Comment by manytimesaway
5 days ago
Don't forget that the guy behing Denuvo is the same person behind SafeDisc, SecuROM and similar bullshit siblings from the past PC gaming world.
5 days ago
Don't forget that the guy behing Denuvo is the same person behind SafeDisc, SecuROM and similar bullshit siblings from the past PC gaming world.
Denuvo is owned by Irdeto, a digital rights management company in a broad sense. They not only do software and hardware DRM, but also work as a watchdog for movie and music companies to claim DMCA violations for BitTorrent, among all other stuff.
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Surely, this has nothing to do with the fact that live service and subscription games generate more revenue, whether or not piracy is involved.
For a long time now I've found it weird that people who like single player games on PC (and to a lesser extent older consoles which had piracy enabling mods) didn't acknowledge the long game consequences of their actions, or at least were willfully ignorant to them because everyone loves getting something for free. It seems to be a variation on Goodhart's law - you get what you reward - if the reward for a company (big or small) in spending lots of time and money isn't as good as other options, those other options will get more investment in the future and the ones you do like will get less.
The other option I can see for the large companies is that any project involving tens or hundreds of millions of dollars is likely to be insured, and a condition of that insurance is they take all reasonable options available to get the most success out of it that they can. If they don't they need to reduce the risk which probably means less resources allocated which again may not be interesting to the companies capable of making grand experiences versus other options.
20 replies →
To give you an idea of the scale of the problem:
Greenheart Games famously released a "cracked" version of their own game (Game Dev Tycoon) onto torrent sites on launch day. In this version, the player's in-game studio eventually goes bankrupt because "pirates" steal their games.
The Data: Within 24 hours, 93.6% of players were playing the pirated version.
The Consequence: The developer's blog post highlighted the irony of pirates posting on forums complaining that the "in-game piracy" was unfair and "ruining" their fun. The experiment proved that even at a low price point ($8), a massive majority of the PC audience will choose "free" regardless of the developer's size or struggle.
https://web.archive.org/web/20161118042043/http://arstechnic...
https://web.archive.org/web/20131214165241/http://aussie-gam...
P.S.: It bears repeating that the game cost only 8 dollars.
16 replies →
Ah, yes, a problem so huge it killed the industry… wait.
This is the same thing with music / cinema piracy : it’s a mix of "pirates will always pirate" (whatever the reason, be it financial issues or not), and anti-piracy solutions always hitting legitimate customers first.
People want convenience first and foremost. Piracy being a « massive issue is a lie defended by lobbies.
Case in point, I have a legit copy of a EA game I cannot play legitimately anymore, because SafeDisc relies on a vulnerable Windows driver (basically a free rootkit) that was blacklisted by MS. See also the other comment mentioning SecuROM that basically killed SPORE on launch.
SecuROM back in the day caused plenty of legitimately purchased copies to not work. You'd have a physical disc with the game on it from the store, and SecuROM decided it won't work on your computer for unknown, undebugable reasons. .
Piracy may be a problem, but that's a problem to customer who were willing to give a company money. We stopped buying anything with SecuROM on it after 1-2 of those situations.
It's fairly well demonstrated that piracy is a service problem. For example, many people will pay hundreds of dollars for a game on Steam rather than play it for free on Epic (Rocket League). So clearly the free price point is not the problem
To some extent. But in the first month where the game is $100 and the pirate version is free, there are plenty of people willing to pirate even if it’s inconvenient.
IMO drm is understandable at the games release, but it should be removed after the initial period.
Do we have a reasonable metric of pirate -> customer conversion rate of Denuvo?
I don't think piracy has much to do with it. AAA (of even AA) single player games sell really well. Just not well enough to be the equivalent of a money-printing machine like Fortnite. Spiderman 2 sold something like 17 million copies between PC and PS5. Still nothing compared to the $30+ billion in revenue that Fortnite has generated so far. So everyone is chasing that Fortnite $$$.