The people that pirate games are not the one that would have bought it day one. It's always the same wrong reasoning about piracy, they think that if one person pirates the game the same person would have gone and bought it. It's not, someone that wants to play the game but not pay for it doesn't care about waiting a month (but sometime even just a couple of days) to find the crack online.
DRM was proved to not work, and only impact on people that buy the media with restrictions such as reduced performance, making the game size bigger, requiring an internet connection even for playing offline, having to activate again the game when they change hardware or reinstall the operating system, have even DRM that are basically malware and reduce the stability of the whole operating system and reduce its performance by installing some low level components that are active even when you are not playing the game, and so on.
In my opinion if games are all DRM-free people would still buy them, game studios would still make money, and users will be more happy (and possibly buy more games).
> The people that pirate games are not the one that would have bought it day one
There is also a nonzero number of people who would buy a game if piracy was not an option, or if there was significant enough friction in pirating it.
Denuvo and other DRM of varying levels do work in their intended function, for some period of time. Sometimes it's cracked before release, and sometimes it takes a while, depending on interest in the game, the current status of cracking groups and all sorts of other things.
So the calculation is pretty simple: Will the sales gained from the few pirates who would buy if they can't pirate, be higher than the sales lost due to the impact of a bad DRM implementation and/or the "stink" of it?
Publishers think that's a gamble worth taking every time, because 1) they assume their devs will get the DRM implementation right, or right enough 2) gamers don't really vote with their wallets, and/or the ~15% performance loss of a bad DRM implementation doesn't really eschew or discourage the supermajority of buyers. The market simply doesn't care.
There's also the PR and sales bump from the later "Denuvo has been removed!" patch (and it gets the game back in the news, after all) but I'm going to assume that it's negligible for this discussion.
In most cases/industries you'd assume the professionals would be right, but we're talking about the games industry - legendary for its shortsightedness and general idiocy - far too many obviously bad ideas get way too much money behind them. Very similar to the movie industry in that regard
And oh look at the one other industry still shooting itself in the foot with regards to piracy. Streaming is changing that for movies - you can see why so many are going for games streaming style services - just nobody has figured out the model
There's simply a gap between the games and media one wants to play and the games and media one wants to buy. Whatever the reasons are (I'm not sure I'll like it, DRM or bugs might make the game unplayable, I'm unwilling to pay full price to have a look, I don't want to commit to a subscription, I'm an irresponsible freeloader...) piracy fills the gap in a way that is impossible with material goods, and it will always be so. There's no way out, and DRM just erodes goodwill. For example, I stopped buying Sony audio CDs, even from artists I like, after the rootkit scandal of many years ago.
It's a little more complicated than this. Sometimes media (or games) are easier or a combination of easier & cheaper to pirate/workaround drm than obtain legally. E.g. Netflix notoriously has location restrictions on where their licensing applies, and people use vpns to work around these. They literally can't pay Netflix more money to e.g. watch the US catalog from Australia. Or see also how much game of thrones was pirated, especially before hbo had a standalone streaming service. For a while you could get it only as a cable add on, so some cord cutters turned to piracy.
When content is available easily and at a reasonable cost, it's often a better experience to buy than pirate. Sure, there are some people who will still pirate everything but there's a lot in the middle who are willing to pay something.
People who are "willing to pay something" typically have an entertainment budget and are willing to spend that money on high-priority beneficiaries (e.g. struggling publishers and starving indie artists that they'd like to see more work from, works so great that they inspire gratitude, live entertainment that cannot be pirated, gifts for someone else).
Choices of entertainment to pay for diverge from choices of entertainment to consume, and piracy accommodates the difference.
DRM was proved to not work, and only impact on people that buy the media with restrictions such as reduced performance, making the game size bigger, requiring an internet connection even for playing offline, having to activate again the game when they change hardware or reinstall the operating system, have even DRM that are basically malware and reduce the stability of the whole operating system and reduce its performance by installing some low level components that are active even when you are not playing the game, and so on.
In my opinion if games are all DRM-free people would still buy them, game studios would still make money, and users will be more happy (and possibly buy more games).