Denuvo is a lot more effective than that.

But also? That kind of makes a huge difference. Story time (so obviously anecdotal and grain of salt and...)!

Way back when there was this series called Mass Effect. All us PC gamers were pissed off that Bioware were traitors who had abandoned us and never wanted to play that xbox shit. Until there was a port of the game to PC and we all needed it in our veins.

Mass Effect PC was one of the first (?) games with activation model securom as a DRM model. And the Scene Group who cracked it first did a piss poor job and the game would crash once you finished the tutorial and got to the starmap. But, because it was the era of multiple Scene Groups vying for power, nobody wanted to be "second" to crack a game.

So the various message boards were full of people complaining and eventually a good many of us pirates just drove down to Best Buy and bought the game because we needed it NOW!!!!

I want to say it was properly cracked within a week? But that was still, likely, very significant sales. Largely for the same reason that publishers/devs pay for day one influencer streams and the like. That is the peak of marketing and when you get all the impulse buys who didn't pre-order.