[...] think my the ultimate issue with DRM is not the impact it has (positive or negative) on sales or developers, it's the impact it has on the real paying customers.
At least modern forms of DRM are attempting to inconvenience the consumer as little as possible. If it's as in your face as those "you wouldn't steal a car..." adverts that only appear on the beginning of legitimately bought DVDs, then it's failed to do its job very well.
In the first instance, you have the historic fact that every DRM other than Denuvo has been cracked in a very short time. That leaves the only people having to deal with software having DRM is the people who buy it. While for most it is a painless experience, those who have purchased new hardware (CPU, Motherboard) will tell you it's a pain in the bum, since licensing is tied to your machine's hardware ID. It can be difficult or impossible to get your game back, as lots of anecdotal sources will be able to tell you. I lost , access to one of the Arkham games for this reason, it was annoying. No paying customer should be expected to buy their games twice.
I've indeed been stung by this in the past. Not with games, but when digital music was first becoming a thing. I don't know how much music I bought that eventually I lost access to because a storefront disappeared or because it was tied to my MP3 player. These *should* be lessons and things of the past but there are still situations where you can legitimately lose access to your libraries (or at least certain functionality from your library) with platforms like Steam.
In the second instance, you have the performance issues which have historically been associated with it, something which again is only impacting the people who have paid for the game. This is alleged not to be the case with Denuvo, which is good if it's true, but the hardware problem above is still a thing.
The hardware problem is only a thing if it's really a thing. I haven't yet seen any (even anecdotal) evidence that it's a thing, other than the obvious requirement for a one-time internet access.
The final issue is the potential environment of mistrust especially given the reputation of actual information theft by people who are still in the industry (looking at you Denuvo).
I agree that this is an issue, and Denuvo is an interesting case as they're the remnants of the team responsible for the Sony rootkit. It's unfortunate, but they're the people with the experience and expertise in the field of DRM / anti-tamper. There's always going to be some mistrust there.
Research has shown time (
http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2003/HPL-2003-110.pdf) and again that DRM is not effective or required, yet developers insist on using it. I understand and respect the reasoning behind it, but I'm really not sold on the idea that the impact on real customers is not being actively considered by the developers, Just sales. Sell sell sell. I dunno, that kind ofnjust bums me out a bit.
That particular research is 13 years old, and did not foresee the type of anti-tamper that Denuvo provides. It's yet to be seen truly how effective it is at converting a potential sale lost through piracy into a sale gained. Anecdotally the important period for a game is around the first 2-4 weeks after it's released (which is when it'll sell the majority of copies). Denuvo aims to keep the game uncrackable for that sort of timeframe.
And yes, this is about a developer trying to sell as many copies as possible. Frontier have spent a lot of money on this game without any external backing (let's assume £10m which I think is about in the ballpark). At a standard £30 minus Steam's cut and overheads, they're probably making around £20 per copy. That means just to break even they have to sell 500,000 copies of the game. As a studio they're trying to grow enough to keep investing in their own games, which means they really need to be shifting many more copies than that. If they fail, they're reliant on just the one franchise (Elite) to keep them going, and there isn't a huge amount of cash they can leverage out of that until they've finished delivering this season of updates (probably around another 6 months). So for a company like Frontier lost sales impact their bottom line directly. I'm not saying there aren't better ways, and I'd truly prefer to see *all* games released DRM free. But Frontier must have looked at the piracy rates of the earlier Alpha releases and decided that's not what they want to see for the release.
They aren't implementing Denuvo just because they can. They aren't implementing it to annoy the consumer. They're doing it because they legitimately feel that piracy will lead to a level of lost sales that will hurt them as a business, more so than the negative PR associated with implementing Denuvo.
Performance issues - see many EA games with DRM enabled compared to using "methods" to stop DRM checks. Games not working anymore due to activation servers not existing anymore - see many of the rereleases of games on gog, before the rerelease some of those were actually playable on modern machines (most of them are rereleased because they wont work after 98 or XP though). Before the gog release you were only able to play some of your BOUGHT games by using a crack which is ridiculous. For purchases lost: Digital Comics Distributor JManga Closing Down... And Deleting Everyone's purchases permanently. For issues with protection blocking you from playing your bought copy of a game after which you have to call the company to get it reactivated: all newer ANNO titles Ubisoft. (had that happen myself - took 2 weeks for them to reactivate the key on my account because I used it on my Laptop while being in a different country -.- Sure I was able to play it again afterwards - but only because 1. the company does still exist 2. it still took them 2 weeks!!! and I couldn't play in that time!)
