They'd play it for free* but how many would pay? Would that number go down if DRM were involved?

Personally, Steam's about where I draw the line. They've given me enough value as an ecosystem and their native 'DRM' doesn't seem that obtrusive, so they've got a lot of my money over the years.

I've regretted every single time I happened to buy a game, which turned out to have other DRM or any form of 'anti cheat' client side. They just never work in the long run.

I played both Oris for 1€ on gamepass only to buy it when it's in a steam sale (~11€ for both iirc). I have free games from epic only to buy them on Steam for 5€. I have no problem pirating games. The last big title was Cyberpunk. It runs like shit on my end but once I buy a GPU I'll buy Cyberpunk. Until then I can wait.

I pirated GTA5 to test it on my machine back in the days. Textures popped in seconds later because the HDD was way too slow to handle the game. I prefer pirating a game over dealing with refunds. I have it for free from Epic. Would I buy it now? No. I don't like the game at all after playing for 4 hours.

What is my favorite single player game? Cyberpunk. Do I share that information? Yes.

I really enjoyed this article, thanks for sharing!

It's a shame that OP didn't add a tracker to the pirate plea button. I would wager that he made practically zero sales from it - looking at how well donations seem to work in software development in general. I think that this is why microtransactions work well. They give away a nerfed version of the game for free, and after the player formed an attachment to it, the game can be upgraded for a price. In a way, this is a much more human design, than forking up the entire cost in advance.