This is interesting. From AuthorEarnings.com:
Digital Rights Management, or DRM, is the encryption lock applied to electronic entertainment. The film, music, video game, and book industries all employ DRM. With ebooks, DRM poses little challenge to pirates, who can crack these locks with a few clicks. Meanwhile, for the paying customer, DRM makes it difficult to move ebooks between devices and traps readers into a single retail channel.
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It wasn’t surprising to see that most Big 5 books employ DRM, but we were shocked to see that it is practically 100% of them. Indies, on the other hand, locked down roughly 50% of their titles. Since there isn’t any variation in the Big 5 books, we are forced to look at the self-published titles for any effect on sales, and indeed there is one. The 50% of non-DRM ebooks account for 64% of total unit sales.
Indie titles without DRM sell twice as many copies each, on average, as those with DRM.
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At almost every price point, we see the thousands of titles without DRM significantly out-earning the thousands of titles with DRM. In fact, at the only two price points that appear to buck the general trend and which show DRM titles outselling non-DRM ones, we found that the reversal was due to 3 outlier DRM titles published by only two authors.
What our data strongly suggests is that DRM harms ebook sales at any price point. And it backs up a report from Tor, one of the few major publishers that gave up DRM two years ago. It also reinforces this report on DRM’s effect on music sales. Interestingly, one of the Big 5 publishers urged authors to push back on Tor’s decision to get rid of DRM. It shows how important data like this is for making sound business decisions. Operating according to myth or fear is far inferior to making decisions based on what’s best for the consumer or on what is proven to increase or decrease sales.I don't know how well these results translate to other DRM-laden products, but previous studies have shown that DRM doesn't prevent music piracy, and that people who "pirate" music also buy more music, so I suspect that the same trend will also apply to things like PC software... and games. Which is exactly why CD Projekt Red ditched DRM for major releases like The Witcher 3:
DRM does not work, and that has been argued for years. Copyright holders argue otherwise and always want to clamp down harder, restrict more, and prosecute pirates for extrotionate amounts of money. With anti-tamper technology such as Denuvo proving incredibly difficult to crack, they may get their wish (albeit temporarily).
However, we now have solid proof DRM is a complete waste of time and money. That proof comes in the form of development studio CD Projekt, owner of GOG.com and creators of The Witcher series.
Marcin Iwinski, co-founder of GOG and CD Projekt, spoke at infoShare 2016 and pointed out how well not using DRM works. The Witcher 3 has no DRM and yet it has sold 10 million copies. It has been pirated, but Iwinski points out that many of those pirates have come back to purchase the game when they can afford it. Also, the regular free content drops for the title have encouraged gamers to buy a copy.DRM sucks; it does almost nothing to stop actual pirates, while making the experience worse for paying customers. Hopefully, the mounting evidence against DRM's efficacy will inspire more big companies to give it up.