When released, games sell for full price ($70 or whatever it is today), then the price starts going down. Most of the sales happen in a short period after the release.
Someone who wouldn't have bought the game even for $10 will not generate revenue no matter whether it's cracked on day 0 or day 60. Someone who's willing to pay $45 may buy a discounted copy if that's available before the crack, and someone who's willing to pay full price and wants the game within 10 days of release is much more likely to pay if a crack isn't available.
Plus there's the issue of not buying DRM'ed games out of principle.
I think you're overstating this quite a bit. It's basically only true for games that are single-player (with a few exceptions), and are not currently receiving frequent updates (or you are categorically not interested in updates). Besides that, e.g. Steam is extremely convenient; installs are rapid and safe, saves are synced across different machines, mods are often well integrated with Steam Workshop, etc.
For many, the above list is easily worth the price to pay. It's not like once DRM is cracked, sales drop to zero. DRM exists because the profit-minded companies find that at some level of investment in DRM, they get a good ROI.
For me Steam is a huge annoiance: every time I want to play a game it keep bugging me with that the client needs an update or with chat windows. It is slow and sluggish compared to the steam store website. And worst of all, some games don't play when you're offline, even though they are just single player games.
Maybe it's because I'm just a casual player nowadays so features like friends lists that keep popping up are not useful for me and the frequent updates never change anything because I'm not using any of the features they update. But Steam is not the solution for everyone.
1. Create a shortcut for Steam that includes the "-nofriendsui" parameter in it's target.
2. Stop having friends.
I do place Steam in a different category, and I own many of their games.
For me, Steam is basically spyware that I don't want on my laptop. It's actually a barrier to me playing games because when I (rarely) consider purchasing something then see it's in Steam, my usual reaction is not too bother. It's my computer, I don't want a 3rd party "store" managing my installs. I feel the same way about the windows store fwiw.
> installs are rapid and safe
Just like normal computer programs then?
> saves are synced across different machines
Possibly useful but not really important to me.
> mods are often well integrated with Steam Workshop, etc.
Didn't know about this one, interesting. But I've never found it hard to install mods for games in the past, without Steam.
Overall it's something I never needed and now that it's being pushed on me, I don't want it.
>> installs are rapid and safe > Just like normal computer programs then?
No, not really. Compared with piracy, their servers are generally much faster than torrenting (with the exception of insanely popular items on torrents). The installs are usually one-click affairs, not needing to click through 5 pages of "next", and telling it to not try to install on the tiny C:\ drive SSD which doesn't have enough space. Installed games are listed in one place, and tend to uninstall instantly, which is not the case with most normal installers. Their installer manager can also do verification of game file integrity, which is surprisingly often a solution to people's crash problems. In terms of safety, viruses are a non-issue, unlike torrented games.
I do get the privacy arguments, and tend to agree with those. A good alternative would be GoG, which has a decent catalog of games, and offers both offline, DRM-free installers (I believe this is still the case), or a Steam-style download manager for those that want the convenience. I'm unsure, but looking at the company behind it, I would argue they are "slightly less evil", and would probably make even their downloader more privacy-friendly.
But really, I think this is all really just a case of whether our needs match that of the average bloke on the street. On HN, we tend to be very privacy-conscious, but I think it's important that basically _nobody_ outside of this niche gives one thought to how Steam is invading their privacy, or how DRM might be bad, unless they have a direct bad experience (e.g. not being able to launch a game offline). It's like the whole NoJS argument for websites - 99.99% of the world doesn't care, and unless your target audience is extremely skewed in this direction, they will not care about it.
That seems unlikely, at least for "much" faster. I torrent movies occasionally and even fairly unpopular ones often max out my download speed. Unless you're downloading something obscure, bittorrent is really fast.
This is stuff you only read on certain forums. Most people don't even notice DRM
Had I downloaded the warezed version, I wouldn't have needed: a- Steam, b- the Windows whatever login, c- the updates. Best experience goes to: pirated version. (Had I wanted the patches: pirates eventually release updated versions, too).
For the record, these days I do like Steam, though I far prefer GOG and DRM-free games (when I have the time to play games at all, that is. Which is almost never).
I buy all my games these days but there are people who do lots of thankless work and I'm not sure why.
Unfortunately Epic is notoriously Anti-Linux, from their CEO down. So the status of EAC under Linux is a giant question mark
It is quite telling that studios rather target ChromeOS or Android than any proper Linux distribution, the days of Loki are long gone.
And the reason anticheat did not works with wine is mostly because they use kernel modules, which you obviously can't run a windows kernel module on linux kernel.
If you run it in a VM, most of them will just fine with it.
(But the Battleye will give you a big "fxxk you")
Granted I've only worked in smaller studios - but anecdotally, OP is correct - game companies don't care about Linux users, high expense for such a small market share.
Windows has a larger selection but its also incredibly trivial to pirate.
I've never bought more games than when I had no windows install at all.
Maybe it works better on Ubuntu.
Just because they don't know what to blame, doesn't mean they don't notice it.
A prominent example is performance degradation with Denuvo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_DD-txK9_Q
I can give this a "me too" to an extant. I use to be like, "Rah rah! Down with DRM!" years ago, but at some point I kinda forgot that DRM even exists—it just no longer comes up in my lifestyle at all.
This thread is an example of this. I saw the thread title and was like, "Oh right...DRM and cracking games...right right right..." that is a thing that
The publishers and developers apparently also lose...
Previously on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15319476 EU commisions a study on the effects of piracy on media sells. The results are not what they expected so they try and hide them. This is "leaked" by a member of parliament.
According to that study, specifically for game piracy, every copy of the game that was pirated resulted in 1.24 copies sold, meaning that effective DRM actually reduces sales.
So the only ones who don't lose are those making the DRM.
If you assign the value lost to piracy as $0 (i.e pirates wouldn't buy) or you assume any extra money earned by less piracy is never going to benefit consumers in lower prices, then your argument holds.
If twice as many paying customers means half the prices, then there is a benefit to consumers. The truth is somewhere between these two extremes of course.
But yes - once the DRM is completely cracked, the game should at least be patched to remove the DRM. That would give a window of N days without making the game worse forever.
One could even argue that it is pro consumer by making sure the revenue will go back to paying consumers in the form of additional content, instead of paying for players who didn't buy it.
TV series on the other hand I still pirate to this day (if they aren't on the couple of streaming services I sub to), because buying them is way too complicated (even impossible with a large portion of shows that aren't current, and a fair number of current shows too).
Movies are a mixed bag - grabbing cheap dvds or blu rays of pretty much anything is easy online so I usually do that, but I imagine if I preferred digital media or watched enough movies for my physical collection to be unwieldy I'd resort to piracy because buying digital copies of movies is just as complicated as TV.
Give me "Steam for Movies and TV" or a streaming service that aggregates licenses from everyone, and doesn't only host the content that they think will be most popular and I'll probably stop pirating those too.
With streaming, who knows? Maybe Netflix loses the rights and it disappears. Maybe their encode is garbage and it ruins the dark scenes. So, I still pay for streaming services but anything I actually care about I download and archive.
That is interesting because it happened to me in the most annoying way possible:
I was watching Donnie Darko, a rather obscure movie that requires (or at least for me required) a bit of brainpower to watch. So I watched the first half of it and planned to watch the remainder the next day. Come the next day, and where is the movie? Nowhere to be found.
(By the way, I know this doesn't actually happen, but I swear Netflix sticks in my bookmarks movies and shows I never bookmarked!)
https://www.radiotimes.com/news/on-demand/2020-07-14/derry-g...
At least, until Steam goes offline, or maybe your account gets lost. I for one still use Steam, but I do wonder if I'll be able to play my favorite games in 20 years.
A plain EXE from itch, GOG, or some other source will work as long as compatible hardware lives on.
if this is somehow "too complicated" for the average user, just make the default an "auto" setting that does whatever it does now and bury it in a menu somewhere.
Admittedly some services, like RedBox, are more frustrating than torrenting though.
That danger is almost exclusive to software piracy. The probability of being infected by an evil pdf, mp3 or mp4 is really low if you know what you're doing (i.e. updating and using decent software).
This included RDR2. Totally worth it.
> One could even argue that it is pro consumer
One really couldn't. It punishes buyers with encumbered software while merely delaying pirates a short while. Pirates end up with the better experience, so...
you might be surprised at how obscure torrents have become outside of tech circles. when I graduated college (2017), basically no one outside of the comp sci department understood how to use torrents (or even knew what they were). this would have been unthinkable when I was in high school. everyone and their mother seemed to be torrenting music and movies.
I even tried explaining how to use them to people, but they would object that the school would catch them anyway. when I explained how VPNs work, they complained that $6/month was too expensive for a poor college student. nevermind that they're already paying for prime, netflix, and hulu subscriptions every month.
I think there are two main reasons for this. a lot of people have laptops with the base storage option, often a 256GB or even 128GB ssd. phones have even less storage. this makes it unappealing to keep a local library of music and especially movies (plus now that everyone has a phone and a laptop, syncing your collection becomes annoying). second, I think video and especially music streaming services have actually succeeded in making their products just convenient enough that people don't feel like figuring out how to use torrent trackers and clients.
Blocked in Europe, China, Australia, ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countries_blocking_access_to_T...
exaggerating slightly but you know what I mean
The base knowledge here is people who know how to install and play pretty complex games. These people go to impossible lengths to install video drivers and troubleshoot problems with their computers; I'm sure they won't find this particular task very difficult.
For pirates, it means they either have to wait until it's cracked, or buy a legit copy
Don't act like every gamer is automatically a pirate, millions of people are perfectly happy to pay for games and want to see their favourite studios continue
I'm not sure where you got the idea I said this. I don't think every gamer is automatically a pirate, though a lot of people do follow the path of least resistance.
I pay for my videogames. I support indie devs that don't bundle DRM crap with their games. For AAA DRM-ridden games, I simply don't buy or play them. (To be honest, I don't have a lot of time to play any games these days).
DRM is anticonsumer for legal buyers. It gives them a worse experience than the people who play pirated copies.
I've no doubt that from a technical point of view, both DRM and the efforts to crack it are fascinating and interesting.
What I don't understand is this: consumers don't crack DRM; crackers and warez groups do. Once cracked, DRM is as good as nothing and it's low effort for an everyday gamer to get and play pirated games.
So this antipiracy "buffer" is only for crackers. For gamers it's just as if the game had a delayed release date.
For legit customers, the DRM is often intrusive and, because it's so complex and fiddly, often breaks in bizarre ways, giving rise to the paradoxical situation that the legit game is harder to use than the pirated game!
Only legitimate buyers lose.