Denuvo seems to stop piracy just fine. Even when it doesn't permanently protect a game, it usually does so for at least half a year before getting cracked. That is more than good enough, considering most of game sales happen early after launch. Some denuvo protected titles haven't been cracked for years now.
If anything I think denuvo is just paving the way for a pretty gloomy future of "almost perfect" DRM. It might still be crackable, but the effort needed would be immense (or just downright impossible if you take into account the incredible resource discrepancy between the two sides). Even the mood in parts of the scene seems to have shifted towards resignation w.r.t to denuvo.
> it usually does so for at least half a year before getting cracked.
but do games where the denuvo isn't cracked early do get increased sales? I mean that's the (purported) claim that the various DRM schemes were to fight piracy, with the justification that piracy resulted in lost sales
It really depends on how you define piracy. With movies and music it doesn't work at all because they don't evolve and change over time. Once that 4K BluRay content hits The Pirate Bay it's game over. But, with games, it's a very different story. Many games have intricate design with their servers that make ripping them apart and creating standalone pirated copies extremely difficult. Even some single player games, while pirated, don't get as much adoption from the pirate community because of the ongoing patch support they receive that is usually lacking in the pirated versions.
It doesn't do that either. Once a copy is out there, it's out there - there's no "scarcity" just because creating a pirated copy takes work. Only few individuals need go through the trouble.
