5 ms·

RDR2 is one of the biggest of triple-As. It probably has more cracking effort applied to it than most. I don't think that's evidence that DRM is useless.

dylan604 6y ago
If no other DRM has withstood for 300+ days before being cracked, then it seems pretty useless. Yay, it worked for one title. I think we can all agree CSS was pretty useless. This stat makes it sound like AAA game DRM is about as easy to crack. At least it's not as bad as the master key leaking for Blu-ray.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- NoOneNew 6y ago
  You do realize whoever wrote the spec for this DRM now has free advertising to be hired for more projects and make bank. If Rockstar did it in house, I'm pretty sure they're going to make a spinoff DRM company. Useless, stupid, whatever you want to call it, they're going to print fun-coupons now.
  - dylan604 6y ago
    DRM is and always will be a cat&mouse game. The hacker that breaks this DRM will also get level up bonus for their resume. At that point, this theoretical business model you propose will no longer be such a valuable thing. Those fun-coupons will be as valuable as the Chuck E Cheese tickets recently discussed
    - NoOneNew 6y ago
      Your argument can easily apply to locks, safes and general physical security. It will always be done. I've been hearing "DRM is will be useless soon" since the early 2000s. Many DRM companies are 10-30+ years old, with multiple international locations and many, many employees. Look, I appreciate the hobby and skills it takes to crack DRM as a logic puzzle. I used to work security integration and I may have had my own similar hobbies. But at the end of the day, the argument of "DRM is useless" is people truly saying, "I don't want to pay for things". Who likes to work for free? I don't and I'm sure as shit you won't work for free either. Do I like Rockstar? No. I think their games are shit from beginning to end. They're edgelord, teenage wish fulfillment trash. Do I respect when someone spends their time and wishes to get paid for it so they can continue their craft with a roof over their head and food on the table for them and their families? Yes. If you don't approve of mandatory crunch times, story lines or whatever anti-capitalist, anarchist, whatever manifesto you subscribe to... don't buy or play their stuff. Fun part about a capitalist system, the best way to hurt someone is to both ignore them and don't buy their stuff. Pirating their stuff, as a lot of folks like to mention, "Doesn't hurt the company". But it does give them reason to be more aggressive, issue lawsuits, get more press attention and generally be bigger assholes that spiral the system out of control. If they can make a profit, you bet your sweet ass they'll figure it out even if it's a long con. So yea, wait for DRM to go bye-bye. Let's see, RDR2 was in dev for around 7 years. You go ahead and work, for someone else, for 7 years on something, about 40 hours a weeks (more if you want to include the "controversial working conditions") and don't get paid during that entire time. Not on something YOU want to do. Something that someone else wants done for them. Do that, then come back to me with a real argument for people not to get paid for their work. We're not a society that runs off hugs and kisses.
      - the_af 6y ago
        > But at the end of the day, the argument of "DRM is useless" is people truly saying, "I don't want to pay for things". This is false. A lot of people oppose DRM because it's a nasty bit of software running on your hardware, or because it's unwieldy or plain doesn't work. Some people buy a game (or ebook, or whatever) then use a DRM-stripped version because it's better. And yes, some people play pirated games because they don't want to pay. But don't make it sound as if that was everyone. DRM sucks.
        NoOneNew 6y ago
        Dude, that's the biggest load of crap and you know it. That's what everyone tells themselves so they sleep better at night and seem like some self-righteous Robin Hoods to the public. You pirate because you don't want to pay for it. People don't buy something, then go out of their way to potentially get a bit of illegal virus/malware induced "DRM-Free version". I was a teen back during Napster and Limewire days... goddamn it I'm old... You pirate because you don't want to pay for it. Stop acting like it's some great public service, saving the world, doing-the-right-thing cause. The folks that do the actual cracking, again, I actually respect for the skills. That kind of stuff is a real fun hobby. They share their work as a way to showoff. However, it's the users that get free-rides who I think are just ridiculous and delusional. "Oh, I pirate games as a political statement for anti-DRM because DRM is soooooo much worse on machines, and, and capitalism bad." Yea... okay. Everything I have is DRM-filth and I never noticed.
        the_af 6y ago
        I don't really know what to tell you except you're wrong. People do what I claimed all the time, you just ignore it happens. > You pirate because you don't want to pay for it. I don't pirate games. > Oh, I pirate games as a political statement for anti-DRM because DRM is soooooo much worse on machines, and, and capitalism bad. Nice strawman there. Please try arguing about what was actually said, instead of trying to start a flame war. Thanks.
        tetris11 6y ago
    - peteradio 6y ago
      DRM that takes 1 year to crack is about as good as you can want. What percent of total sales takes place in the first year. If your proposed hacker finds the solution to this one, does that mean they have the general solution? Or does that indicate that this style of DRM in general takes 1 year to crack and is generally valuable?
      - NoOneNew 6y ago
        I know in the indie game field, ~95% of lifetime sales happen in the first year. But to be fair, they typically don't have the similar marketing power as a AAA. I'd venture 60% (gut/instinct). There must be a good reason for running sales even in the long term. That could also be skewed when you think of in-game purchases too. Cheaper year 2 or 3 purchases could be pushed for if they're banking on in-game purchases. Either way, pretty sure someone broke open an expensive bottle of champagne for a 1 year mark.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
  It is possible it is useless, but if so it is surprising that so many stakeholders continue to invest in it. I don't know what the facts are but it is certainly plausible to me that DRM that only holds out for one month still pays for itself. It seems that the prior assumption should be that there is a good reason for the presence of an expensive and reviled feature. The only one I can think of for DRM is that it is useful, chiefly by driving increased sales due to fractional conversion of pirates.
- Negitivefrags 6y ago
  If DRM lasts a week then it will have done it's job. The people willing to wait longer than that are probably never going to pay for the game regardless, so it doesn’t matter if they pirate it.
  - loeg 6y ago
    I don't know your social circle, but I have a lot of friends that will wait a year or two for titles to go on Steam sales for 40%+ off launch day pricing. You're oversimplifying the revenue model of AAA games.
    - recursive 6y ago
      Is the behavior of those friends at all affected by DRM? If not, then they're not the targets.
    - nemothekid 6y ago
      The people who wait a year to buy a game with 40% off launch day pricing make no where near the majority of revenue for publishers. Most of the revenue for a single player game, like RDR, is made in the first couple weeks and tapers off. By the next year the sister studio is releasing the sequel to the game.
      - crtasm 6y ago
        RDR2 has an online mode with micro transactions. They'll be aiming to milk it for years like they have with GTA5.
    - s1artibartfast 6y ago
      Red Dead Redemption has sold 32 Million Copies to date.[1] 10 Million of these were in the first three days of release.[2] 17 Million were in the first 12 days of release. [1] https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2020-08-03-take-two-ceo-its-a-matter-of-time-before-the-business-is-entirely-digital https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2020-08-03-take-two-c... [2] https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/02/putting-red-dead-redemption-2s-23-million-shipments-in-context/ https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/02/putting-red-dead-rede...
- Voloskaya 6y ago
  > If no other DRM has withstood for 300+ days before being cracked, then it seems pretty useless. Based on what? I'll wager that if a DRM is un-cracked for just 15 days it's already worth it. For most video games, the first few weeks after release are where a huge proportion of the sales are done because no one wants to wait to play an hyped game. If you can keep the game uncracked for those 2 weeks then a lot of people that might have downloaded the cracked game will just buy it because they don't want to wait.
- recursive 6y ago
  > If no other DRM has withstood for 300+ days before being cracked, then it seems pretty useless. The conditional part of your condition fails. I don't know if it's trustworthy, but crackwatch.com shows many games with no crack 1000+ days after release.
  - fatbird 6y ago
    Do they have any way of measuring the volume of effort at attempting to crack it?
Nextgrid 6y ago
Typically when making a copyrighted creative work your objective is to get paid for that work. Just preventing people that wouldn't pay for it anyway from enjoying that work is a lose-lose situation for both parties involved. While this isn't evidence that DRM is useless, it also isn't evidence that it is useful. That evidence would come from sales numbers if they are significantly higher than another comparable work that wasn't DRM'ed as it would prove that the DRM is actually convincing people to pay for something they normally wouldn't. Piracy is not just a "freeloader" problem. I've been to a few poorer countries where piracy is absolutely normal not because they don't want to pay per-se, but because they just don't have the means to do so or are prevented from doing so by technical or commercial reasons like lack of adequate payment infrastructure or region-locking; in which case you are still better off letting them enjoy the creative work for free and hope to gain the benefits in some other way (like them buying your future software when they can finally afford it, or producing good press and raising awareness around other people who can actually afford it). There's also the issue of people for who DRM actually causes problems and prevents them from enjoying work that they did actually pay for, though I personally don't see how the inconvenience of DRM is worse than the risk of running code from an untrusted, anonymous source that might be malicious).
- belorn 6y ago
  We can compare sales number of RDR2 with witcher 3, a game that came out 3 years before RDR2 and without DRM. Given a growing market, and the assumption that both games are equally attractive for buyers, RDR2 should at minimum have a small increased number compared to witcher 3. Witcher 3 sold about 30 millions copies over the first 2 years. RDR2 sold 32 millions over the first 2 years.
  - ineedasername 6y ago
    Eh, hard to say: Witcher 3 was a breakout hit with a (relatively) niche audience for prior games. It's prior games were also available DRM free. RDR2 was both highly anticipated and had a massive marketing budget. I think your idea is sound, but I just don't know if these are really comparable game launches. Counter-factuals are also very hard to prove. how do we know that Witcher 3 wouldn't have generated more revenue if it wasn't easy to share your copy?
manfredo 6y ago
This isn't evidence that DRM is useless. Quite the contrary, it's evidence that DRM can yield resounding successes. What a lot of people don't understand is that DRM has fulfilled its purpose if unauthorized copies are staved off for a few months. Sales usually follow and exponential decay. While some titles experience unprecedented popularity later in life, most games have the overwhelming majority of sales in their first few months after release. It's unclear exactly how piracy affects sales, but assuming that some percentage of potential buyers would pirate instead of buy if illicit copies are available DRM that only delays cracking for a few months captures most of these otherwise lost sales. Phrased from the opposite perspective, most people who would wait several months after release to pirate probably wouldn't have bought the game even if it went un-cracked forever. Again, the standard for "successful" DRM is on the order of several months. RDR2 going uncracked for close to a year is not just successful, but a resounding success.

dylan604 6y ago

If no other DRM has withstood for 300+ days before being cracked, then it seems pretty useless. Yay, it worked for one title. I think we can all agree CSS was pretty useless. This stat makes it sound like AAA game DRM is about as easy to crack. At least it's not as bad as the master key leaking for Blu-ray.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
NoOneNew 6y ago
You do realize whoever wrote the spec for this DRM now has free advertising to be hired for more projects and make bank. If Rockstar did it in house, I'm pretty sure they're going to make a spinoff DRM company. Useless, stupid, whatever you want to call it, they're going to print fun-coupons now.
- dylan604 6y ago
  DRM is and always will be a cat&mouse game. The hacker that breaks this DRM will also get level up bonus for their resume. At that point, this theoretical business model you propose will no longer be such a valuable thing. Those fun-coupons will be as valuable as the Chuck E Cheese tickets recently discussed
  - NoOneNew 6y ago
    Your argument can easily apply to locks, safes and general physical security. It will always be done. I've been hearing "DRM is will be useless soon" since the early 2000s. Many DRM companies are 10-30+ years old, with multiple international locations and many, many employees. Look, I appreciate the hobby and skills it takes to crack DRM as a logic puzzle. I used to work security integration and I may have had my own similar hobbies. But at the end of the day, the argument of "DRM is useless" is people truly saying, "I don't want to pay for things". Who likes to work for free? I don't and I'm sure as shit you won't work for free either. Do I like Rockstar? No. I think their games are shit from beginning to end. They're edgelord, teenage wish fulfillment trash. Do I respect when someone spends their time and wishes to get paid for it so they can continue their craft with a roof over their head and food on the table for them and their families? Yes. If you don't approve of mandatory crunch times, story lines or whatever anti-capitalist, anarchist, whatever manifesto you subscribe to... don't buy or play their stuff. Fun part about a capitalist system, the best way to hurt someone is to both ignore them and don't buy their stuff. Pirating their stuff, as a lot of folks like to mention, "Doesn't hurt the company". But it does give them reason to be more aggressive, issue lawsuits, get more press attention and generally be bigger assholes that spiral the system out of control. If they can make a profit, you bet your sweet ass they'll figure it out even if it's a long con. So yea, wait for DRM to go bye-bye. Let's see, RDR2 was in dev for around 7 years. You go ahead and work, for someone else, for 7 years on something, about 40 hours a weeks (more if you want to include the "controversial working conditions") and don't get paid during that entire time. Not on something YOU want to do. Something that someone else wants done for them. Do that, then come back to me with a real argument for people not to get paid for their work. We're not a society that runs off hugs and kisses.
    - the_af 6y ago
      > But at the end of the day, the argument of "DRM is useless" is people truly saying, "I don't want to pay for things". This is false. A lot of people oppose DRM because it's a nasty bit of software running on your hardware, or because it's unwieldy or plain doesn't work. Some people buy a game (or ebook, or whatever) then use a DRM-stripped version because it's better. And yes, some people play pirated games because they don't want to pay. But don't make it sound as if that was everyone. DRM sucks.
      - NoOneNew 6y ago
        Dude, that's the biggest load of crap and you know it. That's what everyone tells themselves so they sleep better at night and seem like some self-righteous Robin Hoods to the public. You pirate because you don't want to pay for it. People don't buy something, then go out of their way to potentially get a bit of illegal virus/malware induced "DRM-Free version". I was a teen back during Napster and Limewire days... goddamn it I'm old... You pirate because you don't want to pay for it. Stop acting like it's some great public service, saving the world, doing-the-right-thing cause. The folks that do the actual cracking, again, I actually respect for the skills. That kind of stuff is a real fun hobby. They share their work as a way to showoff. However, it's the users that get free-rides who I think are just ridiculous and delusional. "Oh, I pirate games as a political statement for anti-DRM because DRM is soooooo much worse on machines, and, and capitalism bad." Yea... okay. Everything I have is DRM-filth and I never noticed.
        the_af 6y ago
        I don't really know what to tell you except you're wrong. People do what I claimed all the time, you just ignore it happens. > You pirate because you don't want to pay for it. I don't pirate games. > Oh, I pirate games as a political statement for anti-DRM because DRM is soooooo much worse on machines, and, and capitalism bad. Nice strawman there. Please try arguing about what was actually said, instead of trying to start a flame war. Thanks.
        tetris11 6y ago
  - peteradio 6y ago
    DRM that takes 1 year to crack is about as good as you can want. What percent of total sales takes place in the first year. If your proposed hacker finds the solution to this one, does that mean they have the general solution? Or does that indicate that this style of DRM in general takes 1 year to crack and is generally valuable?
    - NoOneNew 6y ago
      I know in the indie game field, ~95% of lifetime sales happen in the first year. But to be fair, they typically don't have the similar marketing power as a AAA. I'd venture 60% (gut/instinct). There must be a good reason for running sales even in the long term. That could also be skewed when you think of in-game purchases too. Cheaper year 2 or 3 purchases could be pushed for if they're banking on in-game purchases. Either way, pretty sure someone broke open an expensive bottle of champagne for a 1 year mark.
asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
It is possible it is useless, but if so it is surprising that so many stakeholders continue to invest in it. I don't know what the facts are but it is certainly plausible to me that DRM that only holds out for one month still pays for itself. It seems that the prior assumption should be that there is a good reason for the presence of an expensive and reviled feature. The only one I can think of for DRM is that it is useful, chiefly by driving increased sales due to fractional conversion of pirates.
Negitivefrags 6y ago
If DRM lasts a week then it will have done it's job. The people willing to wait longer than that are probably never going to pay for the game regardless, so it doesn’t matter if they pirate it.
- loeg 6y ago
  I don't know your social circle, but I have a lot of friends that will wait a year or two for titles to go on Steam sales for 40%+ off launch day pricing. You're oversimplifying the revenue model of AAA games.
  - recursive 6y ago
    Is the behavior of those friends at all affected by DRM? If not, then they're not the targets.
  - nemothekid 6y ago
    The people who wait a year to buy a game with 40% off launch day pricing make no where near the majority of revenue for publishers. Most of the revenue for a single player game, like RDR, is made in the first couple weeks and tapers off. By the next year the sister studio is releasing the sequel to the game.
    - crtasm 6y ago
      RDR2 has an online mode with micro transactions. They'll be aiming to milk it for years like they have with GTA5.
  - s1artibartfast 6y ago
    Red Dead Redemption has sold 32 Million Copies to date.[1] 10 Million of these were in the first three days of release.[2] 17 Million were in the first 12 days of release. [1] https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2020-08-03-take-two-ceo-its-a-matter-of-time-before-the-business-is-entirely-digital https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2020-08-03-take-two-c... [2] https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/02/putting-red-dead-redemption-2s-23-million-shipments-in-context/ https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/02/putting-red-dead-rede...
Voloskaya 6y ago
> If no other DRM has withstood for 300+ days before being cracked, then it seems pretty useless. Based on what? I'll wager that if a DRM is un-cracked for just 15 days it's already worth it. For most video games, the first few weeks after release are where a huge proportion of the sales are done because no one wants to wait to play an hyped game. If you can keep the game uncracked for those 2 weeks then a lot of people that might have downloaded the cracked game will just buy it because they don't want to wait.
recursive 6y ago
> If no other DRM has withstood for 300+ days before being cracked, then it seems pretty useless. The conditional part of your condition fails. I don't know if it's trustworthy, but crackwatch.com shows many games with no crack 1000+ days after release.
- fatbird 6y ago
  Do they have any way of measuring the volume of effort at attempting to crack it?

Nextgrid 6y ago

Typically when making a copyrighted creative work your objective is to get paid for that work. Just preventing people that wouldn't pay for it anyway from enjoying that work is a lose-lose situation for both parties involved. While this isn't evidence that DRM is useless, it also isn't evidence that it is useful. That evidence would come from sales numbers if they are significantly higher than another comparable work that wasn't DRM'ed as it would prove that the DRM is actually convincing people to pay for something they normally wouldn't. Piracy is not just a "freeloader" problem. I've been to a few poorer countries where piracy is absolutely normal not because they don't want to pay per-se, but because they just don't have the means to do so or are prevented from doing so by technical or commercial reasons like lack of adequate payment infrastructure or region-locking; in which case you are still better off letting them enjoy the creative work for free and hope to gain the benefits in some other way (like them buying your future software when they can finally afford it, or producing good press and raising awareness around other people who can actually afford it). There's also the issue of people for who DRM actually causes problems and prevents them from enjoying work that they did actually pay for, though I personally don't see how the inconvenience of DRM is worse than the risk of running code from an untrusted, anonymous source that might be malicious).

belorn 6y ago
We can compare sales number of RDR2 with witcher 3, a game that came out 3 years before RDR2 and without DRM. Given a growing market, and the assumption that both games are equally attractive for buyers, RDR2 should at minimum have a small increased number compared to witcher 3. Witcher 3 sold about 30 millions copies over the first 2 years. RDR2 sold 32 millions over the first 2 years.
- ineedasername 6y ago
  Eh, hard to say: Witcher 3 was a breakout hit with a (relatively) niche audience for prior games. It's prior games were also available DRM free. RDR2 was both highly anticipated and had a massive marketing budget. I think your idea is sound, but I just don't know if these are really comparable game launches. Counter-factuals are also very hard to prove. how do we know that Witcher 3 wouldn't have generated more revenue if it wasn't easy to share your copy?

manfredo 6y ago

This isn't evidence that DRM is useless. Quite the contrary, it's evidence that DRM can yield resounding successes. What a lot of people don't understand is that DRM has fulfilled its purpose if unauthorized copies are staved off for a few months. Sales usually follow and exponential decay. While some titles experience unprecedented popularity later in life, most games have the overwhelming majority of sales in their first few months after release. It's unclear exactly how piracy affects sales, but assuming that some percentage of potential buyers would pirate instead of buy if illicit copies are available DRM that only delays cracking for a few months captures most of these otherwise lost sales. Phrased from the opposite perspective, most people who would wait several months after release to pirate probably wouldn't have bought the game even if it went un-cracked forever. Again, the standard for "successful" DRM is on the order of several months. RDR2 going uncracked for close to a year is not just successful, but a resounding success.