How much does piracy actually cost them? The Witcher 3 sold 50 million copies, and it is DRM-free on GOG. Its lack of DRM doesn't seem to have hurt sales at all.

DRM does cause problems, and the discussion shouldn't be about mitigating those problems, but whether it actually solves a real problem.

You're wrong. Denuvo isn't removed from cracked games, just circumvented. When you play a cracked Dwnuvo game, Denuvo is still running while being tricked into thinking the game is legit. Besides this, we've seen time and time again already that Denuvo in fact doesn't have an impact on performance, both in games that have had executables without it leaked and had it removed later on as it's intended to be. At worst it increases the initial startup time of a game, but doesn't affect your framerate once the game is up and running.

What does impact performance, however, is in-house anti-tamper/DRM bullshit and other insane practices that's often implemented alongside Denuvo. Capcom is especially a bad offender here. To make a somewhat recent example, you know what made Resident Evil 8 run so badly? Among others, checking the list of available resolutions on every. Single. Frame. This and other dumb crap implemented by Capcom themselves was disabled in the cracked version and by using reframework, hence the cracked games runs better.

Everybody loves to circlejerk about how bad Denuvo is, but the reality is that it's become a scapegoat taking attention away from the real issues with games.

The lead is actually buried by this headline. Denuvo is unironically claiming their DRM has no performance impact and that gamers are spreading a myth. And to prove it they will provide a test example, entirely controlled by them, to game journalists in the future.

Wait, what happened to empress?