Resident Evil Village crack completely fixes its stuttering issues
dsogaming.com
dsogaming.com
When I was poor in college, either I would pirate a game or just not play it because there was just no way I could ever afford it.
Now as a grown up I'd much rather pay for the game both to support the creator as well as not roll the dice on a backdoored keygen.
I HAVE to believe that the number of folks that can both afford to buy the game and would buy the game, but would try to pirate first, is a fraction of a percent of the market.
Please stop punishing your fans :/
But I still have some friends that never buy anything digital, after being brought up on pirated software they would describe buying it as “nauseous”. They might own multiple cars and expensive real estate, but still pirate their windows as a matter of principle.
I have a feeling a lot of kids brought up in eastern europe have similar sensibilities.
That mentality simply carried over when the IT boom hit and back then it didn't occur to anyone that copying was a bad thing.
So, similar mentality. I ended up buying all her software (Office, photoshop etc;) but she said it was a waste of money.
I think an issue here is that in lower-income countries software without regional pricing is considerably more of an expense. Something like Office or Photoshop is also quite different than a videogame imho, those are skills that are valuable (or often expected) on the labour market.
That said, I don't believe anybody who has used the 'real' office/photoshop/etc is easily able to go back to a 'lesser' alternative, but that's mostly due to sunken cost and lock in ... but, I don't think a casual user will make good use of the better features in the better software.
We currently see something related to this in the Pharmaceutical industry. There are a lot of statisticians/programmers that learn R or python in university, while most large-pharma companies are using SAS. There is a movement within the industry to pivot or try to pivot to R due to the scarcity of SAS programmers or/and the cost of teaching new employees a new programming language.
If SAS would have more accessible trainings/certifications I am sure R would never even be considered.
They disagree about whether 99% of people who can afford the game (i.e. successful adults) will pay.
This is not a pro or contra buying or pirating argument, and I actually know lots of people who will happily pay for software that is not windows.
> who are ironically paying the most in tuition and housing oftentimes
It's not ironic. They have no choice (other than not attending the university of course). If there is a loophole that lets students not pay the tuition fee without any punishment, a good amount of students would not pay.
- What is valuable as a symbol of love is something completely useless, but which requires you to burn excessive amounts of resources (money). This is because the act of figuratively setting your money on fire clearly signals that you're making a sacrifice (and the amount of money you thus burn also doubles as a proxy for your wealth).
- The scam was established by what's now over a century of ongoing marketing efforts to convince generations of people to consider diamonds as a symbol of love, thus to be priced per rules described above.
- The scam is maintained by finding ways to create artificial scarcity. For instance, lab-made diamonds are very cheap and made to much higher quality than naturally-found ones, but "naturally found" is a perfect discriminator to force scarcity around. Hence it's the mined ones that are used for jewelry.
Textbooks, or videogames, are products of utility, and don't have the aforementioned dynamics. The only thing that's happening is point 3: publishers trying to find a way to make artificial scarcity work, without a benefit of having a good discriminator (all bits are created equal) - hence DRM.
Of course none of that justifies robbery, but in all cases it does justify every effort to prevent artificial scarcity from being established and maintained.
But why is it your problem? Suppose I just wrote a sonnet sitting here in my spare time. I don't want others to know it though so I'll only share it under extremely-controlled circumstances for a lot of money to maintain this artificial scarcity. Why is it your moral imperative for you to crush my carefully-maintained monopoly on my stupid little sonnet?
I currently feel there's a spectrum of cultural importance on media. On the one end, you have your sonnet, that few people even know exists. On the other end, you have Game of Thrones.
At some point a piece of media becomes so widespread that it becomes a part of shared culture. It could meaningfully affect everyone[0], like Harry Potter or even Game of Thrones (I'd expect everyone to be at least aware of its existence). Or a subculture, like Star Trek or Star Wars for people with even passing interest in science fiction (or STEM), or StarCraft for people into PC video games. These works weave themselves into the fabric of society - people lift phrases from them, make metaphors referencing them. Hogwarts is the modern Troy. Being unable to access these works - especially at the same time everyone else around you is perusing them and talking about them - becomes cultural isolation.
With books, we have it solved, thanks to libraries. Almost anyone can get legal access to almost any written work - where they don't have the money, they can substitute it with effort, to get to a library (and possibly convince the library to buy the work, or fetch it through inter-library loan, etc.).
With music and movies, we had it solved in the past too. You could be exposed to popular works through radio and TV, both private and public. This worked better pre-Internet, because while media distribution was regional, the culture was also regional. Not so today - with the spread of the Internet, the culture became international almost overnight. With Internet, enough of us in Poland can enjoy Game of Thrones simultaneously with the rest of the world that it becomes expected of everyone to enjoy it in lockstep with the whole planet.
Videogames gained mainstream popularity around the same time Internet did, so there was never an equivalent of a library, or public broadcasting, for games. You either buy one or pirate it. If a game suddenly gains worldwide popularity[1] and every one of your friends is playing it, you'll either buy it or pirate it, just so you can feel included in their conversation.
And that's ultimately the main justifying factor I'm currently exploring: entertainment media are social objects. One of their most important roles is to glue communities together, by giving people shared experiences to talk about. Once a work becomes popular enough, I can't really blame people who pirate it because they too want to be a part of the conversation.
The sonnet from your example? It isn't popular at all, it isn't part of culture, so I'd consider pirating it as an act of malice. My view would change if I suddenly started seeing it mentioned on the news.
--
[0] - Not everyone everyone, as there are plenty of people with little to no access to Western media. It's much less than 50% of the planet, but much more than "the West", so I don't feel writing the latter would be right either - so where I say "everyone" in this thread, it is to mean "everyone within the broadly understood sphere of influence of the Western culture".
[1] - Which doesn't happen by accident; a lot of money and effort goes into marketing, in order to make this happen. And piracy was historically a part of it, too: few people actually bought originals of Diablo or StarCraft or Red Alert in Central and Eastern Europe, and yet they were hugely influential there, all thanks to folks with CD burners in their trucks.
Your argument about their scarcity being artificial also seems pretty flawed to me. Naturally occurring diamonds are genuinely scarce, and most people value them differently from lab created ones (as they are free to do). Perhaps those people are just being stupid, but they’re no more stupid than all the other people in the world who find value in useless things. It’s not illegal to make lab made diamonds, they’re freely available on the market. But just like a pixel-perfect print of the Mona Lisa, they’re not valued quite as much as the real thing.
I presume you’re talking about De Beers (as this is such an often repeated meme)? Their market share is ~23%.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/585450/market-share-of-d...
They’re also quite tightly regulated by the EU, and since 2006 have been prohibited from buying stock from Alrosa (the actual largest diamond supplier in the world). So their scarcity is most certainly not artificially maintained by De Beers, as people so often like to claim.
See e.g. https://www.businessinsider.com/history-of-de-beers-2011-12?...
You’re also quite narrowly focusing on the romance angle (which is the result of successful marketing, not artificially induced scarcity). I don’t think Quavo wears an iced-out AP as a symbol of love, for instance.
The artificial scarcity argument simply defies logic. The entire worlds supply of natural diamonds was created hundreds of millions of years ago, and the earth is done making them.
If your argument is against IP though, why is the price relevant? You support IP laws as long as the price is one you personally find reasonable, so it's basically a system of voluntary donations then?
I'm sorry for jacking your analogy, but I think it holds water. Diamonds are not inherently valuable (to the degree they are priced at retail). They are valuable because of an exploitative supply chain and social manipulation efforts spanning decades. Which does not justify robbing stores and potentially causing physical or mental harm to innocent shopkeepers. But very much justifies replicating the product to render those practices worthless and hopefully deter them from happening more.
The same goes for educational textbooks in many (but far from all) cases. Personally I've had professors who assigned their own books at very reasonable prices and apologize profusely for them costing money to begin with. I've had others who peddled their own expensive books while themselves handing out copies (!) of books by other authors. I wouldn't dream of pirating the former, but I'm pirating the shit out of the latter if I can.
Yes, I agree this is what ownership means in principle. I think the more practical view of ownership is what the current monopolist of violence will let you do with what you possess. The monopolist of violence in most cases being your local government.
There are many real-world examples of being regulated in what you can or can not do with what you ostensibly own. Whether that's real estate, natural resources or intellectual property. Even IP has expiration dates defined by regulators. Do those expiration dates incontrovertibly define what is morally right or wrong to do with said IP? Were the regulators directed by divine mandate when setting those expiration dates?
> It's not to corner people into an easier target so much as to restrict the debate to the issue I take actual exception with.
Just so I'm fully aware of what we're currently debating, is it this?:
> This idea of labeling something as "price gouging" as a moral defense for anything really.
In which case, here's an example in which I personally believe theft is morally justified. Let's say your family is caught in a natural disaster, and you need fresh water to survive. A local opportunist saw the disaster coming and stockpiled all local water sources at low prices, and is now attempting to sell you water for the reasonable sum (when compared to the alternative option of death) of your life savings.
I'm curious about your position on this (intentionally extreme) example. Not as a trick question, but because I'd like to know how rigidly you adhere to the concept of ownership being morally just in all cases. If you still believe theft is morally wrong in this case, that's fine - it just means we believe opposite things.
As for your price-gouging case, an ethical quandary would remain if you were completely broke and dying of thirst no matter how reasonably the water was priced. And/or if the seller was just a neighbor who actually didn't want to sell at all but just keep it for himself. How is it more moral to keep and refuse to sell at any price than to keep unless someone offers you a high enough price? You must either think theft when needed to preserve life is morally justified or not.
If I must take a binary position, then yes. Theft when needed to preserve life is morally justified. In fact, it happens every day on a massive scale. Governments around the world seize up to half of what their citizens earn and redistribute it according to the needs of the whole, for example in order to save lives or support those who cannot support themselves for any of a number of reasons. I support the argument that taxation is theft, but not that it is wrong.
> If you want to argue that IP is not real ownership and should not exist [...]
I don't want to argue that IP is not real ownership. I want to argue that there is no such thing as real ownership, whether the property in question is physical or intellectual. Practical ownership is only what can be enforced through the monopolization of violence. Governments have the power to assert ownership of their citizens' earnings, but for the most part choose to allow citizens the privilege of keeping a portion of those earnings and pretend that they own the goods and services those earnings pay for.
This discussion has strayed quite a bit from the initial question of whether or not piracy = theft = bad. By challenging the reality of ownership, I'm trying to challenge the assertion that piracy is inherently bad because it infringes on ownership and ownership is a fundamental quality of the universe that cannot be rightly infringed upon.
That we choose to adopt certain principles, such as that of ownership, and act as if those principles are "true" in order to make sense of the world, is a perfectly legitimate practice, and I don't believe that you are wrong to do so.
Like textbooks written by the professors actually holding the lecture that change tiny bits every semester, especially in information relevant to coursework, to make used textbooks essentially worthless.
And the simple fact is you are not forced to possess textbooks nor attend the university, no matter how beneficial it may be to do so. This is how people rationalize all forms of crime.
This is a good argument. I'll try to speak for others when I say that the problem is with professors who actively engage in predatory behavior to gouge students. I appreciate that's not the norm, but it happens enough to at least be perceived as a major problem.
The predatory behavior lies in identifying a group of people who already have considerable sunk cost in their education, and then using a combination of methods (such as decreeing a monopoly by assigning your own books, and creating scarcity by insisting on this year's revised edition) to force them to purchase material or potentially waste the enormous sunk cost already incurred.
You write "we" don't do that, so I'm assuming you're a professor who assigns, and maybe even writes, textbooks. I'm sorry if this whole thread is turning into a personal attack on you. For my part, it absolutely isn't meant to be that. It's an attack on predatory practices that (a minority of) members of all professions occasionally engage in. This time the profession in question happens to be university professors.
I think few people have problems with IP law in and of itself. We have problems with the weaponization of said laws to exploit those in vulnerable positions.
The more people pirate textbooks the more publishers will pivot to a business model where they can make money. Such as with online software instead (they're already doing some of that with software like Pearson's MyLab, which forces students to buy the book anyway to get a license). At which point we're back to the same argument about the freedom to set prices.
Expensive textbooks are not the easier target, they are the only target. What people find issue with are certain predatory practices by a minority of bad actors.
I think it's great that you make an effort to pick more affordable textbooks, and I hope that your students are paying for them.
If someone punch me first, I’ll punch back. It doesn’t mean that I think it’s okay to punch people in general, but sometimes it’s warranted.
Not paying for recent version of Windows seems like a poor example, because not paying for spyware is a pretty good principle.
I mean, it takes no effort at all to copy/paste AGPL code into a proprietary project. But you're still not supposed to do it, right?
This is Microsofts doing.
As far as Im concerned this makes pirating windows totally ethical.
Speaking of principles, which principle is responsible for taking a working, perfectly stable OS and releasing "updates" for it that introduce spyware?
I just want to make sure we're holding companies accountable to the same degree we're holding individuals.
I know a lot of people who still have such sensitivities, they have money and houses and still steal cars just because that's how the grew up.
See, that logic of theft, be it software or hardware, doesn't really make sense. Stealing software is just as bad.
>Stealing software is just as bad.
Stealing software the same way people steal physical would require the thief to delete all copies of the codebase. This happens through ransomware, not piracy.
The owner of the copyright infringed car would just download his copy of the car again from the manufacturer. Why would insurance be involved?
I felt like people really wanted to emulate the west, partake in its wealth and successes, on the other hand there was this ingrained sentiment that it was a bit decadent and was not really “us” They didn’t understand us, and had their nose up in the air, snickering about the poor stray EE kids, who couldn’t distinguish investment portfolios from pension funds, the savages.
There was a very strong Us vs Them mentality, and if you couple that with the idea that copying isn’t exactly theft, it has made sure any moral qualms were quickly overcome with peer pressure. You were “stupid” if you even tried to own SW legally.
Its similar to how an american would feel about owning a Japanese good luck flag, or a nazi medal of honor. Yes there was a person behind it, somewhere, with his/her struggles and dreams, but at one point in time nobody really cared.
Couple that with the fact that some software packages were priced as decent cars, it made the decision pretty easy.
Not trying to defend it too much, just putting it into perspective so people might understand a bit better why someone from EE might feel the way we sometimes do.
DRM punishes your customer. Unfortunately modern technology companies have all but trained users to accept being punished for using their product so this behavior hasn't stopped.
[0] reasonable is, of course, subjective. Thus, some will pirate because even $10 is more than they are willing to pay, but you're unlikely to ever get sales out of these people anyway.
I can remember getting a DVD from Netflix, getting sick of all the unskipable previews, and downloading a pirate version before they had even finished. It's so true. When it's easier to pirate, the publishers need to sit down and rethink their whole existence.
In that time frame (where Netflix was still sending truckloads of DVDs across the country) I don't see how downloading the pirated version of a DVD would be faster than using DVD shrink on the Netflix DVD though.
0: This is more commonly/obviously supported for torrents containing multiple files, eg a TV show where you can get episode-1.mp4, then episode-2.mp4, etc.
Gabe literally built a DRM platform.
But he correctly identified that if you just said something people want to hear in an interview then even if you operate in literally the exact opposite fashion people adore it.
https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/The_Big_List_of_DRM-Free_G...
I know like a decade ago, steam emulators existed that could replace the steam DLLs for offline games (or potentially, but more risky: online games that don't rely on valve's servers).
I've not looked into it since, but honestly I'd be totally unsurprised if they never engaged in a war with the pirates on those tools, and they are no harder these days. My impression has always been that the Steam DRM is more intended to prevent casual copying than to be a real piracy deterrent. (This meshes with games on steam often including more invasive DRM systems on top of the Steam one.)
What about all the piracy that happened because of intrusive DRM? It certainly prevented that kind of piracy.
Make a good game and it'll sale.
You can pay $60 for day-one access to any of those games, you can wait a year to get them for $60 for the game plus a DLC, or just the game for $40. As time passes, their prices decay until you can get the full game plus DLC for $10 on sale.
This is great for people like me. I have no problem paying for day-one access for a game I really want to play on the first day (Cyberpunk), but I'll often load up on games when they hit that "bargain bin" price so that I have a backlog of potentially fun games to play.
Sadly CDPR seems to be fixing the wrong things. They even took out great accidental mechanics like the dodge boost, which was incredibly fun and added a lot of depth to the way you could move around the city. A lot of places aren't even accessible without it. You aren't supposed to go there, but a lot of areas reachable with just the double jump a bugged, too. Even without any mods you can reach a few out of bounds areas... I think removing the dodge boost is as if id had "fixed" the double jump instead of rolling with it. Similar with the slide invincibility glitch. I can see why they fixed that, but some way to jump from great highs is really necessary in a place as vertical as Night City. They replaced it with.. nothing. They also made most consumables useless by roving the ability to disassemble them instead of fixing the economy. There's literally no point in any of the drinks now. You also can't re-roll the stats of any legendary gear you find, so if it doesn't have any slots for mods it's useless. And other things. I honestly think that it was a better game at version 1.04. Performance was better, too.
I have actual concrete data about this¹ and unfortunately the percentage is much larger than you realise.
I'm still under NDA until 2024 but it's in the region of 60-80% of sales for certain games, especially RPGs which seem to get pirated the most.
People like to cite hugely successful products being DRM-Free or something as proof that it works, but for every project that works well there's hundreds that die in obscurity.
Also, people like to back a champion to "prove that it works" which inflates the margins of the champion product.
¹ - based on my time at Ubisoft, and based on Ubisoft titles only and when accounting for other differences between franchised games.
Take a person that has pirated many games, how do you know which ones they would have actually paid for? Even if you knew the ones they play the most, it woulnd't necessarily translate to a buy in the same order.
You can also estimate sales within a 5% margin of error. Other factors such as play time and ratings also allow you to understand what sales would have been.
There’s lots of data to draw from.
Is what? Pirated? How can you have concrete data of something that didn't happen? A copy that didn't sell can not count towards sales.
If it is based on sales estimation, then it could simply mean that the game didn't sell well because it was bad. Not every unsold copy of an estimation is automatically a pirated copy.
Keygens tend to be based on the cracker reverse engineering the licence key check algorithm, and then just spitting out a bunch of keys that fit it. Most people will pick the first key the keygen creates, which makes it easy to track the pirated copies.
The only way around the wholesale pirating of games is to make the game totally nerfed unless it can connect to a 'server'. This is why most AAA games all have at least some level of online features.
A release which gained 10M in sales which could not be pirated and scored 80/8 on metacritic can be compared to a release which sold 4 million but scored the same and has the same play time curves.
Obviously this is contrived, there are way more inputs, but you can see where I’m going.
Maybe the full data is more convincing, but ultimately you can't really know whether someone playing your game would've bought it other than if they did. If, for example, each iteration of some franchise sells less with more pirating going on, it probably means your fans don't appreciate the way things developed and just want to see where their once beloved franchise is going. Assassin's Creed used to be one of the best in gaming, but for me it's not even worth pirating any more. Should've developed the current-year story like it was foreshadowed in AS2, but the whole idea of training Miles using the animus to defeat abstergo was jus dropped to milk the fans once a year. Doesn't surprise me when people stop buying in such a case.
I mean, tons of people on this page are saying DRM doesn't reduce piracy and serves no purpose. But it's hard to make that position jive with the fact that the companies with tons of data on how DRM affects their bottom line keep paying for it.
But, you can't stop crackers. Bits of memory are bits of memory. They can be changed. The balance is making games highly available, and having content beyond just the base game. Such as online play, or physical merchandise with the purchase.
If I got a poster every time I bought a game id be liable to buy more games that I may not even play.
Yes, but that's because when you take a physical good off the shelf there isn't still a copy on the shelf. Software does not have this problem.
> Or in other words if software costed no money and always relied on donation, you'd be bankrupt.
There are obvious examples that contradict your point: Linus and The Toady One come immediately to mind. Though, admittedly, they are outliers.
They are doing exactly that. Pretty much all research has shown that DRM schemes are ineffective and mostly just cause problems for legitimate users.
The reason for DRM is mostly
1. Cargo culting.
2. Liability ass-covering (we did our best, it's the DRM company fault our game leaked!)
"Company wouldn't do anything unreasonable." is a really unrealistic takes - companies do unreasonable decisions due to managerial cargo cult pretty much constantly and consistently.
This is so true right here. The crackers who break the DRM just find it an amusing puzzle to solve, and the pirates who use what the crackers create never suffer the annoying side effects of the DRM thanks to the crackers work. Legitimate buyers on the other hand have to deal with situations where their paid for game literally won't run for them without a crack being installed because of DRM or broken-by-design anti-cheats.
(I know this from first-hand experience. Some of my paid games run fine after DRM removal cracks are applied, despite breaking in various fun ways prior to that.)
that and always-on gameplay generally do the job I think, atleast for games.
So it would not be surprising to have a similar situation there.
The people who actually make the software are fully aware that any DRM will be cracked within 48 hours of release (with a few small exceptions).
I guess that's also why AAA games are hyped so much before release, so that many people preorder it.
Never thought about it this way, but it does make perfect sense. Thanks!
The context of _this thread_ is computer games.
That's why I posted it.
However to this day I would rather crack and try and game before wasting $70-100+ on an unfinished piece of garbage, which I firmly believe 8/10 games are now.
With companies releasing broken games like this and 50gb day one patches that still don't fix shit, these days it's the game companies that don't have my trust, not the other way around.
I used to get into Early Access on Steam and we all saw the cesspool of forever-betas in that shit. In fact to this day, 10 years later I think, warframe is still in beta, and I dont think a single game I ever EA'd made it to production, all were thieves. Chucklefish was a great example of that. Jesus and they have control over the forums too so no dissent allowed. They never finished the game but posted pics of their new multi million dollar studio and new houses.
Anyway sorry but fuck games these days.
Edit-spells and stuff
Now with a good job and financial stability I have no interest in piracy. DRM does seem to punish paying customers meanwhile those who will crack the game and pirate still find a way.
Can someone knowledgeable explain why DRM functions would be called on every zombie kill? I guess I don't have a good understanding on how these DRM checks are implemented in games in general.
Here they put some in the zombie kill routine, but I don't think there is anything special about zombie kills. It could have been anything: picked up ammo, loading a map, pass a certain event, on a timer, during a save, all of the above, etc...
I don't have a deep knowledge about the technology involved but from what I've seen modern DRM like Denuvo are based on virtual machines and are very flexible, allowing all sorts of checks at many points. Done well, there is little overhead, but some overzealous publishers do frequent lengthy checks, killing performance.
For the DRM to hold up the checks need to be frequent, hard to pin down and in practice that means in performance critical, complex code that can behave in unexpected ways.
Since when do publishers have access to source code to do those checks themselves? Developers do that. And yes, I am aware that in this particular case, for RE:Village, the developer and publisher are the same.
It has the same slowndowns it used to have on PSX, but somehow, worse, the game runs quite poorly during combat, stuttering when there is any new sprite on the screen.
I think they lost the source code, and made an emulator just f or this game, to allow them to shove the new "remastered" assets in (the remastered assets are just AI-processed backgrounds... quite poorly sometimes even, for example in one screen something that is clearly some grass near a fountain on PS1 became a green smudge on PC).
And that does not only apply to games, certain parts of MS office do not have source available anymore so MS has done binary patches to fix bugs, pixar almost lost part of a movie but an employee happened to have a offsite copy at their home.
Doing a full build from scratch of a game is a complicated thing. The build systems at a game studios are quite extensive.
Even if you were given access to the version control repositories for a game I think it would probably take you quite a long time to be able to successfully export and build everything from scratch.
Not that I'm in the know, but it seems likely that publishers can get code into the binary one way or the other.
And crackers, until they don't get to that point in game, they have no idea that what's ahead is legit game code or just another Denuvo trap to trigger something (game crash, patch previous cracked portion of game, corrupt saves, etc etc - the possibilities to fuck with the cracker are limited only by imagination). That's why cracking takes time when it comes to Denuvo, because is a tedious step-by-step dissembling boring job.
I can imagine disaster if someone inlines the wrong function here. Definitely something that shouldn’t make it out the door, but amazing the difference 6 letters could make.
I think this is pretty smart.
tehbeard (another comment in this thread) makes a point that maybe not attaching the DRM calls to the clock makes it easier to hide them, since a cracker would probably be looking for a time-based trigger.
By way of illustrating this point: C++ has std::chrono::system_clock, std::chrono::steady_clock, and std::clock, all of which give different guarantees on how the clock behaves.
Arguably, without EMPRESS, the crack would have taken a lot longer.
Doom Eternal & Metro Exodus – https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2020-05-29-denuvo-sec...
Monster Hunter World – https://www.vg247.com/2021/06/03/monster-hunter-world-denuvo...
Mass Effect Legendary Edition – https://www.nme.com/news/gaming-news/mass-effect-legendary-e...
Nier Automata – https://www.nme.com/news/gaming-news/nier-automata-update-re...
Taken literally, that's all of ~60 additional copies sold!
2. People who want to play the game immediately and can’t wait, but will download it for free if they can
3. People who want to play it but are happy to wait for a sale
4. People who will never buy the game, but will play a cracked version
Group 2 is pretty huge, and includes age groups who care a lot about cosmetic items online (teenagers-20s)
meaningful online service is the only thing that drives me to buy AAA games now and days, and most don't even have that.
Steam is a great thing for anti-piracy; 99% of the time it works without any friction and is faster/safer than piracy.
On the other hand I've only played the original Call of Duty and BF1942, and have neither paid for nor pirated any of the sequels of either. Frankly most AAA games actually really suck.
The only game I pirated in the last 10 or so years was Metro Exodus because it was removed from the Steam store just before launch.
I waited until I could buy it for ridiculously dirt cheap on sale (literally a tiny fraction of full asking price) because their actions at launch destroyed my willingness to pay full price. Had they done things differently, they easily could have had me as a happy full price purchaser.
But from what I've seen there are quite a number of titles with performance impacts out of using Denuvo. Overlord Gaming [1] has some videos with before and after comparisons for games where Denuvo got removed by the publisher. Of course, there could potentially be differences in test methodology or other stuff in the Denuvo removal patches, but there is some pretty interesting findings, eg.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKsesO3bdv4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08zW_1-AEng
Only AFTER the official launch, performance complaints started, then people realized the official launch binary, that has Denuvo, has performance issues, while the demo binary, that has no DRM, runs perfectly fine, using the exact same data.
I don't really blame them for wanting to prevent piracy, but I absolutely blame them for implementing it in a way that degrades the game only for paying customers.
For some games I've paid for a game but then still pirated it because the pirated copy removed things like unwanted software (uplay, etc.) or allowed me to play offline in a single player game.
I just want to pay for a game but still get a reasonable experience so for me paying and pirating can make sense.
So I see the intent, but not the logic
Their point is that literally all broken DRM like this does is punish paying customers and encourage piracy.
Nothing to do with the ethics of piracy - which - btw - if you don’t want me to pirate your game - don’t use DRM. ;)
That's clearly not true here. The game in TFA went ~two months without being cracked - that's what the DRM was there for.
> if you don’t want me to pirate your game - don’t use DRM
This is such a weird sentiment to see on a place like HN. Do you ignore the terms of software licenses that you don't like? If not, what's the difference?
Also one might argue there are second-order benefits to the paying customers, like lower prices and more products being offered since the seller can make more money.
Wait until you read about capcom.sys:
https://www.theregister.com/2016/09/23/capcom_street_fighter...
I don't trust any japanese company to make good PC games.
Like, you're pretty awful when you end up a target by the biggest companies of the world and even the scrappy upstart is double the market cap of your biggest member (Spotify is double Universal Music Group: https://www.billboard.com/articles/business/9529823/spotify-... )
Good luck with that - people aren't that fussy about the content when they want to veg out in front of the TV, and recently I've been watching netflix exclusives almost exclusively.
First is the advent of free to play games. While some are filled with dark patterns, many are very much playable for "freeloaders". Call of Duty Warzone, Starcraft 2, League of Legends, Valorant, CS:GO, even more casual games like Team Fortress 2, there's plenty of gaming for everyone without paying a dime.
Second is the sales. It was unusual in the past to have games for few dollars. Nowadays it's the norm. With Steam Sales and similar sales on other platforms, you can buy many AAA quality games for just a few dollars. Recent releases can be had for reduced prices too.
Third is the giveaways. Especially with Epic, but to some extent with GOG and Steam, it's very easy to have "games to play" these days. I have over 100 games on Epic and I didn't pay anything for them. About 20% of them are indie games that I probably won't ever play, but the remaining 80% are big games such as GTA 5 or Borderlands.
[1] https://www.engadget.com/2017-09-22-eu-suppressed-study-pira...
FIX: disambiguate 'it'
The nice part of this story for DRM vendors is that it works even if DRM is eventually cracked. It means you can win without being water-tight. Because most people admit that DRM will eventually be cracked.
There was also a great study on the impact to piracy by Netflix which showed a huge decrease in piracy of DVDs when the cost to view them was reduced to something people were willing to pay.
The economics have been demonstrated many many times that the market segments into what people are willing to pay for a product, and if your retail price is higher than the bulk of the market's willingness to pay, then you get either piracy (copies which generate no revenue) of if you could have perfect DRM, no revenue. The only difference between the two scenarios is how many copies are in circulation, not the amount of revenue that was made on selling the product.
The non-intuitive result is the for creative works (books, movies, video games) having more copies in circulation enhances revenue because subjective reviews heavily influence buying decisions in the market. This was starkly demonstrated in the London publisher's conference where publishers have all experienced that highly pirated books are more likely to be best sellers than non-pirated books. That works because more people who actually buy the book will have a better chance of having heard something positive about it before they buy it.
The markets have been dealing with DRM and non-DRM digital products for over 30 years now, there is a LOT of data that shows two things; DRM causes more problems for legitimate users than prevent piracy, and piracy has zero impact on the total revenue received from the digital products.
Now whether this actually helps sales is still out for debate -- some data points to piracy ultimately increasing lifetime sales of a product (see: Microsoft Windows)
Additeddly it would only prevent piracy and not cheating, but hey!
Or is the expectation that they'll somehow pivot from that to... I guess crypto? Aren't there dozens, hundreds, of companies in the crypto space already?
Did they buy one of them at least, or are they legitimately trying to build a crypto company from the ground up, with no stated innovation or insight into crypto?
Cryptographically proven digital ownership of content has been (games or in-game content), with freedom of resale, had been a long discussed topic in crypto communities for years. They have not given any details yet, but I do hope that it can be it.
Scaling is still an issue, tho.
Gog.com wouldn't exist without all developers going back to patch their online only games etc.
Games these days are often not even ready until a year or so after release meaning if you don’t trust the patch distribution to continue for a long time one shouldn’t even buy the games.
An online requirement is pretty easy to patch out after a while. Obviously you trust the developer to actually do it, and I wish more would. A good distributor could prove that they are reliable and patch away the online requirement after a year or so. After all DRM is usually about protecting a first crucial period of sales.
I haven’t really played a game that doesn’t use another online resource (data, opponents, DLCs…) in a very long time so perhaps I’m underestimating the problem of online requirements compared to someone who would e.g ever play an older offline game.
Importantly, when I “buy” (I use that term lightly for software) a game, I don’t expect it to be a perpetual functioning license that lets me show it to my kids in 15 years. I see it more as a movie ticket for brief entertainment. It's an unfortunate state of affairs - but I'd rather have 1 year of non-stuttering gameplay than a perpetual re-playable but flawed game if I'm forced to choose.