DRM = digital rights protection, as a way to protect against piracy. But one of the selling point of Witcher 3 is that its DRM-free, because it’s developers are against it, claiming it’s restrictive.
I don’t know much about DRM, but doesn’t this encourage piracy?
I got my free Witcher 3 key by purchasing a GTX 970 graphics card. I redeemed the key on GoG and got all the file downloading links from the official site of GoG. Installing the game from these files did not require any kind of CD key or online verificiation whatsoever. But the thing is, I just checked some file sharing sites, and they still have “cracks”. Why? I mean it is DRM free, right? So why do pirates still need cracks to play it?
The idea is that DRM isn’t preventing piracy to a large enough extent to be worth the loss of goodwill it causes among legitimate customers.
DRM is, along with all of its other faults, inherently a reactive kind of tool: You create a DRM scheme you think is can’t-miss, it gets cracked, and you eventually find out and have to change your scheme, which gets cracked, and so on. It’s an arms race which has been going on in roughly its current form since the 1970s.
And DRM tends to have collateral damage, in the form of increased development time (to think up and implement the DRM), increased software complexity (which works out to being increased development time), and things like false positives and other damage on the users’ systems. You don’t want your users to get the idea that your games make their systems crap out.
And, for all that, the game ends up on sale illegally in China and Russia anyway.
So, why are there still Witcher 3 cracks online? I don’t know. Maybe they’re all malware. Maybe there’s parts of the game which have to be unlocked, and the cracks are actually cheats.
CD Projekt Red has come to not believe in DRM. They reason (wisely) that pirates are gonna pirate regardless (I mean, they’re Polish, they would know about extensive piracy ), and would rather spend money on game development than DRM outsourcing - not to mention coding the way they like rather than being told they have to adopt this or that file structure/format to make it easier to protect. They’d rather build a solid reputation and deliver the best content they can to the people who actually buy the games, to generate repeat sales and customer fidelity. And it shows - their games can be clunky at times but they work, and they’re little gems.
CD Projekt also keeps updating their old games and providing more content to players after the sale, for example when they learned that the English translation of Witcher 1 was abysmal they released a new and extended voice-over (the so-called “director’s cut”), and threw in a few gigs of improved textures and game assets. Free of charge.
Their goal is also to establish a communication of sorts with pirates, “we make *really *good games, we’re not evil like Ubisoft, we patch our shit, we don’t nickel & dime you through DLC etc… - so if you enjoyed the game, consider supporting us so we’ll make more”. Furthermore they reason that pirates that play the game and enjoy it talk about it with their friends, which can generate sales down the line.
Ultimately though their approach is simply that pirates are not, and have never been, “lost sales”. They’re people who wouldn’t ever have bought the game. So why bother ?
FWIW, their approach works with me. I bought all three Witchers.
Just googling around, it appears that there is a crack needed if you got it before release. Thought “crack” is overstating it–they just left out some files. I believe the idea was to let you download some tiny files as soon as they were released and not have to get the whole thing.
I do also largely suspect some cracks are malware, based on the sites I saw hosting the crack.
The small file you are talking about is actually a legit file that you need to play the game. Since you could download the game before the offcial release date, they did not allow you to download it completely (so you couldnt start playing it before official date), and left out a tiny file that is needede to start the game.
Persoanlly I think no DRM for such a major game is pretty lame. Pretty much every single AAA games now use some form of DRM or other. No DRM = super easy to pirate. This is like 10 years ago where you could download a simple crack and copy-paste over the original exe and … done!
I think profit wise CDPR would gain significantly from DRM, and then they can put that profit into developing in areas that truly matters such as graphics and features, not that no-DRM non-sense.
Sure. But DRM = hacked in a couple days at the most anyway, so…
In fact, I can’t really think of *any *game that has not been hacked and is not available out there, with only token effort required to find them. The closest to “hack proof” are games that require a constant connection to a server that handles part of the game - MMOs (and Diablo 3). But even those games can be played on pirate servers, which do exist.
While I buy games on Steam, I’ve been known to try them out to see if they’ll work on my low spec machine. And I’m always able to find a cracked version.
(It’s how I found out South Park: The Stick of Truth will run on pre-HD Intel cards, for example. The specs say it needs a much higher GPU.)
so? even DRMed games are cracked and “Super easy to pirate” in short order. there are three groups of people involved here:
the w4reZ scene, who will crack and pirate your game no matter what you do.
people who end up using pirated copies out of spite because your DRM scheme treats them as de facto criminals and makes things a hassle.
people who buy your game and put up with the DRM hassle.
#1 is not worth worrying about, no DRM scheme in the world will change them. foregoing DRM might help prevent group #3 from getting fed up and pirating. group 2 is the kicker; stop treating your customers as criminals from the get-go and they might do something crazy like pay you for the game you made.
“Restrictive”, eh? That’s an interesting way of putting it. I wonder if you’d describe the CD-burner I had that got bricked by Starforce as “restricted”. The fact is, every DRM scheme ever devised has served mainly to interfere with the enjoyment of legitimate customers. Have they slowed pirates down? Sure- briefly. Have they stopped pirates? Never. Most of the time, they don’t even inconvenience pirates, since the version they use doesn’t have any DRM. What probably springs to your mind is a bank that has no security cameras or locks on its doors; in comparison to a normal bank as you know it today. But this isn’t what you’re actually dealing with; a more apt comparison would be a bank with military-grade security checkpoints, hundreds of armed guards, fingerprint and retinal scanners and multiple razor wire fences, surrounded by fields of land mines. Your money may be more secure, but you’ll have very few customers if no one can get into the building.
Let’s take a look at Spore, shall we? It shipped with Sony’s SecuROM, a built-in system that required it to “phone home” by connecting to an EA server every few days, and came with a three-installation limit. Surely, something so thoroughly shielded would be impossible to pi- oh, wait. The pirated version got released before the legal release did. And the game went on to become the most pirated title in history.
Putting aside both practical and moral concerns, doing a DRM-free release is good from a business standpoint- it sets you apart from the competition. It allows you to have a much more liberal refund policy (you don’t really have to worry about people abusing it to steal games from you if they can already steal them without going through channels). GOG was originally launched as “Good Old Games”, with the idea being to take old games that weren’t commercially available anymore and make them easily run on modern systems. As the well of old good games begins to run dry (not that it’s finished yet (where’s my Icebreaker, Marcin?), you need something to set you apart. A firm anti-DRM stance does so very nicely.
I used to pirate a lot of games. (now that I have money, I buy them)
DRM was a waste of time. Basically,
If the game was single player, it was cracked within a few hours of release. A few days at most.
If the game was multiplayer and reliant on remote servers, it depended. Cracking a game like that requires actually reverse engineering and emulating the remote server. Some of these games, the remote server did little more than send a packet saying “I’m here”, and that was crackable, sorta. Others were a lot more involved.
Anyways, #2 works as a DRM scheme, but it has rarely ever been done. This is because everyone whines about it, and, pretty much every time it’s been done, the company doing it has been unable to keep their servers up all of the time. Servers go down, legitimate purchasers can’t play, much complaining ensues, the game company integrates the server code into the game you play on your computer so you no longer need the remote server.
Nobody has mentioned Denuvo yet. It’s a new type of DRM that bascially take forever to crack. Battlefield hardline has it, and it still has not been cracked.
DRM and non-DRM’s effect on people buying the game is no clear-cut, black-white. The easier to crack for people, the more likely people are going to pirate it. I think this is common sense. If all it takes is a simple copy-paste, then why not?
I think key advantages of having geniune copy is multiplayer, the ease of upgrade done automatically by clients like steam, and mods. It’s just easier and much less hassel with a geniune copy.
With that said, the easiest would be just download the copy from official site, and download a crack and replace the original exe. This is what it was like 10 years ago. With each additional step, like installing from iso (many people don’t even know how to mount ISO), replace multiple files in different folders, having to re-download the game to have the latest patch (as opposed to have it installed auotimatically by game clients), you will have less people using pirated version because it is more of a hassel. That’s why Witcher 3 did was quite stupid, it reduces the barrier to entry far too low making it too easy for even the most unsophisticated gamer to pirate it.
probably because I’ve never heard of it until now. But now that you’ve tipped me off to it, I looked and it’s descended from the same Sony DADC which installed rootkits on people’s PCs just because they wanted to listen to a CD. So fuck Denuvo, and fuck your shilling for this filth.
DRM solutions add to the expense of getting a computer game to market (they have to buy the tech from whoever made it).
CD Projekt Red made a simple calculation…the cost of DRM is not worth it. Remember not every pirated game is a sale lost (although the industry likes to calculate it that way).
Considering I have yet to see a DRM implementation that hasn’t been cracked I think they might be right. DRM tends to screw over your best customers without stopping the people you want to stop.
You do realize that pirates also release patches that devs only make available through Steam/Origin/Uplay these days, right ? You don’t have to redownload the whole game.
As for mods, DRM makes it harder to develop those, because while hackers can trivially break weak file encryption and reverse engineer software, not every modder is a hacker. Precious few are, really. So plenty of games are, in essence, mod-proof.
But, OTOH, you can absolutely mod a hacked game. Why couldn’t you ?
Witcher 3 is available through the exact same underground channels as the rest. You still need to “install from iso” (I knew how to do that by age 14, man…and that was in the dinosaur age, before there was Google), still need to find a .torrent of the files in the first place etc…
The barrier to entry for the casual pirate is exactly the same for every game: You find an illegal copy of the game online, download it, and run the installer that comes with it. As long as even one person in the world has cracked the DRM, this will be possible. There is no difference between one person doing it, and everyone being able to do it, because once it’s cracked, it’s cracked.
I agree. Specifically, if you’re gonna use DRM, it better be industrial strength stuff you have *evidence *that it works.
For example, it took months for pirates to crack some of the Assassin’s creed games because your copy of the game game would upload data files to a remote server, and that server would actually generate the save files using a complex algorithm. Took months for the pirates to reverse engineer this.
If you don’t have the money to get access to DRM that good, don’t even bother. It’ll get cracked the first day anyway.
Yup. But now they know how.* Assassin’s Creed Unity *was cracked a week or so after release. Ubisoft still has to maintain their byzantine Uplay crapola though, otherwise legit customers would get screwed out of their saves. Winning !
In the words of the Baroque philosopher Fallout Boy, this ain’t a scene : it’s an arms race. And an unbalanced one at that. One side has to come up with new schemes all the time, paying lots of very talented brainiacs do so. The other does it for fun, compete against each other for who’ll crack each game the fastest and can rely upon hundreds of talented coders all across the world… many of which are actually the selfsame brainiacs who have all the incentives in the world to work both sides of the fence.
The only really usable system is keeping the game off of users’ machines, so they don’t have any way to monkey around with it. Things that communicate with external servers take longer, but they will get figured out well enough to play.
It’s largely the reason everyone is so pushing massive multiplayer. Sure, you might be able to make a fake server. But you won’t be able to host a ton of connections without being caught. If you design the game where it needs a lot of people, the experience in that manner just sucks.
), and would rather spend money on game development than DRM outsourcing - not to mention coding the way they like rather than being told they have to adopt this or that file structure/format to make it easier to protect. They’d rather build a solid reputation and deliver the best content they can to the people who actually buy the games, to generate repeat sales and customer fidelity. And it shows - their games can be clunky at times but they work, and they’re little gems.