Quoting: areamanplaysgame

Quoting: pleasereadthemanualFor Windows? I face these issues with DRM regularly for visual novels on GNU/Linux through WINE, but never have on Windows. Though I've only been playing games for ~10 years.

It was in Steam on Linux, using Proton, but when looking for a solution, I learned that people attempting to play several Ubisoft games on Windows have experienced the same issue.

Well, that's embarrassing. I suppose I should say that most publishers are able to ship games with DRM that does work for all intended customers today.

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Quoting: areamanplaysgame

Quoting: pleasereadthemanualIt would certainly be effective at convincing people who don't buy because they can get it for free to buy the game, but as for people who want a game unencumbered by Denuvo's anti-tamper software or people who simply don't have the money, I don't think it would have much effect.

I don't know. Maybe I'm not the typical case, but while I think DRM is generally bullshit, I am too old to download cracked games or tools to crack games. I have no clue where that shit comes from and I don't trust it.

From what I've heard, you're an exception. But I agree with you. You can't trust any executable binary unless you have some amazing reverse engineering skills. Random executables you find on a torrent site should be the least trustworthy. But this isn't just about downloading a cracked version of the game—it's about increasing sales. The goal of DRM is to increase sales by preventing customers from sharing files. Would you buy the game if the only option was DRM? If you only want games that are unencumbered, probably not.

Quoting: areamanplaysgame

Quoting: pleasereadthemanualI've personally never had DRM preventing me from playing a game—assuming I was using Windows, of course. Singleplayer games that require an internet connection to play are something everyone is willing to raise their pitchforks over, but these are far and few between.

The problem is no longer that DRM is ineffective and inconveniences customers.

I have had this issue, and recently (though it was an older game). I bought one of the older Assassin's Creed games on Steam and the damned Ubisoft launcher kept prompting me for a CD key. I assume there is a workaround for this, but it was not worth it to me to find out how, and I returned the game instead.

For Windows? I face these issues with DRM regularly for visual novels on GNU/Linux through WINE, but never have on Windows. Though I've only been playing games for ~10 years.

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Quoting: DerpFox

Quoting: NociferCan't say that I disagree with you much, but on the other hand, there is really not much else to be discussed about GOG and Linux, is there? I guess we could just call the case closed and stop writing comments altogether, but then what's the point of coming to the comment section in the first place?

Maybe the ultimate solution would for GoL to stop promoting GoG. I know it's kind of a hard thing to do devs still offer Linux builds on GoG after all. But to me, it feels like less and less Linux users want to hear about and buy from them. So what's the point?

Despite my complaining, I'm happy to hear more about GOG.

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Quoting: NociferCan't say that I disagree with you much, but on the other hand, there is really not much else to be discussed about GOG and Linux, is there? I guess we could just call the case closed and stop writing comments altogether, but then what's the point of coming to the comment section in the first place?

I expect it in posts titled "GOG forgets GNU/Linux exists and recommends installing Windows to use their store", but this discourse has invaded every GOG post. I feel it's kind of becoming the equivalent of:

"you should call it Linux, not GNU/Linux," "but GNU was the original and deserves credit too," "what about X, Apache, and lots of other software not part of the GNU project—and the GPL doesn't enforce attribution," "yes those are important, but GNU is a complete operating system project and they are advocates for desktop users and their freedoms, not just enterprises, and corporates make so much money out of GNU/Linux because of the GPL," "corporate is an important part of why Linux is so successful," "certainly, but in the desktop GNU/Linux space, no one edges out the GNU Project in advocacy or contributions," "what, should we start calling it Apache/Linux for web servers, then?" ...

These people are clearly never going to find a way to agree with each other, and they just end up having the same conversations. But again, the comments section wouldn't be as lively without these comments.

I wasn't saying that everybody should capitulate to my desires and commenting preferences, just making an idle observation. Hell, even if I was saying that, who would listen? Don't mind me.

If anything, I'm probably more off-topic.

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Quoting: tpau

Quoting: pleasereadthemanualCan't get past one mention of GOG without talking about how GOG Galaxy doesn't have a GNU/Linux build.

There are various tools that cover that need like MiniGalaxy and Heroic.
The latter also installs linux native builds if available.

My point was more that other users can't stop mentioning it and what it means. Any post about GOG inevitably devolves into this. I don't mind the discussion, but no new points are ever raised.

It will inevitably take this form ad nauseum:

- GOG said they would release a GNU/Linux client in 2014. They didn't. They don't care about the platform, even though they should more than Windows. It's sad that Steam is doing more for GNU/Linux as a platform that ships a significant number of DRM'd games. I'm never buying another GOG game.
-- It doesn't bother me that GOG doesn't have a client. In fact, I prefer it that way—being forced to use a proprietary client to play a game like with Steam is far more annoying to me. I manage them in Lutris. If you want to use one, though, Minigalaxy has some of the features.
- But it doesn't have cloud saves, you can't play some online multiplayer games, [and it's missing some other features, probably].

Occasionally, as in this thread, there will be some discussion as to whether GOG's stance is morally or financially justified, perhaps a back-and-forth about GOG exposing the API.

I find it boring. But I suppose the comments section wouldn't be as lively without these comments.

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Can't get past one mention of GOG without talking about how GOG Galaxy doesn't have a GNU/Linux build.

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Quoting: ShabbyX

Quoting: pleasereadthemanual

Quoting: ShabbyX

Quoting: pleasereadthemanual

Quoting: areamanplaysgame

Quoting: Mountain ManThere's just too much pressure on the industry to keep games locked down despite the fact that DRM has done nothing to curb piracy in the slightest and only serves to inconvenience the honest paying customer.

I don't think the data actually bear this out, at least in absolute terms. I think there is *some* deterrent effect to DRM on games, if only for the very brief period before it gets cracked, and that might amount to a relatively small but nonzero number of additional sales. On the whole I still think it is philosophically a shitty way to treat customers, but there is almost certainly a marginally legitimate reason it exists.

The reason publishers pay top dollar for Denuvo is to increase their early sales, which tend to make up the most significant portion of their profits. Denuvo doesn't think that it's possible to prevent a game's copy prevention mechanisms from being circumvented forever, but that they can frustrate reverse engineers long enough to convince more people to buy the game.

It would certainly be effective at convincing people who don't buy because they can get it for free to buy the game, but as for people who want a game unencumbered by Denuvo's anti-tamper software or people who simply don't have the money, I don't think it would have much effect. Perhaps the truth is that the second and third groups of people make up such an insignificant portion of the publisher's target market that it isn't worth attempting to appeal to them. The question might be: "how do we convince more people to buy our game without noticeably degrading the experience for our current customers?"

I think we simply don't have data on this, so both of you are really just speculating. Unless some AAA publishers start publishing DRM-free and sales could be compared with those with DRM, and if enough of them do so to get statistical confidence in the results, best we can say is that we don't know if and how much DRM increases sales.

Unfortunately, it seems to me that AAA companies are also mostly speculating, since no one is releasing DRM free to compare, so this has merely become "standard practice" really rather than something that's properly evaluated.

For example, most AAA games make most of their money from console sales where piracy is not possible (right?), PC itself is a niche in gaming FYI. So that does hint that DRM cannot be *that* important.

Also, DRM-free _could_ theoretically increase sales too. If N% of people pirate the game, but recommend it to others and that leads to M% more sales, there is nothing forcing N>M. If nothing, at least word of mouth from pirates does mean that the actual loss is less than N%.

I'm certainly speculating, but if you want a biased source:

90% of visual novel players don't buy the game (the game was bought 50,000 times, but the patch was downloaded 500,000 times)

Most visual novels today are released without DRM. I can think of only one visual novel localizer today that releases the game encumbered with DRM. MangaGamer previously used Soft-Denchi for its DL releases about a decade ago, but didn't include it in physical releases. Their audience helped change their mind, and many other localization companies also followed suit and now only release DRM-Free editions. Even in Japan, most physical releases are unencumbered by DRM today, with some exceptions.

Johren, on the other hand, also localizes games into English but only releases them with always-online DRM for which you only get 3 activations, after which they tell you to purchase another license. They haven't released any numbers, and I doubt they will, but they're a much larger company than most localizers as a DMM operation. Many people openly express distaste for Johren for how badly they feel they're treated as a customer, however. Limited activation, always-online DRM is something that will incense most-everyone, I suppose.

These sources are clearly biased, but do with this information what you will. I think the only thing you can conclude is that it depends on the game. I've always thought the games that don't end up having their DRM circumvented are games that few people are interested in playing.

For what it's worth, visual novels are mostly released on Windows, but there are some console and mobile releases, so PC sales make up most of the overall sales.

So 50k people bought the game and 450k pirated. Your example shows that piracy exists, ok.

But there is no data about what those numbers could have been with DRM; 100k sales and fewer pirates? 50k sales and fewer pirates? 40k sales and whatever pirates? Or did I misunderstand your comment?

Sorry; not sure how I misinterpreted your response like that initially or what point I was trying to argue. If there were any point of comparison I'd try to draw, it would probably be between Mangagamer before and after they dropped their DRM. I don't have the numbers from before, but I'd surmise that making all of their releases DRM-Free resulted in an insignificant difference in sales.

The reason I bought up Johren and every other English localizer is because it certainly illustrates the trend that you were talking about with larger publishers installing DRM (likely because it costs money, and they have more of it) and smaller publishers forgoing it.

I certainly have no idea how you would test the effects DRM versus DRM-Free, as it varies by industry and likely by game. I would speculate that for Visual Novels, DRM or DRM-Free makes very little impact on sales. But for popular AAA games, I would speculate that it makes a significant difference, at least for early sales.

You're right; I don't know. The publishers might know, but I'd guess they're using DRM because they instinctively want to protect their "intellectual property". The conversation shifted at some point from "protecting intellectual property" to "increasing early sales", at least for large publishers, but I wonder if that instinct ever went away.

At least a lot of smaller publishers no longer see much of a need for it anymore.

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Quoting: ShabbyX

Quoting: pleasereadthemanual

Quoting: areamanplaysgame

Quoting: Mountain ManThere's just too much pressure on the industry to keep games locked down despite the fact that DRM has done nothing to curb piracy in the slightest and only serves to inconvenience the honest paying customer.

I don't think the data actually bear this out, at least in absolute terms. I think there is *some* deterrent effect to DRM on games, if only for the very brief period before it gets cracked, and that might amount to a relatively small but nonzero number of additional sales. On the whole I still think it is philosophically a shitty way to treat customers, but there is almost certainly a marginally legitimate reason it exists.

The reason publishers pay top dollar for Denuvo is to increase their early sales, which tend to make up the most significant portion of their profits. Denuvo doesn't think that it's possible to prevent a game's copy prevention mechanisms from being circumvented forever, but that they can frustrate reverse engineers long enough to convince more people to buy the game.

It would certainly be effective at convincing people who don't buy because they can get it for free to buy the game, but as for people who want a game unencumbered by Denuvo's anti-tamper software or people who simply don't have the money, I don't think it would have much effect. Perhaps the truth is that the second and third groups of people make up such an insignificant portion of the publisher's target market that it isn't worth attempting to appeal to them. The question might be: "how do we convince more people to buy our game without noticeably degrading the experience for our current customers?"

I think we simply don't have data on this, so both of you are really just speculating. Unless some AAA publishers start publishing DRM-free and sales could be compared with those with DRM, and if enough of them do so to get statistical confidence in the results, best we can say is that we don't know if and how much DRM increases sales.

Unfortunately, it seems to me that AAA companies are also mostly speculating, since no one is releasing DRM free to compare, so this has merely become "standard practice" really rather than something that's properly evaluated.

For example, most AAA games make most of their money from console sales where piracy is not possible (right?), PC itself is a niche in gaming FYI. So that does hint that DRM cannot be *that* important.

Also, DRM-free _could_ theoretically increase sales too. If N% of people pirate the game, but recommend it to others and that leads to M% more sales, there is nothing forcing N>M. If nothing, at least word of mouth from pirates does mean that the actual loss is less than N%.

I'm certainly speculating, but if you want a biased source:

90% of visual novel players don't buy the game (the game was bought 50,000 times, but the patch was downloaded 500,000 times)

Most visual novels today are released without DRM. I can think of only one visual novel localizer today that releases the game encumbered with DRM. MangaGamer previously used Soft-Denchi for its DL releases about a decade ago, but didn't include it in physical releases. Their audience helped change their mind, and many other localization companies also followed suit and now only release DRM-Free editions. Even in Japan, most physical releases are unencumbered by DRM today, with some exceptions.

Johren, on the other hand, also localizes games into English but only releases them with always-online DRM for which you only get 3 activations, after which they tell you to purchase another license. They haven't released any numbers, and I doubt they will, but they're a much larger company than most localizers as a DMM operation. Many people openly express distaste for Johren for how badly they feel they're treated as a customer, however. Limited activation, always-online DRM is something that will incense most-everyone, I suppose.

These sources are clearly biased, but do with this information what you will. I think the only thing you can conclude is that it depends on the game. I've always thought the games that don't end up having their DRM circumvented are games that few people are interested in playing.

For what it's worth, visual novels are mostly released on Windows, but there are some console and mobile releases, so PC sales make up most of the overall sales.

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Quoting: areamanplaysgame

Quoting: Mountain ManThere's just too much pressure on the industry to keep games locked down despite the fact that DRM has done nothing to curb piracy in the slightest and only serves to inconvenience the honest paying customer.

I don't think the data actually bear this out, at least in absolute terms. I think there is *some* deterrent effect to DRM on games, if only for the very brief period before it gets cracked, and that might amount to a relatively small but nonzero number of additional sales. On the whole I still think it is philosophically a shitty way to treat customers, but there is almost certainly a marginally legitimate reason it exists.

The reason publishers pay top dollar for Denuvo is to increase their early sales, which tend to make up the most significant portion of their profits. Denuvo doesn't think that it's possible to prevent a game's copy prevention mechanisms from being circumvented forever, but that they can frustrate reverse engineers long enough to convince more people to buy the game.

It would certainly be effective at convincing people who don't buy because they can get it for free to buy the game, but as for people who want a game unencumbered by Denuvo's anti-tamper software or people who simply don't have the money, I don't think it would have much effect. Perhaps the truth is that the second and third groups of people make up such an insignificant portion of the publisher's target market that it isn't worth attempting to appeal to them. The question might be: "how do we convince more people to buy our game without noticeably degrading the experience for our current customers?"

I don't think most customers tend to worry that much about not being able to copy the game files to another computer. As long as they have another computer with Steam on it, they can still download and play the game. It's not as if you can only register/install a game on a maximum of three computers as it was ten or fifteen years ago; Steam instead prevents you from running it on more than one computer at a time. Most people probably think this is fair, as the only thing it really stops them from doing is sharing their account with a friend and both of them being able to play at the same time. The inconvenience for paying customers is non-existent.

As to whether Denuvo has an impact on resource usage, this is hard to prove if the only version of your game that you release is the one that uses Denuvo. Most people will assume it is the game and its lack of optimization, not the anti-tamper. And this still isn't an issue that will dissuade people from buying the game—they might be annoyed about it, sure, but they'll get over it.

The only area of concern is what will happen to the game if Steam disappears. I don't think anyone really believes this is going to happen, even if Valve files for bankruptcy. Of course, you could still be banned as you can with Amazon and lose everything you've spent thousands of dollars on for the past few years, but I don't know whether Steam does this right now.

Steam even has an offline mode that has attracted praise.

I've personally never had DRM preventing me from playing a game—assuming I was using Windows, of course. Singleplayer games that require an internet connection to play are something everyone is willing to raise their pitchforks over, but these are far and few between.

The problem is no longer that DRM is ineffective and inconveniences customers. The problem is that it works and most people don't even notice or care about it. There may no longer be an "until it's too late". This substitute for ownership is slowly becoming acceptable because the difference seems to be mostly semantics. At best, some will make a distinction between "acceptable" DRM and "unacceptable" DRM, which is usually always-online DRM for Singleplayer games.

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Quoting: F.UltraNo this is IMHO a misunderstanding of copyright. You can do all the transcription, translation and performance all day long without infringing copyright. It's when you distribute any of that to some one else that you violate the copyright, aka you can re-enact Harry Potter in your living room without an audience and not be infringing, but put it in front of an audience in any way and you are potentially in trouble (I say potentially since most courts would not see you performing this for your family or close friends as being infringing).

Well, I can't refute this, as my argument is just based on my impression of the law (which I haven't read). Initially I thought that copyright was only concerned with distribution, but through a lot of research, I came to change my mind recently. I'll have to read my country's Copyright Act (and its various amendments) some day. I will say that I live in Australia, but given that my country has agreed to various international treaties, it's likely the same overall.

Quoting: F.UltraPlease note that this article is a bit misleading, first they mention that RIAA have won in "in some cases" without further clarifying which or how many and later on they describe that they found the "pirates" by looking at BitTorrent data, so I would still say that the ones that they got damages from in court where the ones using BitTorrent since they could prove that they where distributing and not just downloading.

I read the later sections of this article after posting it and realized that I was undermining my own point, as it references BitTorrent in the edit, but ended up leaving it in as a counter-example, not being able to find any other sources to validate my argument.

Quoting: F.UltraAlso please note that many decided to settle out of court does not prove anything, it just shows that the defendants either used BitTorrent or that they didn't fully understood the law and was afraid (and didn't have access to legal counsel due to the costs involved in the US and Canada).

The RIAA is most likely who the average file sharer is going up against, because they're active and fanatical enough to go after everyone. My point is, even if they take you on for something they probably wouldn't win, they could still automatically win a settlement for a few thousand dollars because the alternative—paying for legal counsel for an unknown period of time—would be far more costly. It's not necessarily about what's judged to be legally correct, and instead more about what is practical.

Copyright infringement becomes a civil dispute in most cases, which means the copyright holder is the one who needs to bring the charge against an offender. Most independent creators don't have the capital for that sort of litigation—putting aside whether they would feel the need to pursue these matters—resulting in only large corporations and organizations such as the Author's Guild making regular appearances at the court. Practically, the only entities that are legally able to enforce their copyright are mostly large entities for whom copyright infringement isn't as potentially damaging. While I haven't looked into the details myself, it would not surprise me if this was simply another exercise in generating revenue for the plaintiff's company rather than an attempt to protect its commercial interests.

The average file sharer is in no position to defend themselves in court over sharing files, just as the average creator is in no position to be bringing these claims against the average file sharer.

Quoting: F.UltraAnd the RIAA are known for lying to their teeth in order to scare people into settle the cases. It's a known scare tactic from their part.

What people should think about is why the RIAA invented the term "piracy" if there had been an actual crime for the activity of just downloading, the way BitTorrent works gave them a massive foothold into suing people but they coined the term long before that.

Disclaimer, I have been active at the Swedish Pirate Party since inception.

I don't think they're a reliable source of information—and the footer on the page I linked says as much that this is just babble and not legally enforceable, but if the RIAA really believes these things, then they'd be willing to take people to court over it.

I don't respect the usage of the word "piracy" in relation to copyright infringement (and likely copy protection circumvention as well, though this is a separate issue) as it is hyperbolic and prone to causing misunderstandings, so I don't use it in most instances. It kind of shocks me how willing people are to accept the premise of the word, but I think this is helped by some copyright infringers finding it funny (The Pirate Bay, for example).

Evidently, at least one court also thinks that using this word and words like it unfairly biases a jury. But I don't think we're going to be purging "piracy" from the public's vocabulary any time soon.

How old is the Swedish Pirate Party, anyway?

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