That study didn't find evidence of it based on the way they conducted it (asking 30k people). That doesn't mean there isn't a negative effect, just that their research wasn't able to prove there was. I can go into any of the threads about Denuvo and show you countless posts of people who bought that game because they weren't capable of pirating it. There is no doubt that sales are lost because of piracy (no, of course not every pirated copy).

The question is whether the positive effect beats out the negative, but that's almost impossible to prove since there's no way to know how a game would've sold without DRM vs with, and it'll vary immensely per game even depending on hundreds of variables.

Probably more worrying is that the 'positive pull' they mention is achieved by offering bonuses you can't get in the pirated versions, which means some form of drm-ed bonus. Or worse, games that are closer to F2P with most of the game being service related.

Yes, a study funded by the pro-corporate EU Commission researched displacement rates of copyrighted content in the EU, using well-established methodology and a huge sample size, and couldn't find a negative effect for games. To be honest, not sure how your anecdotes are relevant for this study. There are a lot of of things which cannot be proved absolutely, especially where human behaviour/society is concerned. This doesn't mean policy or decision-making should be based on gut feeling or anecdotes when empirical evidence is available.

And in this case the evidence does suggest that the positive effects offset the negatives. They are really just speculating about the reasons, those were not part of the research.

Unfortunately one single study is not very authoritative, if only because a single study can not cover everything, may not be 100% accurate or may suffer from limited available information and large uncertainty (many studies do). I would not say that anything is confirmed really. It's more like there are some hints that piracy may not be that bad after all. The truth is, we just don't know. Piracy may or may not hurt sales.

I think it's legitimate of the producers to try to safeguard their products against pirates even if there is only a chance that piracy is hurting sales. If the measures become unreasonable, legitimate customers should just refrain from buying.

Regarding the question if piracy is bad or not bad, there may never be a final answer to it. There are hints, that piracy is less bad than the industry wants people to believe. That's all we know so far.

Well what it boils down to it depends on the game and the game developer. In such cases like Sonic Mania users had issues with Denuvo on 2 occasions. 1. It causing users not being able to get past the menu in the game. 2. Sega rushing to update the version of Denuvo which broke the game yet again by not allowing Denuvo to polish the new version and get the bugs out of it. Other games with Denuvo had no issues at all because the game developers implemented/optimized Denuvo to work with the games properly. In Final Fantasy XV's case the performance issues were caused by the Steam API and not Denuvo. In Assassin's Creed's case Ubisoft implemented their own from of DRM on top of Denuvo which is crippling even PCs with Hex core cpus. To me in my mind I think by Ubisoft having two forms of DRM is the primary cause because they are not playing nice with each other much like having two Anti-Virus programs installed. At the end of the day it boils down to the game developer optimizing Denuvo or any other form of DRM to work correctly with their games.