Epic fail

[UncannyGarlic]

While these are all valid points, these are businesses that want to make a profit that we're talking about. I would like to assume that they spend effort on that and hire some experts on such matters - of course, every company does stupid things.

My guess is that most companies hire contractors rather than have experts on staff whose job this is so it's probably not a long term study, hence why they don't have them on staff. I'm also skeptical about having a more general market study contractor study something like piracy, as it's pretty unique and technical, in different ways than most of what they research, challenge. It's also extremely hard (I can't think of a good way) to accurately measure how many pirates would buy a game if they didn't pirate it so with everything else right, you're still missing that vital piece, the piece that everyone is looking for.

I also question whether they have actually studied whether or not their DRM is actually effective and how they went about that (sample size and bias become major issues here). This is the other important piece of the pie that you really can't know unless a DRM has been around for awhile and there's the added question of how long it takes for a DRM to be subverted to the point where it's irrelevant. If you did enough of those studies you could extrapolate the effectiveness of DRM in general. Once you have efficacy data on DRM you can start doing cost-benefit analyses to figure out whether it's actually profitable to have DRM, compare specific types of DRM (something cheap like CD keys vs burning protection vs rootkits and other software).

That's a lot of research which is going to cost a lot of money and take a significant amount of time so I'm not so sure that game companies are willing to make that type of investment.

Again, I'd have to read the research to know whether or not I trusted it, it's a difficult enough task that I wouldn't simply trust someone spouting out numbers.

I think the main problem is that the vocal complainers on the internet represent only a tiny part of the userbase, and for a large part of the userbase these measures don't matter much.

Yes and no, I think that they are more noticeable but I do think that invasive DRM is a problem for a number of consumers, they just don't always understand or vocalize the problem. I think you're right that most people either don't know, don't care, or both.