If Natrox works for a game company, and he and his colleagues decide to use DRM, that's their prerogative. We can't argue against the fact that they're trying to defend their livelihood. As a paying costumer, however, I cannot abide a game being made (potentially) worse for me, due to a "lost sales" mindset.
People pirate games because:
-They can't purchase it (lack of funds, no platform to purchase said games on, region locking, etc);
-They want to circumvent DRM that actually makes the game worse (remember Securom?);
-They want to test a game before spending 60+ bucks on it;
-Or, alternatively, they are scum of the earth who think they shouldn't have to pay for someone else's hard work.
In any of the cases above, you aren't getting a sale anyway, and the only people you're inconveniencing are the otherwise paying customers. Pirates don't have to deal with your safety measures. Inversely, applying "uncrackable" DRM on your game does not guarantee that people who would pirate your game will be purchasing it.
Many of the games I pirated as a pennyless teen, I ended up buying later on Steam and GOG, once I got a fixed source of income. Not only for moral reasons, but because it's handy to be able to safely redownload those games from reputable distributors.
[QUOTE=Natrox;51399775]
Seriously, if you're going to assume that game companies only just do stuff to please 'suits', you're misguided.
[/QUOTE]
Well... in the 6 years in the industry it's not just pleasing the "suits" but 60% of my time was in the end... doing something that made publisher or investor happy agaist our will.
Even if it meant changing the vision of the project or completely ruining it.
I have even seen studios ran into the ground because they tried to hard to incorporate the ideas of the publishers.
Not to mention, lots of PS4, mobile and Steam games that were 100% finished and ready for a softlaunch but got pulled, because one of the suits calculated and decided that it's not worth it in the end.
And if someone comes with... "well just don't do it" it's not that simple.
We are speaking of huge budgets that go +2 million Euros (not much compared to AAA), publishers own these projects.
Milestone wasn't going like expected? WELL TOO BAD, kiss the last 3 months goodbye, we wont going to pay for these.
Couldn't implement the crap the publisher wanted? Well maybe we should look for another studio because you are incompetent.
The issue is not that you have ONE GUY representing your publisher or investor but up to 10 people some of which you never see or meet, they only exist in your email inbox, communicating with you.
These guys have to validate their position in the machinery, they don't make decisions that the game profits of, they have to underline how good "their" decision is, playing out their colleagues. And they know absolute horseshit of videogames.
It's horrible.
[QUOTE=Egevened;51399790]"it works for me lol" does not discredit the thousands of legitimate complaints by users that hit way more than recommended settings for them[/QUOTE]
I'm not saying it ran well for me so it doesn't count if other people had problems. I'm saying those games do not need 16GB or RAM and any issues people faced were due to other things. Inquisition ran at 20fps on my old PC (which was actually an improvement over most games), but it still never used more than 4GB of RAM at a time.
Similarly, as mentioned by Natrox, Tomb Raider runs fine if you're not an idiot who's trying to run very high textures with 4GB or VRAM.
[QUOTE=Natrox;51398043]I don't have the exact numbers on hand. Even if I did, it wouldn't be my call to just put them out there.
Last I checked it was a matter of 1~2 frames per second. Pretty much negligible.[/QUOTE]
That's a lot worse than I thought. Not really acceptable.
It's not a huge hit, but it's still a significant hit that you are willingly (and even paying money to) leverage against the people who actually buy your product.
[QUOTE=elowin;51404112]That's a lot worse than I thought. Not really acceptable.
It's not a huge hit, but it's still a significant hit that you are willingly (and even paying money to) leverage against the people who actually buy your product.[/QUOTE]
It's unnoticeable. I reckon if you take a standard modern day CPU, it wouldn't even be 1 frame (my work PC has an old 2011 quad-core). If you're struggling to make 30 fps somehow, then yeah this might affect you (a LITTLE) - but I'd argue that you're probably under minimum specs then anyway.
[QUOTE=Egevened;51399669]Lords of the Fallen
Deus Ex: Mankind Divided
Dishonored 2
Dragon Age: Inquisition
Batman: Arkham Knight
Homefront: The Revolution
FIFA 15-16
Far Cry Primal
Need for Speed (2016)
Rise of the Tomb Raider
All of these games I listed run denuvo, and if you look up any of them on the steam store, bad performance is the number 1 complaint on user reviews
[editline]20th November 2016[/editline]
Inquisition and MD both require 16 GB RAM minimum, which is nonsensical for the structures the games themselves run on. there is something going on in the background and if you are even remotely tech savvy you would understand
[editline]20th November 2016[/editline]
Also worthy to mention that Arkham Knight was taken down from steam, then later added back without the copy protection to address performance[/QUOTE]
Inside, Abzu and DOOM also use denuvo and what a surprise those games were also developed on PC first with engines optimized for PC set ups.
Turns out the DRM barely affects performance and its the developer's job to optimize what a shocker
I always love how pirates justify stealing by saying the DRM is evil and that's the reason I didn't buy it.
If you don't agree with their piracy prevention methods, here's a wild idea; [I]don't buy it.[/I]
[QUOTE=ZombieDawgs;51405218]
If you don't agree with their piracy prevention methods, here's a wild idea; [I]don't buy it.[/I][/QUOTE]
Well, that's what they do, isn't it?
[QUOTE=JCDentonUNATCO;51405295]Well, that's what they do, isn't it?[/QUOTE]
Ah you caught me on that typo.
Don't play it then.
[QUOTE=ZombieDawgs;51405218]I always love how pirates justify stealing by saying the DRM is evil and that's the reason I didn't buy it.
If you don't agree with their piracy prevention methods, here's a wild idea; [I]don't buy it.[/I][/QUOTE]
Often enough the pirate will get a better experience for free than the person who pays real money for the game. It doesn't justify piracy but it's a good way to demonstrate something smarter devs have known for awhile, piracy is a service problem and hurting your customers experience isn't worth a misguided attempt to increase sales.
In the case of denuvo this manifests as inability to play your game without a crack 5 years down the line and increased CPU load judging by what Natrox was saying. He didn't really give enough specifics but the way he was saying "1-2 fps hit"(why he isnt using a percentage is a good question) when he's talking about something cpu bound rather than gpu bound is pretty silly, it doesn't tell us anything about which component would be the bottleneck or how cpu bottlenecked system would change the story vs the likely gpu bottlenecked system he's developing on. Playing something like COD with it's tiny cpu load compared to gpu load you might expect a 1-2 fps hit assuming he meant from 60fps, but on a cpu bound game that hit could easily be much larger. The CPU being capped out often causes much worse problems in games than just framerate too. Keep in mind that many gamers end up with newer graphics cards than their cpus, so you dont need to be playing one of the rarer cpu heavy games to feel this, maybe you are playing that Cod game but you're just way ahead on your gpu than your cpu.
[QUOTE=Natrox;51399775]I work in said industry. Some things I know the answer to, some I don't. I've explained to you before that companies do it, not just because they can, but:
1. They must have done the research for DRM to be a worthwhile investment.
2. DRM is a pretty cheap gamble.
3. Companies have the right to protect their product.
Seriously, if you're going to assume that game companies only just do stuff to please 'suits', you're misguided.
But hey, I am kinda done talking to you. The first post where I replied to you, you rated it dumb and didn't return. Now you're just cherry picking my posts.
[/QUOTE]
Again with this "they must have done the research". Or, maybe they just didn't, or didn't do it properly (we can't even get a good portion of medical research done properly and you expect good science from a game dev) or maybe it makes sense that a developer is full of people like you, suits, and shareholders who have the natural "ahh they're STEALING from us we need to stop them!" reaction. If you yourself don't even know about what research has or hasn't been attempted or yielded results im not going to take your position seriously.
You called me out for not replying to your reply of my post where you basically said that archival concerns were not your or any other dev's problem, and that everyone should just be expected to have to crack games they purchase later down the line. So consider this line as the response to that nonsense, i really didn't think it even warranted one.
These days there are just so many good games i could spend my time and money playing these days, you could give me most denuvo games for free and i would have no interest in ever launching them. Its more than i would ever have time for. This isn't the console market where i have to choose between like 5 different games worth looking all year, if a game has harsh drm i'll just play one of the other games on my ever expanding wishlist that i don't need to worry about fucking me,
For some weird inexplicable reason i have bought not a single denuvo game, apart from mgs v
Weird huh
[editline]21st November 2016[/editline]
[QUOTE=Ganerumo;51399706]Denuvo isn't even visibly all that good for sales considering Bethesda's sales of their two most hyped/marketed titles of the past 12 months.
Fallout 4 sold literally three times as much on Steam as Doom did, despite the fact that Fallout 4 doesn't have Denuvo and is as easy to pirate as you'd expect. And they were both hyped to the fucking moon and beyond.[/QUOTE]
Honestly I wouldn't have trouble believing the rumors that DRM damages sales in the long run.
[QUOTE=Natrox;51398126](although one could make languages optionally downloadable).[/QUOTE]
Gog does this, or atleast does it for The Witcher 3.
It was really nice being able to switch between English, Russian, and Polish to see what the different languages sound like in the game by simply downloading the language packs and changing it ingame.
[QUOTE=SirJon;51405401]For some weird inexplicable reason i have bought not a single denuvo game, apart from mgs v
Weird huh[/QUOTE]
Maybe you haven't bought a Denuvo game because you weren't interested in the game itself
It's not really a matter of whether anyone has done research on the impacts on it, because it's not really something you can research very well. You can try to compare the sales of a game with DRM vs a game without it, but there will always be a million other factors at play. You can't isolate DRM as a factor on sales.
Fact is, there [i]are[/i] people who will cave and buy a game if they can't pirate it. It's also a fact that there are people who will not buy it unless they can pirate it, for a variety of reasons. No one knows how these two groups compares to each other, so frankly I don't really see much of an argument one way or another on whether DRM increases or decreases sales. It's just conjecture.
Meanwhile, I personally have three really big problems with DRM.
First of all, they will harm the experience for legitimate buyers. It might be insignificant. It might only affect a tiny minority of people. But someone, somewhere, is going to be inconvenienced by it. Someone who paid you for this product. And you thought, you decided this is fine, because you just might get a few extra sales from it. Maybe.
Secondly, it gives more power to hype than to quality. If people can play games first and then decide which ones they will pay money for, they will naturally buy the games they enjoyed the most, the games they thought were best. But if they have to pay before being able to play it then the money will go to the game that advertised better, the one that has a greater popularity and the one that could afford TV commercials, and the people won't play the other, potentially better games at all.
Finally there are the already mentioned archival problems. I'm one of those crazy people who don't think old games are inherently inferior to new titles. Some of my favorite games were released decades ago, and I still play them to this day. Similarly, some of my favorite games are also being released right now, and I will still want to be able to play them decades down the line.
And maybe someone 20 years down the line will discover the Hitman series when Hitman 9 comes out, and wants to revisit the older games, just to find out that the servers for Hitman 2016 were shut down and he's left with a completely neutered game.
This is not a future I can accept.
DRM is an inherently anti-consumer practice that will only ever harm the people that actually care about your product, all in the name of maybe possibly raking in just a little bit extra money.
[QUOTE=Egevened;51399790]"it works for me lol" does not discredit the thousands of legitimate complaints by users that hit way more than recommended settings for them[/QUOTE]
Thousands out of how many sales?
Saying "people won't buy if they can't first pirate for free" is kinda stupid seeing as you can't pirate on current gen consoles and people buy tons of games there.
[QUOTE=Mattk50;51405387]He didn't really give enough specifics but the way he was saying "1-2 fps hit"(why he isnt using a percentage is a good question) when he's talking about something cpu bound rather than gpu bound is pretty silly, it doesn't tell us anything about which component would be the bottleneck or how cpu bottlenecked system would change the story vs the likely gpu bottlenecked system he's developing on. Playing something like COD with it's tiny cpu load compared to gpu load you might expect a 1-2 fps hit assuming he meant from 60fps, but on a cpu bound game that hit could easily be much larger. The CPU being capped out often causes much worse problems in games than just framerate too. Keep in mind that many gamers end up with newer graphics cards than their cpus, so you dont need to be playing one of the rarer cpu heavy games to feel this, maybe you are playing that Cod game but you're just way ahead on your gpu than your cpu.
[/QUOTE]
Rise of the Tomb Raider maxes out both GPU and CPU (when you let it). So my "1-2 fps hit" was indicative of the performance bottleneck in this game specifically. Stop assuming things about my configuration by the way, it's very annoying.
[QUOTE=Mattk50;51405387]Again with this "they must have done the research". Or, maybe they just didn't, or didn't do it properly (we can't even get a good portion of medical research done properly and you expect good science from a game dev) or maybe it makes sense that a developer is full of people like you, suits, and shareholders who have the natural "ahh they're STEALING from us we need to stop them!" reaction. If you yourself don't even know about what research has or hasn't been attempted or yielded results im not going to take your position seriously.[/QUOTE]
"Or maybe they just didn't?"?? That's just pitting your word against mine. Think about it for once, would a company spend 100k on something they don't research? People always say these people are greedy with money, why would they spend 100k for 'nothing'?
[QUOTE=Mattk50;51405387]You called me out for not replying to your reply of my post where you basically said that archival concerns were not your or any other dev's problem, and that everyone should just be expected to have to crack games they purchase later down the line. So consider this line as the response to that nonsense, i really didn't think it even warranted one.[/QUOTE]
No, I said I am not against releasing a patch to remove DRM. The reality is that every game gets cracked, though. So I don't think we need to. Calling my points here nonsense and not replying to them is a sure-way ticket to getting on my "these people only want to hear their own opinions repeated"-list.
[QUOTE=Mattk50;51405387]These days there are just so many good games i could spend my time and money playing these days, you could give me most denuvo games for free and i would have no interest in ever launching them. Its more than i would ever have time for. This isn't the console market where i have to choose between like 5 different games worth looking all year, if a game has harsh drm i'll just play one of the other games on my ever expanding wishlist that i don't need to worry about fucking me,[/QUOTE]
Good for you.
[QUOTE=Natrox;51393181]Denuvo is pretty good. We used it at work[/QUOTE]
ah, so you're one of the "i want to actually get paid for my work!!!!!", because other than that there's no reason to ever defend denuvo
[QUOTE=damnatus;51410206]ah, so you're one of the "i want to actually get paid for my work!!!!!", because other than that there's no reason to ever defend denuvo[/QUOTE]
That's what the software is for right? It's meant to deter zero-day piracy.
The other points I'm trying to defend is why companies use Denuvo, and the minuscule performance impacts.
I kinda have the right to get paid for my work? More so than any of you have the right to pirate video games.
[QUOTE=Natrox;51410211]
I kinda have the right to get paid for my work? More so than any of you have the right to pirate video games.[/QUOTE]
you will get paid either way lol, it's not dependent on piracy
[QUOTE=damnatus;51410230]you will get paid either way lol, it's not dependent on piracy[/QUOTE]
If no one does ANYTHING to stop piracy (which doesn't come down to only Denuvo, but also stuff like arresting uploaders and whatnot), and piracy becomes easier and more streamlined - it can affect my pay eventually.
Realistically speaking though, no, I will get paid either way. But somewhere down the line, something is going to be impacted, such as budget for the next game.
For indies, it is more apparent. I posted think link earlier:
[url]https://gamerant.com/video-game-piracy-damage-opinion/[/url]
I thought this was an interesting block of text from the article;
[QUOTE]However, there’s one list The Witness is topping that Blow is less than happy about; according to the developer, The Witness has been ranking high on one of the web’s top torrent sites. Although the title has been selling very well, it also seems as though the game has been pirated savagely by a large number of PC players. Blow took to Twitter to discuss the issue, explaining that any sales missed through pirated versions of the game could damage the chances of his follow-up game being as of high a quality.[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE=Natrox;51410211]That's what the software is for right? It's meant to deter zero-day piracy.[/QUOTE]
If that's what it's meant for then you may as well remove the protection once the game's been cracked since it doesn't serve any purpose. No reason to require your legit customers to run the stuff once a quick search on TPB or any other torrent site gives you a way to crack it.
[QUOTE=damnatus;51410206]ah, so you're one of the "i want to actually get paid for my work!!!!!", because other than that there's no reason to ever defend denuvo[/QUOTE]
usually people want to get paid for the hours they put in something yes
[QUOTE=_Axel;51410282]If that's what it's meant for then you may as well remove the protection once the game's been cracked since it doesn't serve any purpose. No reason to require your legit customers to run the stuff once a quick search on TPB or any other torrent site gives you a way to crack it.[/QUOTE]
Hey, I'm all for that. Totally. But that's not my call to make.
[QUOTE=ZombieDawgs;51405218]I always love how pirates justify stealing by saying the DRM is evil and that's the reason I didn't buy it.
If you don't agree with their piracy prevention methods, here's a wild idea; [I]don't buy it.[/I][/QUOTE]
I've said it before and I'll say it again, in my opinion a game worth playing is a game worth buying.
I'm not wealthy, but I have the benefit of an allowance which happens to be just big enough to afford one AAA game every month, or two if I saved enough prior. so if a game suits my fancy I'll buy it. In the month of November I ended up buying both Battlefield 1 and Titanfall 2 because I wanted to play both, and I think they were both worth the money. The latter runs Denuvo and I couldn't care less.
However, I may be a paying customer, but I'm not a moron nor am I a cash cow. I need confirmation that a game can run well, and although I'm familiar enough with my own computer to know whether most games can run inherently or not, there are always some uncertainties that need some direct testing. This is where Denuvo's nature as an anti-consumer practice is shining the most - every purchase becomes a blind leap in the dark and your only escape measure is Steam's refund system, which is not very reassuring.
And Denuvo's been associated frequently with bad ports. Again, whether or not this is circumstantial or an actual cause is completely secondary - what's important is that after games like Arkham Knight, Just Case 3 and Dishonored 2, it has become increasingly difficult to [I]trust[/I] developers blindly, something the publishers want us to do [I]more.[/I]
So basically, I'm a loyal, paying customer who'll gladly spend money on games if I can get my enjoyment out of them, and I'm slowly losing my trust in developers because of the fact that every single purchase I make that use Denuvo is a blind, unilateral leap in the void. It's even more outlandish that games like Rise of the Tomb Raider come with a benchmark, but back when it wasn't cracked, only way you could access that benchmark was to buy the game, defeating the purpose of the benchmark to begin with.
[editline]22nd November 2016[/editline]
This of course goes without even mentioning the effects of Denuvo on legacy support and mod support, but that's another discussion.
[QUOTE=Ganerumo;51410363]It's even more outlandish that games like Rise of the Tomb Raider come with a benchmark, but back when it wasn't cracked, only way you could access that benchmark was to buy the game[/QUOTE]
I agree, I'll raise this for the next game I work on.
[QUOTE=Natrox;51410257]If no one does ANYTHING to stop piracy (which doesn't come down to only Denuvo, but also stuff like arresting uploaders and whatnot), and piracy becomes easier and more streamlined - it can affect my pay eventually.
Realistically speaking though, no, I will get paid either way. But somewhere down the line, something is going to be impacted, such as budget for the next game.[/QUOTE]
You said yourself that realistically speaking piracy won't ever impact developer wages
[QUOTE]I thought this was an interesting block of text from the article;
However, there’s one list The Witness is topping that Blow is less than happy about; according to the developer, The Witness has been ranking high on one of the web’s top torrent sites. [B]Although the title has been selling very well[/B], it also seems as though the game has been pirated savagely by a large number of PC players. Blow took to Twitter to discuss the issue, explaining that any sales missed through pirated versions of the game could damage the chances of his follow-up game being as of high a quality.
[/quote]
It's selling well, isn't it? So why mention piracy then?
It's still lost revenue. It especially affects small teams that can't even afford DRM anti-tampering.
Of course an argument could be made that the users who pirated the game wouldn't have bought it anyway, but it's a very murky area in terms of actual stats. As a personal anecdote, I know multiple people who bought DOOM specifically because they couldn't pirate it.
[QUOTE=damnatus;51412421]You said yourself that realistically speaking piracy won't ever impact developer wages[/QUOTE]
Because there are more measures in place to keep piracy at bay (lol). If piracy was allowed somehow, it would probably affect my pay (why pay for something when you can get it free with zero consequences?).
[QUOTE=Ganerumo;51399706]Denuvo isn't even visibly all that good for sales considering Bethesda's sales of their two most hyped/marketed titles of the past 12 months.
Fallout 4 sold literally three times as much on Steam as Doom did, despite the fact that Fallout 4 doesn't have Denuvo and is as easy to pirate as you'd expect. And they were both hyped to the fucking moon and beyond.[/QUOTE]
DOOM isn't as much as a mainstream title as Fallout is though.
It's a franchise that's very well-known and respected but only among those who are hobbyist gamers, outside of that niche, few people cared. The last game in the series was released [I]12 years ago[/I], unless you're an enthusiast you probably don't care that much about the series. Right there they lost of lot of younger gamers that don't have a history with the series.
Bethbryo RPGs on the other hand are extremely popular and reach a wide audience, even among non-serious gamers that usually stick to multiplayer shooters and FIFA. Both casual and hardcore gamers eat those games up. Fallout 3 and Skyrim were recent and well-received enough to be recognizable enough to non-enthusiast gamers.
You might not think it, but DOOM has far less power and influence as a franchise than Fallout or the Elder Scrolls.
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