Since they are closest to the market, they posses what economists call 'local knowledge'. Some have released numbers to back up their claims, which is more than you've done. (Also, how many people do you think had a VHS copier when Blade Runner came out? 0% of people I knew growing up could copy VHS tapes.) Anyway, I think it is correct to look at market behavior if you want to talk about market behavior, not what bloggers say when they aim to maximize pageviews.