I know I might be in the minority, but I just wish we could stop at semi-difficult license keys.
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.
Used to pirate a lot as a poor kid in eastern europe, as there was no way I could either afford it, find a legal copy or both. Now as a paid developer I always buy the software / games I use, as its much less of a hustle, and I’d like to support the people whose work I’m using.
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.
In Finland (and probably elsewhere as well), people have the right to make physical copies of copyrighted works, for private use, and private use extends as far as giving copies to family and close friends. That means we copied a _lot_ of tapes in the 80's. Legally.
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.
My ex is Bulgarian. She makes over €150k+, and she outright refuses to buy any software, even an app for €0,99.
Also, she's rather wait for ads instead of pay the €0,99.
Other kids in Bulgaria literally made fun of me for buying WoW with summer job money, even though it was the one popular game that was complete crap pirated. Even every single office I've seen there before had pirated Windows and everything else.
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.
Well ... depending on the usecase it _is_ a waste of money. Libreoffice, Gimp and Inkscape are perfectly viable alternatives to MS and Adobe products if you are a casual user.
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.
I think those are good arguments for allowing teenagers to pirate software. If you learn how to use photoshop then you’re unlikely to relearn GIMP. And companies are less likely to pirate software. (Though I have heard of some small ones that do)
>If you learn how to use photoshop then you’re unlikely to relearn GIMP.
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.
Doesn't that approve of the thesis of OP. People who are not going to pay for a license, are not going to pay for it. No matter what. It makes more sense to have light license keys.
I think it's unfair to lump windows into the mix, because the monopoly still is very real and for certain circumstances (like, wanting to play certain games) there's no way around it.
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.
I see this same issue with books Particularly with international students (who are ironically paying the most in tuition and housing oftentimes). Though I go out of my way to find cheaper textbooks sometimes, or accommodate older editions that can be bought dirt-cheap used, students will still just find a scanned version somewhere and share them with each other. There's online networks where they do this apparently.
Well, to be honest, university textbooks (at least in US) is in general a predatory market. There are courses that require $800 worth of textbook.
> 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 others said plus diamonds are only valuable because they're absurdly expensive. The scam works like this:
- 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.
> 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?
You ask a good question, and to be honest: I don't have a good answer to it yet. I'm still trying to work out a consistent position on the whole topic. Therefore I'm going to give you a rather tentative view.
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 premise for why diamonds are a scam seems to be that you don’t personally see any value in them. Which is a perfectly fine position to have, but it doesn’t make them a scam. Everybody sees value in some things that other people don’t. Diamonds are essentially useless, but so is a painting. You might find them austentatious or distasteful, but that doesn’t make them a scam either.
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 consider natural diamonds specifically to be a scam, where paintings aren't, because both the symbolism and the scarcity of them were created by a single company, through a very long and thorough marketing effort.
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.
Am I? DeBeers may not have the major market share now, but I'm talking about how they, in a process that started over a hundred years ago, single-handedly turned diamonds into symbol of love, and held a monopoly position on them until recent times.
Since we can agree that they don’t have a monopoly, we can agree that they don’t artificially create scarcity.
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.
Of course I chose an analogy which sidestepped IP questions to focus on the moral issue of defending piracy based on the price.
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 haven't personally drawn a hard line in the question of whether or not IP law as a whole is good or bad. I hate to use this cop-out answer, but it depends.
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.
The reason I sidestep the IP issue is I am personally much more favorable to that argument, however I didn't see it as relevant when people are labeling market behavior as "predatory". 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. This idea of labeling something as "price gouging" as a moral defense for anything really. If someone owns something then they are free to ask whatever price they want, up to refusing to sell it at all. That's what ownership means.
> If someone owns something then they are free to ask whatever price they want, up to refusing to sell it at all. That's what ownership means.
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.
If you want to argue that IP is not real ownership and should not exist, then I cannot make a good counter-argument. Except to say that it is the system we have and to eliminate it would simply shift the debate to whatever new business model the video game or textbook publishers switched to.
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.
> 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.
I think it is ethically ok to rob diamond stores if somehow you are forced to possess diamonds and diamonds are only available through a prohibitively expensive and exploitative market.
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.
No we don't do that. One of the most popular questions the first day of class is whether a prior edition of the textbook will suffice. It is very commonly accepted, especially if changes are minor. Authors offer big sweeping improvements to attract buyers. Used textbooks are a robust business.
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.
> 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.
I don't see this as defending myself from an attack but as debating the logical basis of an ethical position that strikes me a purely emotional. In my initial comment I already pointed out trying to pick cheap textbooks. But people wanted to go after the easier target of expensive textbooks, so fine.
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.
> In my initial comment I already pointed out trying to pick cheap textbooks. But people wanted to go after the easier target of expensive textbooks, so fine.
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.
In practise, yes. Monopolising the only water source in town will get your property seized by the majority right quick; why should the legal system pretend otherwise?
The principled thing to do about software you consider spyware is to not use it. Not paying for a paid product you use daily and continuously derive value from is hard to justify in my view.
I did pay for a version of Windows that does not contain spyware, so I am consistent with my principles.
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.
As a poor kid in eastern europe i couldn't afford a car. I would steal one as people would have it covered by insurance and the factory makes thousands of copies each month anyway.
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.
Copyright infringement isn't theft or stealing. It's copyright infringement. If you could walk down the street and make a copy of any car you see for free you wouldn't deprive the owner of the car of his property. By copying you deprive the designer of the car the right to the scarcity of cars with his design. The problem is that we need to pay designers for R&D otherwise they stop designing cars.
>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.
Except that when you copy something you don't steal an existing copy. If the person were not going to buy something because they couldn't afford it, they're not a lost sale. This means there's no monetary loss for the company selling the software, it might even be beneificial as free marketing.
Sure. Worth mentioning cars are also insured, so there is no loss for the owner as they get a "refund". That means there is monetary loss for them. The car maker is also happy to sell them a new car. The only people losing are those in between. Just like with software. You know, those people also work for money.
I disagree with your way of looking at this, There's monetary loss from the insurance company because someone has to pay someone to make that one specific car that you want to steal, while the software is already written and distribution is free. In the case of software, nobody pays. Hardware, someone always has to pay.
Right after the iron curtain fell was a weird place to live in in Eastern Europe.
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.
Gabe correctly identified piracy as a service problem a decade ago. People pirate for two reasons: they can't otherwise buy legitimately at a reasonable[0] price, or the legitimate version is less convenient to obtain or use. It used to be people used no-CD cracks because of the inconvenience of inserting a CD even if they legitimately purchased the game. More draconian DRM consistently leads people to use cracks on legitimate game purchases. Hell, I recall at least one developer practically begging their community to crack their game because their publisher forced them to include Denuvo, but they could remove it as soon as a pirated version appeared.
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.
"or the legitimate version is less convenient to obtain or use"
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.
Just like movie theaters left the movie business at some points and entered the popcorn business there might be a reason why Netflix couldn't do without those un-skipables previews. Maybe numbers showed that enough previews triggered more rentals ? Which are now absent from naked downloaded DVDs ?
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.
It was definitely faster. I distinctly remember downloading a ~700MB Divx AVI from Easynews while the DVD was in progress. I don't remember what year but a rough guess was maybe 2010.
Ah, if by pirated DVDs you mean a 700MB Divx then yes I can see how it could be faster. There would need to be a lot of previews on the DVD and a lot of peers for the Divx and a beefy connection (so a recent movie I suppose) though.
If your torrent program supports it[0], you can tell it to download the first chunk (quarter, file, etc) at higher priority than the rest, then watch that while it downloads the second chunk at high priority, and so on (basically streaming, except done right rather than as a way to defraud the user out of their downloads).
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 correctly identified piracy as a service problem a decade ago.
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.
He literally built a PC game distribution platform that made buying games so convenient it sparked a PC gaming revival and still completely dominates the market. Note that Gabe didn't say DRM was the problem per-se, he said that inconvenience was the problem. Steam's DRM is unnoticed in the vast majority of circumstances.
DRM isn’t a bad thing per se. It’s intrusive DRMs that are the issue. Steam isn’t intrusive; I can launch a game using my start menu and never interact with Steam or worry about the DRM. DRM requiring people to insert the CD to play is intrusive.
There is a solution for that: family sharing. Make him his own account, activate it as family on yours, and the only limitation will be that you can’t play the same game at the same time.
Maybe something changed but last time I used family sharing would allow only one active game per account at a single time. But you can't go offline and keep playing while slightly risking an abuse detection. You can do the same, or at least could, with 'free weekend' games and play as long as you don't go online.
Another limitation is that this sharing isn't enabled for all games especially competitive online games (the system was widely abused by hackers to avoid bans).
Gabe's DRM platform isn't as bad as the rest! That's the thing: he saw a service problem and tried to solve it best he could. Steam's DRM is way less intrusive than Denuvo.
Does valve even really try to counter the steam DRM defeats?
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.)
Steam's DRM is nothing like the DRM which is causing constant issues on AAA titles. Of course you can apply Denuvo over top of Steam's DRM, but the 'normal' Steam DRM is very easy to remove or emulate (if you're learning to reverse-engineer it's actually a pretty good commercial target to learn on) and doesn't contain a bunch of dumb triggers executing huge chunks of virtualized code constantly during gameplay.
It helps that they have predicable pricing models.
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.
It's just as good as the witcher and exhibits precisely the same strengths and flaws, just in a different setting. Especially with regards to the day one state of the game and patching not really doing all that much in the first year.
It's more of an immersive sim than an RPG. It even encourages stealth play heavily in a lot of missions with explicit optional goals and by the way many mechanics are designed in general. If enemies were more intelligent about looking for the player instead of just standing around when becoming suspicious it could easily match the best of the genre like Deus Ex.
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 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.
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.
Note that the GP wrote "that would buy the game" which I think makes this unknowable / unmeasurable. You can measure how many players have pirated the game but not how many of them wouln't have bothered at all if they had had to pay for it.
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 see the deficit of the pirated copies sales vs the non-pirated copies sales.
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.
Ubisoft games require installing a 3rd party gamestore (Ubisoft Connect) which people might be reluctant to install. I know I am, Steam is the only DRMed store I use because it always works. On others I've come close to losing access to the account or just failing authentication where I have to crack a game I paid for to finish playing it.
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.
It's totally possible for a game to be cracked to accept a fake licence key, yet still have connect to an update server or what have you. That way the publishers end up easily seeing the amount of copies in the wild vs actual sales.
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.
That still doesn't tell you if whoever pirated the game would have bought the game, which is the point OP was making. Sure, you can know if 60% of the players are using a pirated copy, but if that pirate copy didn't exist, what percentage of the pirates would have bought the game? That's the interesting question that's hard to get an answer for.
You can track diffs between releases of a franchise, if you have enough releases.
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.
Sorry, but even if you know that both releases should have sold roughly the same from past sales that doesn't mean it has to stay true forever. For example, the platform might've become obsolete, people got better things to play than rehash #9001, other sales channels became more popular, pirating to work around issues with intrusive DRM, dissatisfaction with past products, and many other possible reasons.
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.
This seems like a pretty reductive take. An Ubisoft-sized company, having all the relevant data and having a huge incentive to learn everything that can be learned from it, is surely going to have some idea of the scope of the problem.
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.
On the other hand, many people refuse to buy anything with DRM on it, or wait for the massively-reduced "game of the year" edition that comes out a few years down the line, when a crack to remove DRM is available.
If you were to walk into a store that said "please support the creator" as payment, your shelves would be empty. Or in other words if software costed no money and always relied on donation, you'd be bankrupt.
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.
I believe the cases of steep sales drop were observed at the moment when a cracked game binary appeared. No game studio would want to spend resources (developers work and licensing cost) implementing anti-piracy for nothing.
Yep. My first developer position was at an audio software company that made a plugin used by EDM artists. The year our software was cracked (2009ish), our sales dropped by 65%. Support tickets also nearly quadrupled including a massive increase in refund requests and chargebacks because customers realized they could get it for free instead.
> No game studio would want to spend resources (developers work and licensing cost) implementing anti-piracy for nothing.
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.
> … "and mostly just cause problems for legitimate users."
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.)
Movies publishers does it as well (DRMs on movies media) since decades and we all know this have absolutely no effect : every movie is available on p2p networks even before being available in stores. I’d add that they even manage to get negative effects since only legitimate consumers are annoyed.
So it would not be surprising to have a similar situation there.
Apparently a lot of devs included SecuROM in their products not as an actual hindrance to pirates, but to placate investors who are concerned about piracy reducing sales.
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).
As far as I know SecuROM is popular because it takes a bit longer to crack, thus helping the publishers secure the critical sales of the first week. Afterwards many studios remove it again to make it actually playable.
I guess that's also why AAA games are hyped so much before release, so that many people preorder it.
Ahh, fair enough. Thinking about it, that comment was probably from 10 years ago when almost everything was cracked near day one and Steam hadn't yet reached 100% penetration.
This is probably why most new games have some sort of online multiplayer requirement - the DRM/purchase check is required to use the online, so a pirated copy means little.
Hardly. Except from this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27799795 and maybe another I miss the whole thread is about people growing up in poor countries stating piracy was the only way to watch content.
Was/am in the same boat. Did what I had to when broke and poor, now am happy to give extra when I can.
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.
Exactly when I was poor in my late teens and early twenties I pirated lots of games and software (adobe, etc). Now in my 40’s I purchase all games and make it a point to support developers.
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.
I still pirate movies sometimes because, due to HDCP, none of the streaming services work with my computer. Unfortunately, all the DVD rental places are gone now, too.
>All in-game shutters like the one from when you kill a zombie are fixed because Capcom DRM’s entry points are patched out so most of their functions are never executed anymore.
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.
DRM calls are sprinkled everywhere inside the code, usually statically linked or even inlined. This is to make it harder for crackers to identify them.
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.
If there is little overhead, then the game is cracked easily as the checks are rare and easily found.
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.
Quote:"...but some overzealous publishers do frequent lengthy checks..."
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.
I would think it very odd if publishers were not given the source code. If you were a publisher, would you want some small shop to be able to disappear off the face of the Earth, preventing you from ever doing even simple ports and patches?
That actually happens a lot. Mass Effect Legendary Edition is missing a DLC because the source code was lost. Many of Square Enix's hit games like the PS1 Final Fantasy games and the PS2 Kingdom Hearts have lost the original source code and the modern ports are either based on PC ports or are rebuilt from the shipped assets.
Also I have a very strong impression Legend of Mana for PC is... emulated.
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).
Neither of those examples have anything to do with if a publisher was given access to the source. Those seem to be more about those games being developed in a time when source control and backups were handled more loosely within the industry as a whole.
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.
EA released a remastered C&C some time ago. One of the developers involved in that described the problems they had with the video quality, the originals where lost, the best they could do was extract videos from the PlayStation port and try different AI up scaling algorithms. The result isn't pretty.
Which would almost certainly have required different actors, given the 25 years since the original release, and I imagine that would have cause a huge uproar in addition to being fairly expensive.
Out of scope, sure, but I agree that that option prevents "extract old video from the production version and try to upscale it automatically" from qualifying as "the best they could do".
Depending on the contract, publishers might have the ability to get a copy of the source code, but they certainly are not going to be monkeying around with it.
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.
I imagine the DRM is contracted out to a company which the publisher uses for more of their games. The DRM guy or gal comes in a couple days around the end of development, imports some libraries, and sprinkles some function calls here and there. There either isn't the knowledge/time/co-operation to optimize it, or the actual devs are told to stay well away from the DRM stuff to avoid messing something up and causing piracy false positives.
Not that I'm in the know, but it seems likely that publishers can get code into the binary one way or the other.
The DRM in this case, Denuvo, is a framework. One that is very finicky to work with and it has a gazzilion of different API's which are variants of same basic thing, but when compiled it goes into different code machine. Also, strictly speaking, is not the programmers that embed Denuvo in the game, is the level designers. They are the one who select where in the game the checks are made.
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.
> Done well, there is little overhead, but some overzealous publishers do frequent lengthy checks, killing performance.
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.
My guess is they want intermittent checks, but don't trust the system clock to advance, but a zombie kill is evidence that time has advanced for the player. Seems like it shouldn't block the main game thread and there should be a longer time to live for that check, and maybe those are the bugs.
Generally in a software system you can't count on a time source to move forward, to move in consistent intervals, or to move at all. In a system that is designed to be resistant to attack, it actually makes a lot of sense to instead rely on a desirable event critical to progression. Especially one that occurs relatively infrequently and is likely associated with a lot of other complex calculations.
I think I understand the theory. If I was a cracker though, I would think that patching out the system clock calls (in order to prevent DRM checks) would have a lot of game-breaking unintended side-effects (animations, other time-based mechanics, etc). And if that was the case, it would be a perfect place to trigger the DRM calls, since a cracker couldn't patch the system time calls without breaking the game.
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.
A game’s animation and other in-game timing functions are very unlikely to be based on wall-time, instead typically relying on monotonic counters that are higher resolution, less overhead, and not potentially adjusted backwards or forwards while the game is running. Thus, disabling wall-time accesses for a crack should have little influence on game timing and animations.
That makes sense to use monotonic counters for game mechanics. I think the point still stands in that case though: if the DRM calls were tied to the same time source as the animation system, you couldn't patch one without breaking the other.
> Generally in a software system you can't count on a time source to move forward, to move in consistent intervals, or to move at all.
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.
Yeah, a lot of publishers voluntarily remove DRM from their games after a few months because most of the profit is made right at launch. Once the first round of discounts start to hit DRM serves no purpose anymore.
Publishers put this DRM in place only as a short-term measure, removing it within a year in almost all cases after the majority of their sales are well gone. They do this in the hope to convincing people who might pirate the game to ultimately purchase it, which I'm assuming must work to some extent or they wouldn't pay the rather high costs of Denuvo, etc. (and I'm willing to bet their sales data probably supported this theory).
I'm under the impression that the group of people who if they can pirate something, will do so and never buy it, but if they can't, will just buy it, is quite small indeed.
Every time it comes out that a pirate version fixes things broken in the mainline version, esp if drm is what broke it, I slide more firmly into always pirate category.
meaningful online service is the only thing that drives me to buy AAA games now and days, and most don't even have that.
That describes me. I pirated lots of games when I was still into gaming. I bought Tribes 2, for example, because of course you can't pirate it if you want to play online (and it's a multiplayer-only shooter). Same for e.g. PUBG and one or two others.
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.
I generally won't buy single player games I can't pirate. The reason for this is they either have some online only bullshit, which is unacceptable in a single player game, or some DRM performance degrading virus.
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.
> 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.
Not just that. I'm not an expert, but from what I read, some DRMs will encrypt assets and critical game logic and let them be decrypted in real time on a virtual machine so that they aren't directly extractable from memory.
Probably a possible “checkpoint” from Denuvo or similar DRM manufacturers. One would define an “event” for the DRM to trigger. Sometimes it’s starting the game, starting a New Game, loading game/saving game, and so on. Perhaps Capcom thought to (perhaps aptly?) make the check that if you kill a zombie in the zombie game, it checks if you bought the rights to do so.
I bet that all development and testing was done using stubs for those DRM hooks, which were probably developed by a different team closer to the shipping date, and once they were integrated it was too late to do anything about them.
Let me preface this by saying that different publishers likely have different implementations of Denuvo checks, and also there are lots of different iterations of Denuvo.
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.
Also a notorious case: Final Fantasy XV famously could run the full game using the demo binary, this is how it was "cracked" before launch, when players realized the demo binary could run the preloaded content before release.
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.
Younger, poorer me would not hesitate to pirate a game if that meant it’d be free. I do not blame a company for trying to protect their investment. I’d do that, too, if I was dropping 10s of millions of USD into developing a game.
> I do not blame a company for trying to protect their investment.
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.
The absurd point here (and in many other cases) is that paying customers get a worse experience than those who pirate.
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.
1. Paying customers get worse experience than pirates.
2. Your software lifespan is reduced. (Worst if you use 3rd party DRM).
3. The company pay for something that 99% of the time doesn't work.
> literally all broken DRM like this does is punish paying customers
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?
I vote with my wallet. I don't support DRM: I don't ever buy anything with DRM. I go out of my way to buy DRM-free stuff. (sometimes I buy a couple of copies)
By the same logic a broken lock on a store's door does literally nothing except prevent customers from entering the store to buy stuff. Sure, but this is just a risk of having security. The solution is to fix the problem, not discard locks and security.
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.
I don’t really trust capcom on pc. I can’t run re:2 remake without using video drivers from years ago. DMC 3 never worked and you had to mod it to make your controller work properly. Re:4 on pc gives people migraines from frame pacing issues, my family members can’t play it without nausea, so I’ve never been able to show them the game (on consoles it’s fine). I heard street fighter on pc has an issue too but I’m not familiar. Edit: dmc5 on of apparently has issues where save games get deleted, so I’m told that the community uses a cheat program or shares save files to get around it
I have never played Lost Planet 3. I bought Lost Planet 3, but I was unable to get it to work on my Radeon RX 470. I’m sure I’d work on my 2070 RTX but I’m wouldn’t be surprised if it still didn’t work.
This is pretty good for how fast the game got cracked. For context, this is Denuvo 11, the latest version, and the game came out on May 7, 2021. So a little over 2 months.
Publishers want to protect first month of sales, which is the biggest one for projects like RE (heavily advertised offline games). So, I would consider it a success
This sounds about right given RE Village is now on sale on Steam etc. I don’t think new release multiplayer games go on sale so early (happy to be wrong here).
Took the music industry a few decades to learn that suing your fans is bad for business. Now they have to deal with Spotify and Apple/Google/Amazon Music.
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-... )
The music industry continues to blame illegal downloading and Apple strong arm tactics for its perceived profit loss. Hollywood has taken the music industry example to heart and is stonewalling Netflix to make sure it continues to maintain the upper hand over streaming services.
> Hollywood has taken the music industry example to heart and is stonewalling Netflix to make sure it continues to maintain the upper hand over streaming services.
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.
There is certainly fewer reasons to pirate games today than in the past. Three major things have changed since the '90s.
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.
This is typical. DRM doesn't deter or hurt pirates, and according to the EU[1] piracy doesn't hurt sales either, all that DRM does is to create support problems and hurt legitimate paying customers.
The typical story of DRM is that roughly the first month of launch, where the DRM still isn't cracked, is responsible for a lot of sales. It's where people who _would_ pirate but also want the game _now_ because of the hype.
Those people become sales because of DRM. Where not having DRM would have lost the sale to piracy.
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.
You read the EU report right? People who buy cracked copies of software do not, in general, ever pay for that software (certainly not retail anyway).
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.
Why even bother implementing DRM if it gets cracked anyways? People who cannot afford the game won't buy it even if DRM was perfect. This is also supported by the EU study that was here on HN recently.
Most of the money made by an AAA game is made in the first week or two of sales; DRM that takes a week or two to crack is “good enough” from the POV of the publisher.
Good point. I think there might be a win-win solution: If DRM degrades the experience so much, they should release a patch e.g. after two weeks (maybe a month?) from release which removes the DRM.
To add to the other comments, 3rd-party DRM providers such as Denuvo are very careful to avoid claiming totally invulnerability to cracks; the cutting edge is all about covering the initial post release that will represent 99% of the volume of the sales curve.
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)
Just imagine if you could simply prove the ownership of a game using well-understood multidecade-old cryptography (in a new way). That's what I hope GameStop[0] can become. Or whoever else.
Additeddly it would only prevent piracy and not cheating, but hey!
What expertise does GameStop suddenly have? I'm aware of their recent flood of cash, but isn't their expertise in retail brick-and-mortar?
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?
From the best I can gather, the new CEO is trying to pivot GameStop from a brick-and-mortar company with online presence, to a tech company with a brick-and-mortar presence.
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.
"Cryptography" doesn't solve any problems not already solved by licensing servers. And DRM will still be required on games to prevent the software from being modified in such a manner as to ignore licensing / proof of ownership.
This is why I’d always have an always online DRM. I don’t mind not being able to play when my internet is down. Yes I know some people are on metered connections or don’t have internet at all. Even so, it’s better than this if you absolutely must have DRM.
Dunno if you realized this, but once online-only games become unprofitable, the servers are down for good and the games become useless. If all games up to this point were like this, we wouldn't be able to play childhood games anymore.
Gog.com wouldn't exist without all developers going back to patch their online only games etc.
That’s another drawback. And it’s one I’d rather have than stutter too (of course I’d rather have neither but let’s assume that’s not on the table).
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.
Man that's a bleak view of games if you're ok with them being relevant for a couple of years so you can get brief entertainment. Might as well train an AI to constantly spew images and sounds that you like at you and call it a day.
That’s basically what buying AAA games these days is. First year unplayable because of bugs, then a brief lifetime as you finish it (single player) or the user count dwindles (multi player).
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 :/