Are companies trying to ruin PC Gaming?

[Maxon]

http://www.destructoid.com/confirmed-ubi...4079.phtml

Basically, if you have no internet, you can't play the game.  If your playing the game and you lose the internet, through fault of Ubisoft or your own, you get booted from the game with no save.

I thought limited installs were bad, but this is just getting ridiculous.  When did it become so bad to be able to play a game offline and I don't think the DRMs have really stopped piracy, but only enticed more to do it since people don't want to pay for ridiculous DRMs like this.

[Tricks]

In a word: yes. Xbox and PS3 are just more profitable. PC software gets hacked, chopped up, and pirated and developers are sick of it.

I wouldn't be surprised if a huge FPS title in the future isn't launched on PC at all.

[Surf314]

Easy solution: download the pirated version. Why anyone would actually buy this I have no idea. This coming from a person that now buys all of his games and does not pirate.

[Spore]

Easy solution: download the pirated version. Why anyone would actually buy this I have no idea. This coming from a person that now buys all of his games and does not pirate.

Best answer is to not pirate it or buy it.

[CaffeinePowered]

Not really, companies like Valve continue to make a killing in the PC market, Indy games thrive much more on the PC than consoles. PC is still and will always be god tier for FPS, RPG, RTS, and MMOs.

[ZargonX]

It's been a self-fulfilling prophecy for years: companies complained that pirates were hurting their business, so they create more and more arcane DRM methods that only hurt paying customers and encouraged more people to pirate the games.  Honestly, I think it really is just an excuse for a lot of companies to focus on the more profitable console games.  And, you know, if they are going to make inferior products on the PC, then good riddance to them.

[Wedge]

Ubisoft is a shitty company and you don't want their games anyways.  They haven't developed a single decent game in this console cycle. 

[Tricks]

Not really, companies like Valve continue to make a killing in the PC market, Indy games thrive much more on the PC than consoles. PC is still and will always be god tier for FPS, RPG, RTS, and MMOs.

What are the biggest video game releases of all time? Top two, in total dollars made opening week? Compare consoles and PC for MW2 and Halo 3.

[Odin]

Companies need to realize that games are pirated to avoid DRM.

Sins of a Solar Empire, fantastic game, didn't sell too well, had no DRM, but wasn't pirated ever.

Even DVDs is getting stupid, I have the digital copy I OWN but I can't put it on anything because of the DRM.  Retarded.

[cbre88x]

Companies need to realize that games are pirated to avoid DRM.

Sins of a Solar Empire, fantastic game, didn't sell too well, had no DRM, but wasn't pirated ever.

Even DVDs is getting stupid, I have the digital copy I OWN but I can't put it on anything because of the DRM.  Retarded.

that's why people invented bitripper

[backfire]

DRM is simply useless. I have the box version of Farcry 2. I tried installing it and it said I couldn't play it because of some crappy activation limit, not like I ever installed it on some other computer.

So what did I do? Went online, downloaded a cracked exe, replaced it, then played my game. Oh, but now I didn't even have to have the disk in.


What kinda crap is this anyways? All it does is make annoy the legit customers while the pirates are playing the games without any problems. Does ANYONE else besides Valve and a few indies notice this?

[cbre88x]

Does ANYONE else besides Valve and a few indies notice this?

no. why do you think Valve/Steam is so damn popular now? they actually recognize the consumer exists. they figured out the best way to make money is by making a majority happy. Most game companies are like the American Government and are too damn greedy to notice they could make more money by making everyone happy.

[[fr31ns]Karrde]

Yeah, Ubisoft is fucking themselves right out of the PC gaming market.  Never thought I'd say this but, somehow, the music industry has moved light years ahead of the gaming industry in terms of digital distribution.

[KorJax]

Companies need to realize that games are pirated to avoid DRM.

Sins of a Solar Empire, fantastic game, didn't sell too well, had no DRM, but wasn't pirated ever.

Even DVDs is getting stupid, I have the digital copy I OWN but I can't put it on anything because of the DRM.  Retarded.

That's not really true.  Sins wasn't pirated because it was such a niche game, not because it had no DRM. And even then there was still plenty of piracy to be found.

World of Goo had no DRM and has something around a 90% piracy rate. AND it's an indie game, so that's super low on the scale of of "piracy morals". There are several other AAA games that are not known to have any/bad DRM at all and their piracy rates too are through the roof (see Crysis which only has a basic CD check for example).  The only game people really seemed to care about pirating/not pirating (as a whole) due to DRM would be Spore.

I've saved an excellent example for last. As an indication that not only is the scale of piracy generally high across all types of games, but more importantly, that it seems to have little to do with DRM, big greedy game companies, or the high price of games, let's take a look at a game called World of Goo, recently released by a small independent developer called 2D Boy consisting of a team of 3 people. It's available as a digital download, selling for less than $20 on Steam, it has no intrusive DRM, and it's received nothing but praise, reflected in a Metacritic Score of 90%/95%. This should be precisely the recipe for preventing piracy according to some, but unfortunately the truth is less convenient: the developer of the game has stated that World of Goo has an approximate piracy rate of 90%. Regardless of the precise level of piracy, the key point to consider is that World of Goo addresses every single item on the checklist of excuses which people usually present for pirating games - yet it is still being pirated quite heavily.

The argument that removing DRM will result in a net increase in sales has no basis in fact based on the evidence at hand. Not only does gaming history show that unprotected games simply lead to more piracy, recent history also demonstrates clearly that simply removing DRM is not the answer to piracy. As we saw in the Scale of Piracy section, many popular games which have no intrusive DRM, such as Assassin's Creed, Crysis, Call of Duty 4 and World of Goo, also have some of the highest piracy rates in 2008. Indeed as I write this, the new Prince of Persia game was released yesterday for PC (December 10, 2008) with absolutely no DRM protection, and a quick look at torrents shows that the pirated version is available, and on two popular torrent links alone there are over 23,000 people downloading the game within the first 24 hours. The evidence is overwhelmingly clear: DRM does not cause piracy, piracy results in DRM.

Update: As yet another example of removing DRM not leading to any reduction in piracy, the game Demigod has been pirated so heavily in its initial release period that it has caused the game's servers to effectively go down. Out of the 120,000 connections made to the game's servers, over 100,000 were by confirmed pirates, leaving only around 18,000 legitimate purchasers. The game is released by Stardock, a relatively small company which has a lot of public support due to the mistaken perception that Brad Wardell, CEO of Stardock is anti-DRM (see the bottom of the next page for more details of Stardock's actual position). Demigod is widely considered to be a good game, it's available as a digital download priced at under $40, and has no intrusive DRM - yet not only has this not stopped the game from being rampantly pirated, preventing legitimate purchasers from playing the game, but has also resulted in poor reviews, potentially affecting future sales of the game.

From: http://www.tweakguides.com/Piracy_4.html and http://www.tweakguides.com/Piracy_8.html

[CaffeinePowered]

[quote author=Caffeine link=topic=4222.msg137434#msg137434 date=1266453957]
Not really, companies like Valve continue to make a killing in the PC market, Indy games thrive much more on the PC than consoles. PC is still and will always be god tier for FPS, RPG, RTS, and MMOs.

What are the biggest video game releases of all time? Top two, in total dollars made opening week? Compare consoles and PC for MW2 and Halo 3.
[/quote]

Valve won't release sales figures for OB Steam, but I can bet you they made more money than Infinity Ward did, Halo might be debatable.



For every copy of MW2 sold, IW gets $10 after packaging, production, licensing, etc.

Valve sells for $10 less and still likely makes $40 - $45 after bandwidth and steam maintenance costs since they don't have to pay licensing, packaging, or anything else with a digital copy.

[Surf314]

Steam is my favorite DRM. Why can't other companies realize if you make a DRM that provides utility people will actually want you to install DRM on their computers.

In other news I heard Bioshock 2 has 3 simultaneous DRMs running. I almost think that passes into the realm of artsy fartsy critique.

[Mission Difficult]

[quote author=TR1CK link=topic=4222.msg137474#msg137474 date=1266470558]
[quote author=Caffeine link=topic=4222.msg137434#msg137434 date=1266453957]
Not really, companies like Valve continue to make a killing in the PC market, Indy games thrive much more on the PC than consoles. PC is still and will always be god tier for FPS, RPG, RTS, and MMOs.

What are the biggest video game releases of all time? Top two, in total dollars made opening week? Compare consoles and PC for MW2 and Halo 3.
[/quote]
Valve sells for $10 less and still likely makes $40 - $45 after bandwidth and steam maintenance costs since they don't have to pay licensing, packaging, or anything else with a digital copy.
[/quote]

And they make a truckload licensing their engine to other developers.

[[fr31ns]Karrde]

I don't see why people need to do this anyway.  Direct 2 Drive, Steam, Impulse, there's tons of good programs out there they could release it on.  Even the out of the box version could require it and have an installer.  Well, either way, until they change their policies, I'm never buying another ubisoft game on the PC.

[ainmosni]

Someone in this thread mentioned 'opening week'... Who cares? I bet TF2 will have made more money in its lifetime than MW2 or Halo. Valve breeds customer loyalty and doesn't stare itself blind on silly things like opening weeks. What is it with the obsession of opening $time_period anyway? The only thing that shows is how good the hype machine worked for something, something might start up slow because of lack of hype but will grow more and more if it's actually good. SO yeah, I think this 'opening week' thing is a bunch of BS.

[CaffeinePowered]

Someone in this thread mentioned 'opening week'... Who cares? I bet TF2 will have made more money in its lifetime than MW2 or Halo. Valve breeds customer loyalty and doesn't stare itself blind on silly things like opening weeks. What is it with the obsession of opening $time_period anyway? The only thing that shows is how good the hype machine worked for something, something might start up slow because of lack of hype but will grow more and more if it's actually good. SO yeah, I think this 'opening week' thing is a bunch of BS.

Actually another point with console games - the used market


To a developer if you buy a used game, you might as well have pirated it, because gamestop isn't paying them a dime in commissions or anything for reselling a used disk.


Pirate a PC game or buy a used console game, its exactly the same economically in the developer's eyes