16 ms·

I know I might be in the minority, but I just wish we could stop at semi-difficult license keys. When I was poor in college, either I would pirate a game or ju

• sundvor 5y ago
  There's proof you're right, from yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27798879 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27798879
  • johnchristopher 5y ago
    Hardly. Except from this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27799795 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27799795 and maybe another I miss the whole thread is about people growing up in poor countries stating piracy was the only way to watch content.
    • sundvor 5y ago
      Context here is computer games?
      • deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      • johnchristopher 5y ago
        If you had read the article from the thread you cited and proposed as proof you'd know the study dealt with music, books, movies and games.
        • sundvor 5y ago
          Yes, I did, and it stated piracy didn't impact computer games sales - mainly new/ big movie releases. The context of _this thread_ is computer games. That's why I posted it.
          • johnchristopher 5y ago
            Sorry, was threw off by the wording and misreading between the lines I guess.
            • sundvor 5y ago
              All good, thanks - and I could definitely have been more detailed in why and how I referenced it.
• seer 5y ago
  Used to pirate a lot as a poor kid in eastern europe, as there was no way I could either afford it, find a legal copy or both. Now as a paid developer I always buy the software / games I use, as its much less of a hustle, and I’d like to support the people whose work I’m using. But I still have some friends that never buy anything digital, after being brought up on pirated software they would describe buying it as “nauseous”. They might own multiple cars and expensive real estate, but still pirate their windows as a matter of principle. I have a feeling a lot of kids brought up in eastern europe have similar sensibilities.
  • antisthenes 5y ago
    > They might own multiple cars and expensive real estate, but still pirate their windows as a matter of principle. Not paying for recent version of Windows seems like a poor example, because not paying for spyware is a pretty good principle.
    • dandelany 5y ago
      The principled thing to do about software you consider spyware is to not use it. Not paying for a paid product you use daily and continuously derive value from is hard to justify in my view.
      • jhasse 5y ago
        You're forced to use Windows due to multiple reasons.
        • ifdefdebug 5y ago
          You're forced to drink water for much stronger reasons yet you pay for it if you don't dig up your own.
          • DrSiemer 5y ago
            Digging up and purifying your own water source is a bit more effort than installing a widely available and well documented crack
• viktorcode 5y ago
  I believe the cases of steep sales drop were observed at the moment when a cracked game binary appeared. No game studio would want to spend resources (developers work and licensing cost) implementing anti-piracy for nothing.
  • judge2020 5y ago
    This is probably why most new games have some sort of online multiplayer requirement - the DRM/purchase check is required to use the online, so a pirated copy means little.
  • Shosty123 5y ago
    Yep. My first developer position was at an audio software company that made a plugin used by EDM artists. The year our software was cracked (2009ish), our sales dropped by 65%. Support tickets also nearly quadrupled including a massive increase in refund requests and chargebacks because customers realized they could get it for free instead.
    • richrichardsson 5y ago
      ReFX Nexus perchance? If not it's another example of the crack destroying sales.
    • mmmrk 5y ago
      Oof. How did the company cope?
  • pjerem 5y ago
    Movies publishers does it as well (DRMs on movies media) since decades and we all know this have absolutely no effect : every movie is available on p2p networks even before being available in stores. I’d add that they even manage to get negative effects since only legitimate consumers are annoyed. So it would not be surprising to have a similar situation there.
  • AussieWog93 5y ago
    Apparently a lot of devs included SecuROM in their products not as an actual hindrance to pirates, but to placate investors who are concerned about piracy reducing sales. The people who actually make the software are fully aware that any DRM will be cracked within 48 hours of release (with a few small exceptions).
• devwastaken 5y ago
  If you were to walk into a store that said "please support the creator" as payment, your shelves would be empty. Or in other words if software costed no money and always relied on donation, you'd be bankrupt. But, you can't stop crackers. Bits of memory are bits of memory. They can be changed. The balance is making games highly available, and having content beyond just the base game. Such as online play, or physical merchandise with the purchase. If I got a poster every time I bought a game id be liable to buy more games that I may not even play.
  • AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
    > If you were to walk into a store that said "please support the creator" as payment, your shelves would be empty. Yes, but that's because when you take a physical good off the shelf there isn't still a copy on the shelf. Software does not have this problem. > Or in other words if software costed no money and always relied on donation, you'd be bankrupt. There are obvious examples that contradict your point: Linus and The Toady One come immediately to mind. Though, admittedly, they are outliers.
• guilamu 5y ago
  The Witcher (and now cyberpunk) series is the proof of that: insanely successful sale wise and 0 drm of any kind. Make a good game and it'll sale.
  • bool3max 5y ago
    Except the latter is not good, just aggressively marketed.
    • nix23 5y ago
      That's a "taste" thing. I think it's a great game...but not the advertised one.
      • wccrawford 5y ago
        Agreed. Plus, I enjoyed Cyberpunk more than Witcher, even after trying all 3. I didn't refund them, but I sure thought about it.
      • binarybanana 5y ago
        It's more of an immersive sim than an RPG. It even encourages stealth play heavily in a lot of missions with explicit optional goals and by the way many mechanics are designed in general. If enemies were more intelligent about looking for the player instead of just standing around when becoming suspicious it could easily match the best of the genre like Deus Ex. Sadly CDPR seems to be fixing the wrong things. They even took out great accidental mechanics like the dodge boost, which was incredibly fun and added a lot of depth to the way you could move around the city. A lot of places aren't even accessible without it. You aren't supposed to go there, but a lot of areas reachable with just the double jump a bugged, too. Even without any mods you can reach a few out of bounds areas... I think removing the dodge boost is as if id had "fixed" the double jump instead of rolling with it. Similar with the slide invincibility glitch. I can see why they fixed that, but some way to jump from great highs is really necessary in a place as vertical as Night City. They replaced it with.. nothing. They also made most consumables useless by roving the ability to disassemble them instead of fixing the economy. There's literally no point in any of the drinks now. You also can't re-roll the stats of any legendary gear you find, so if it doesn't have any slots for mods it's useless. And other things. I honestly think that it was a better game at version 1.04. Performance was better, too.
• AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  Gabe correctly identified piracy as a service problem a decade ago. People pirate for two reasons: they can't otherwise buy legitimately at a reasonable[0] price, or the legitimate version is less convenient to obtain or use. It used to be people used no-CD cracks because of the inconvenience of inserting a CD even if they legitimately purchased the game. More draconian DRM consistently leads people to use cracks on legitimate game purchases. Hell, I recall at least one developer practically begging their community to crack their game because their publisher forced them to include Denuvo, but they could remove it as soon as a pirated version appeared. DRM punishes your customer. Unfortunately modern technology companies have all but trained users to accept being punished for using their product so this behavior hasn't stopped. [0] reasonable is, of course, subjective. Thus, some will pirate because even $10 is more than they are willing to pay, but you're unlikely to ever get sales out of these people anyway.
  • Mindwipe 5y ago
    > Gabe correctly identified piracy as a service problem a decade ago. Gabe literally built a DRM platform. But he correctly identified that if you just said something people want to hear in an interview then even if you operate in literally the exact opposite fashion people adore it.
    • colejohnson66 5y ago
      DRM isn’t a bad thing per se. It’s intrusive DRMs that are the issue. Steam isn’t intrusive; I can launch a game using my start menu and never interact with Steam or worry about the DRM. DRM requiring people to insert the CD to play is intrusive.
      • gameswithgo 5y ago
        i can’t play a game on my steam account while my son plays another game on it.
        • spidersouris 5y ago
• dijit 5y ago
  > I HAVE to believe that the number of folks that can both afford to buy the game and would buy the game, but would try to pirate first, is a fraction of a percent of the market. I have actual concrete data about this¹ and unfortunately the percentage is much larger than you realise. I'm still under NDA until 2024 but it's in the region of 60-80% of sales for certain games, especially RPGs which seem to get pirated the most. People like to cite hugely successful products being DRM-Free or something as proof that it works, but for every project that works well there's hundreds that die in obscurity. Also, people like to back a champion to "prove that it works" which inflates the margins of the champion product. ¹ - based on my time at Ubisoft, and based on Ubisoft titles only and when accounting for other differences between franchised games.
  • jobigoud 5y ago
    Note that the GP wrote "that would buy the game" which I think makes this unknowable / unmeasurable. You can measure how many players have pirated the game but not how many of them wouln't have bothered at all if they had had to pay for it. Take a person that has pirated many games, how do you know which ones they would have actually paid for? Even if you knew the ones they play the most, it woulnd't necessarily translate to a buy in the same order.
    • dijit 5y ago
      You can see the deficit of the pirated copies sales vs the non-pirated copies sales. You can also estimate sales within a 5% margin of error. Other factors such as play time and ratings also allow you to understand what sales would have been. There’s lots of data to draw from.
      • deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
  • DocTomoe 5y ago
    On the other hand, many people refuse to buy anything with DRM on it, or wait for the massively-reduced "game of the year" edition that comes out a few years down the line, when a crack to remove DRM is available.
• canadianfella 5y ago
  Why do you HAVE to believe that?
• effingwewt 5y ago
  Was/am in the same boat. Did what I had to when broke and poor, now am happy to give extra when I can. However to this day I would rather crack and try and game before wasting $70-100+ on an unfinished piece of garbage, which I firmly believe 8/10 games are now. With companies releasing broken games like this and 50gb day one patches that still don't fix shit, these days it's the game companies that don't have my trust, not the other way around. I used to get into Early Access on Steam and we all saw the cesspool of forever-betas in that shit. In fact to this day, 10 years later I think, warframe is still in beta, and I dont think a single game I ever EA'd made it to production, all were thieves. Chucklefish was a great example of that. Jesus and they have control over the forums too so no dissent allowed. They never finished the game but posted pics of their new multi million dollar studio and new houses. Anyway sorry but fuck games these days. Edit-spells and stuff
• roody15 5y ago
  Exactly when I was poor in my late teens and early twenties I pirated lots of games and software (adobe, etc). Now in my 40’s I purchase all games and make it a point to support developers. Now with a good job and financial stability I have no interest in piracy. DRM does seem to punish paying customers meanwhile those who will crack the game and pirate still find a way.
• tracedddd 5y ago
  I still pirate movies sometimes because, due to HDCP, none of the streaming services work with my computer. Unfortunately, all the DVD rental places are gone now, too.