I think they count downloads not even installs.
I truly couldn't afford games in the 90s and early 2000s in Eastern Europe because they cost the equivalent of 2 weeks minimum wage.
You can't convert people into paying customers with DRM who can't afford to pay for games.
You also can't convert habitual pirates who just download everything and might not even try the game.
There are so few good and interesting games today that money is really not the issue. I often pay for the deluxe / ultimate / whatever edition of games that look really good. Because there is maybe one or two games like that in a year, if we're lucky.
IDK what happened to the gaming industry, there used to be so many great games. On second thought: I do know what's happened: DEI.
Well there is a lot more that's come into play than DEI.
The short version is that the games industry has effectively ended up mirroring Hollywood in a number of ways. Sure, the DEI crap is one of the biggest issues that's plaguing them but before that they had what I call MCU syndrome. After the success of MCU movies from the early 2010's onward, it seems Hollywood wouldn't green light anything that didn't have the potential to make a billion dollars at the box office. The problem with this thinking is that it essentially created a market where there were rarely anything but comic book based movies coming out and even those projects were all designed to make a billion dollars or more whether they did or not.
It's the same thing in the gaming industry. Instead of chasing MCU money, they are World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Fortnite or Call of Duty levels of money. As with movies, this is easier said than done. Live-service and MMO type models are the most lucrative, so that's what a lot of companies have focused on to the point where single-player games are a rare sight in the AAA world. They don't just want to sell you a game, they want to sell you on content drops and quick dopamine hits that get you spending far more money in the long run than you ever would on a single-player game.
Essentially, the developers are all looking to cash in on what industry leaders have already done and a lot of design decisions are driven by monetization considerations above all else. This is even a factor in single player games now. Even with single player games, its all about chasing trends. Open world games were super popular. It didn't matter whether or not it would benefit gameplay or the story. So many if not most games started to go with open-world designs. Those are huge and expensive to do. For every game like Ghost Recon Wildlands that benefited from the open-world model, there are many Mass Effect Andromeda's that didn't.
You also have a problem with companies going with tried and true formulas they are afraid to change. That's how you get your annual sports releases and your Assassins Creed games and Call of Duty games. They are milking those franchises dry and as long as they make money, they'll keep selling you the same game over and over again with a fresh coat of paint on it.
I could get into how the quality has slipped, but that's another very long post. I think we can agree that the quality of games seems to be getting worse. In part, that's due to the complexity of games and their sheer size. However, its also because of hiring decisions, too many separate studios, and a number of other issues. Including hiring activists in studios which hasn't helped. Some of that is DEI infestation and some of it comes down to game studios not wanting to upset the blue haired Twitter whackos. They water everything down so as not to offend anyone and end up pleasing no one to put it simply.
I could write a lot more on the topic, but I'll leave it at that for now.
