its perfectly rational if it increases sales, there are indications this is the case with PC piracy, especially with titles that would otherwise lack exposure.

Its also rational if it allows them to move away from custom designs entirely, and save a truckload of money, more than they lose to the nebulous spectre of "piracy".

But the parent post references AAA games. In reality "piracy is organic advertisement" is a tired excuse. Large titles are already spending spending large portions of their budgets on advertising (sometimes more than their development budgets!), and small titles get shafted by petty piracy all the time (see mobile gaming, I've known multiple devs whose games show up on pirated APK sites before their main sites on google).

People usually cite narrow cases where an AAA game succeeds in spite of lacking DRM as if piracy helped, or games that didn't spend anything on marketing and get big through marketing, which is an exceedingly rare lottery to win.

No one ever cites games like Crysis 3 which had been pirated more times than it ever sold days before release

Oh come on, people sell (and have sold) in millions of copies through PC gaming history, even though piracy was "rampant".

The major boost in sales was improving the sales process (Steam and similar stores) and dropping prices, not attacking legitimate users with DRM rootkits. People keep repeating this DRM suppor mantra when up until now there STILL hasn't been any good proof that it does any good. If anything, it only damaged sales due to people not buying games that randomly stop working when internet fails.

It seems to do a pretty good job of protecting the game from piracy when it's at its most expensive. Numerous companies now seem to be implementing DRM for launch and then quietly remove it after 3-6 months once it's fallen in price. That leads me to believe that they think piracy is a real issue at launch and not one later when prices fall.

but those pirated copies _would not_ have been sold had there been no piracy. I argue that piracy doesn't decrease sales, just increases the amount of utility that society gets from software.

I hear that all the time and I don't buy it. Denuovo is a DRM being sold on the premise that there are in fact people who will buy a game if it's not cracked at release, and in places dedicated to monitoring games with their DRM plenty of people have admitted they bought games they really wanted.

Piracy will obviously cause some non-zero number of people not to buy games because it turns a games cost from a price, to a suggested donation.

"I'll pay if I like it" isn't the profit model a publisher who puts out a multimillion dollar game wants to support.

Not to mention, paying for something can be a great motivator. It's a lot easier to dismiss a a game saying "I wouldn't have wanted to pay for this" at the slightest flaw when you haven't paid for it.

I'd say that is not true anymore - it used to be pretty hard to buy games before (with retarded regional restrictions and no Steam, etc). So people couldn't be assed to buy a game if they could not find a cracked one.

But today, you can do it with a few clicks, so if someone really wants to play a game because it looks cool/interesting/whatever, I'd say a lot of people will just pay for it if they can't find the crack.

Nevermind a game is quicker to download than install and complete the first level. Games get pirated and then not played. Heck, I got an entire Steam library of unplayed games.

They could sell an open variant for more money (+40% perhaps?) such that potential losses in games revenue are offset. Or the open variant could require an always-on internet connection to play games, as is already the case for some PC games (or Super Mario Run, even).

> They could sell an open variant for more money (+40% perhaps?) such that potential losses in games revenue are offset.

1) Developing a second SKU is expensive.

2) It seems that much of the PS4 hacking has been enabled by the minimal "open" surface provided by simply having a browser available on the PS4. The protections of an "open" SKU would likely be a roadbump.

3) Piracy is not the only problem. Hacking undermines multiplayer competition, the value of leaderboards, achievements, ...

Frankly, the cheapest option to solve all these problems would be to simply bundle an extra PC to make your "open variant". But of the question is: Why would they? What's the profit in it?

Um, that "open SKU" always exists - it's called the developer unit and can run any binaries so as a developer you can run your own game during the process.

They're just locked behind the dev kit licensing costs and NDAs.

As someone who has both the X1 and PS4 devkits on my desk, it's interesting to me that Sony actually goes through the effort and massive cost of developing a separate SKU, where the devkit is a huge machine with extra cooling, more ram, more ports, and then the X1 is exactly the same as a retail unit, just with a different certificate installed on it.

But yes, theoretically, "anyone" can buy a devkit and have access to the full architecture of PS4/X1 is they want to.

How would you compare the experience of working with the two?

I had the same a year or two ago - both sets of kit have similar specs and design principles, so most of the differences were in the tooling and APIs.

At the time, PS4's tooling seemed much more polished/complete/reliable - I only needed to resort to the command line interfaces for integrating with our existing custom tooling, and CI processes, exactly as you'd hope. The APIs were mostly solid, retro, C style APIs - with sane error handling, few edge cases, and no callback hell.

I'm sure the XB1 has caught up somewhat in the tooling department at this point. Also, you may already support D3D11, and get to reuse a lot of code there. Not so much reuse with other WinRT APIs (for Win8/10 apps) although the APIs feel very similar.

> Um, that "open SKU" always exists - it's called the developer unit and can run any binaries so as a developer you can run your own game during the process.

Manmal seemed to be positing some kind of mass access semi-open SKU that didn't completely defeat the purpose of having a closed SKU in the first place. I'd argue that mass access to devkits would defeat the purpose of having a closed SKU in the first place.

I suppose you could argue I should've said "developing a third SKU is expensive", though.

Protection for PC games has become really good - Denuvo seems to be sophisticated enough that even 2 year old games have still not been cracked.

At the very least, it makes it possible to not lose sales at launch, which is when most of the money is made iirc.

Pretty interesting.

It seems you skipped the second paragraph where I said "So assuming there is no economic impact".

Are you saying piracy has an impact that isn't economic in nature? If so can you clarify?