Devil May Cry 4, derided for not being as good as the previous three, had its poor sales blamed in part on piracy.
That’s not what I’m talking about. Games KEEP HAVING DRM. Which means that Executives ACTUALLY THINK piracy is a problem and hurting their sales. If they didn’t, they’d stop bothering.
I haven’t pirated any games in quite awhile (barring a few well justified exceptions), but I admit I’m a little leery about the possible advent of secure DRM. Companies are treating games more and more as services rather than products. It’s understandable, and a lot of the time it’s more convenient for the customer, but I worry more and more about whether I’m still going to be able to access my purchases years down the line. Each layer of DRM adds another compatibility issue that might render the game unplayable when Windows 15 ends legacy support for whatever it depended on. A whole bunch of games were nearly crippled by the end of Games For Windows Live, and deeper DRM might have even more severe results down the road.
And on the more selfish side of things, I worry about region locking. As an American living in Japan, I’ve encountered a number of situations where items I’ve wanted to purchase were simply unavailable locally. With secure DRM, I can’t help but feel those region locks could become more common and more restrictive. Piracy has always been the “well, I paid for it, dammit, and if you won’t let me play it from this IP I’ll just torrent it” last line of defense and I would be a little worried if it went away.
The irony of effective DRM keeping you from stealing a copy of the game (that you may or may not have purchased) to bypass the DRM or whatever other garbage the game shipped with is pretty funny.
We are writers and translators in the PC game and mobile business in Tokyo. Anything that stops or even slows down pirates is good news to us. SAAS is coming big time. Its the future.
Thats a bizarre assumption. I’m against IP theft so I’m a spammer. Weird.
To be fair, some of us have seen quite a few E-mails that start with something similar to “We are writers and translators in the PC game and mobile business” and end up trying to sell us their products/services.
More because your username also happens to be a Web site whose only purpose seems to be advertising a kickstarter.
Ah…well that’s a brand new site. Its actually our company site for translation work in Tokyo. Its just a few days old but we will be adding other projects. I admit I’m in love with the name. My wife came up with it. Its a play on the 7 major gods. P.s. Good to know the site’s been indexed by Google I guess. You never know with Google. lol.
Ah, I see. Fair enough. I’m not trying to sell anything per se. I did ask a mod for permission to post the kickstarter link but if answer is no, no harm done for me.
I’ve been a fan of The Straight Dope since 1973 when I looked forward every week to Cecil’s latest column. I didn’t realize this forum was here and actually just stumbled into it.
I understand people being leery. I myself use ad blockers and deal with a load of spam in e-mail. Tired of it as well.
I do believe in SAAS and have no sympathy for thieves.
There was a brief window in the 90s when CDs were comparable in size to hard drives, and were essentially uncopiable by ordinary users, when piracy of major games would have been effectively impossible (Baldur’s Gate, for instance, required five CDs, at a time when a gig was a large HD). I wonder if any trends can be detected by comparing that time? Did games that came out at about that time really sell better than those before (when games were small enough to not need CDs) or after (when hard drives caught up to CD sizes and burners became commonplace)?
The PS4 versions of these games can be resold second hand. Are they seriously putting something in say the PC version of Just Cause 3 that stops you loading the game on a second machine and creating a new account? :dubious:
For something like Just Cause 3, if you buy the physical box you’re most likely just buying a disk with the Steam installer and an activation key, which will be permanently tied to your account when you use it. The majority of PC game boxes these days are effectively just empty boxes to display on a shelf. Many don’t even include any game data at all on the discs.
Ok but these are two separate issues. There is no reason that PC Denuvo protected games can’t be sold in disc copies that allow the user to sell their physical copy to another person and for a new person to activate as long as the disc is in the drive every time its played. Both PS4 and XBox one allow this.
The fact that the second hand game market has been killed on PC is firmly in the hands of Valve / Steam, nothing to do with Denuvo.
Dubious. Every producer would love to be able to sell his product for whatever price each single customer is willing to pay providing it still turns a profit. For instance, if it costs $5 to produce, for $6 to all people who aren’t willing to pay more, for dollar $10 to those willing to pay this price, for $20 to those willing to pay so much, and so on. It would maximise their profit. Unfortunately, they can’t offer them at a different price to every customer, nor anyway guess who is willing to pay how much.
But they can try to find ways around this problem. Like selling the same product under a prestigious brand in upscale shops for twice the price they sell it under a generic brand in a different shop. The sales on Steam work in the same way. Those who are eager to play the game and willing to pay big bucks will buy it for $40, while others who would never buy it at this price will do so for $15 during a sale. More profits for the company. I doubt they have the slightest issue with this scheme.
Brick & mortar stores stopped taking open software around a decade before Steam even existed.
I agree. And to add to your comments I see companies here beginning to see the value in “ADDED VALUE.” Putting out games in tiers or for example, in Visual Novels, continuing a VN with new episodes, new characters…add-ons. Want the basic? Great, here it is for X price. If you want more the options will be there.
Its not so much Steam as it is getting games and VNs to Steam and other outlets. For example, we’re about to embark on a 8 or 9 month journey translating a 50+ hour VN and have just learned episodes are being added. This stuff does not pop out of someone’s butt in a day or two. 
Its expensive and time consuming. Piracy has really been a near mortal wound for many companies around the globe. I hope it is winding down to some extent.
Ok fine but either way you can’t say that this unbreakable copy protection is aimed at killing the second hand resale market. On PC its already dead and on Xbox one and PS4 this has no effect on it.
I’m completely fine with unbreakable copy protection. If you really can’t afford to pay full price for a game theres plenty of cheap indie games to play or you can wait a few months and either get it on a steam sale or buy a second hand disc copy on console. Game developers deserve to get paid.
I don’t think there was ever a huge retail market for used software. In part because it was so easy to copy – sell a used copy of Space Wizards to someone for $5 and they go home and copy it and sell it back to you. Try to hedge your profits by offering a low buy price and you’re not worth selling to. I’m not saying that no one ever sold used software but I don’t remember it ever being remotely like the console game market.
Maybe I should start another thread to discuss this idea, but I’m glad there’s no used secondary market on PC. I don’t know how anyone thinks that’s better than piracy for the industry. All of the money that’s allowing 4000 gamestop stores to be open is money drained from paying publishers/developers from their games. People are getting to enjoy the game without contributing any money towards those who made it.
People sometimes say “oh I hate steam [or digital distribution in general] because you can’t resell your games!” - I mean, would you rather have to buy a game for $40 and resell it for $12, or would you rather have it for $10 and keep it forever? The licensing/no resale model for gaming allows the prices to be lower.
To demonstrate, imagine steam allowed you to sell “used” copies of your games, and they put it right up there on the marketplace. So you get a game that’s $20. A bunch of people beat the game or otherwise grow bored of it and decide to sell it for $19. So you go to the store page. You can either buy a new copy for $20, or a used one for $19. Out of principle, some people would buy the new copy to compensate the developers, but most people would just go “derp derp why not the cheaper one?” - or if not $20 and $19, maybe $20 and $14. Or $20 and $6, because everyone is undercutting the other sellers for a fast sale. In which case very few people would buy a new one.
So now the game is barely selling any new copies outside of sales that drive a spike in demand (although not such a huge spike in demand, if the used prices are selling for closer to the discount price) because people are just picking the used copies. Just the same copies being passed around to different people, with none of the secondary money going to those who made the game. So in response publishers either have to accept drastically lower sales, or raise prices significantly so that the copies that are floating around and being resold at least compensate them for a higher value in the first place.
That sounds awful to me, and would severely negatively impact the game market overall.
Consoles did it because they were expected to run a game without any sort of authentication for many many years - it’s only recently that we expect consoles to be online, and even then, many aren’t. Whereas PCs have been able to have CD key databases for 20 years. So consoles have basically been forced to retain the “disk as absolute propery” model rather than software as a license. It’s so set that when microsoft tried to limit or abolish it with the xbone, there was a massive revolt.
But all the money from those used sales are allowing people to play the game without ever compensating the creators/owners, which is scarcely different than piracy from the perspective of the creators/owners. I have no idea why no one talks about the market-shifting affect of gamestop, but we’re always talking about piracy. It’s better for 10 people to own a game for $10 each than for one $50 copy to be passed around to 10 people. Both for the end users and the game makers.