It'd be a great launch/pre-order move from the devs to let us use GOG connect with the first and second installments once they release The Banner Saga 3.

Sadly, it's far from healthy, and it has been very unhealthy for at least 10-15 years. Just last week I listened back to some old GDC talks (from 2004, I believe) to that effect. I don't remember the exact number, but the estimate was that something like 80-90% of bigger-budget titles never turn a profit… not a healthy industry. It's not DRMs fault, but it didn't help prevent it, either.

I completely agree. But there's also some things that are considered "consumer rights" for good reason. One thing that is necessary is that people are informed of what they get before they buy. Even I buy the occasional Steam game when, given all the downsides of the distribution system, I still think it's worth the price. But I'm sure that most Steam users, for example, are not aware of the fact that, should Valve go bankrupt, their entire Steam library would disappear. It happened with several DRMed music stores, and also some casual game stores. Still today, most people are surprised and very upset to realise that their libraries were tied to an external service beyond their control.

For me personally, there is the additional factor of knowing that a company invested time and effort into technical limitations that I know are misguided, also makes me less likely to want to buy. When I bought GTA IV for PC, I was very pissed off that Rockstar bragged about how much money they paid for their "unbreakable" copy protection, which had already been broken by that point, but they didn't feel the need to spend more money on badly needed QA, to ensure that the game wouldn't crash on most systems with AMD video cards. There's also the long-term effect: people who have been burned by misfiring DRM once, are going to be very wary of buying another game from the same company for a while.

Just as a back-on-topic note, as wrong and annoying as this publisher's previous statements have been, I don't support still boycotting them because of it. The new game is now here, DRM-free. The right signal to send, if one thinks their "GOG leads to piracy" statement was wrong, would seem to be to buy the games here instead of elsewhere. The argument I want to make is best supported by helping GOG.com gain a bigger market share in digital games distribution :)

Which is one of the reasons why the PC gaming market is in such a sorry financial state ;) when I see how people over at Steam forums, and sometimes even here, get upset when an Indie game costs upwards of $20, I'm not surprised how the business is a loss for most companies. I don't think Steam normalising 90% discounts was good for the industry. In fact, I think it's done exceedingly more damage than piracy.

Thanks for the details, as I said my memory about the Denuvo history is not perfectly clear.

Of course it also always depends on developer talent. From what I know, Denuvo is pretty open with regards to what, and how often, you want to check. I still understand the frustration when, in the case it happens, you learn that the guilty code is part of a copy protection that should be of absolutely no concern to you as a licensed player.

That's all true as well. The problem is that both sides are practically impossible to support with proof.

The GDC talks I've listened to included an industry panel on piracy, with representatives from some major publishers and industry associations (ESA was one). One of the statements was that the worse your game is, the more likely piracy is going to hurt your sales. The better the game, the higher the promotional effect of piracy (although still not easy to quantify).

Although one statistic that supported the "not many lost sales" argument pretty well was where someone looked at how many games (I assume private) torrent tracker users download a month. I think the average was about 20. Not many people would spend that on full-price games, let alone have the time to play that much (hence be willing to spend money on it). A lot of piracy is hoarding. Getting it for free because you can, even if you never look at it. That goes a long way to explain the sheer volume of file sharing, and why only little of it translates to economic effect.

It's all so muddy though, so I tend to revert to this principle: publishers should listen to their potential paying customers, in order to figure out how to create a product that the most people will want to buy. It's more effective than directing their attention to pirates, trying to figure out how to keep them from pirating, while many of them would never buy their product anyway if they couldn't get it for free.

That is, again, trusting that this will be possible. The "No One Lives Forever" mess is just one example of how and why this can end up not working out.

nice looking forward to it

Do you have links to any source data on that?

I like to educate myself but the last time I did reading on the subject (admitedly a few years ago now) I was unable to find any research on the subject which showed any appruciable number of people fall into the catagory of "will certainly buy a game but only if there's no crack of it" (appruciable in this context meaning a larger enough market share to more than offset the costs of buying and implimenting DRM).

If you have links to research that says there is such a meaningful market share which behaves that way I would be very interested to see it.

I made the mistake of supporting that company for the original Kickstarter, which means they owe me (and all other Bakers they got to up their pledges with the "get all three chapters for an extra $X" sales pitch) this. After that I wash my hands of the devs and their publisher due to their Epic failure in customer relations.

Don't forget...noadays most games aren't bought anymore, you only buy the right to use the game, some kind of upfront payed rent. The Details are different from company to company (or publisher) but for exp. most of them have a § within their AGB's that allow them to end their part of the service(Support/MP-&DRM-Severs,...) after some time, for the EU it was 2years+...any service after this point is some kind of gift :)

Edit:
So..viewing it from the law-side..no reason to complain ;), that isn't your game and if something don't work you have to give them time to fix it and hope it will be fixed before the time of servce ends

I'm honestly not that up to date on how profitable the average triple A title is these days. Whatever the difference is from pirating I doubt for titles like that it'd be a make or break difference. That depends on the game itself in most cases. I think most triple A games put almost as much if not more of their money towards advertising than the actual game. I'd rather see that change first. Imagine how much better the games could be with that money >.<

I find this very unlikely. I'm sure there are people who don't understand and/or know yet but I'd speculate the majority is aware of that (these days).

Either way, I think Valve has long past into 'Too big to fail' territory. The only way I can see Valve suddenly up and disappear is if Gabe Newell for some reason decides to just scrap the company for no good reason or perhaps if he croaks and whomever gets it decides to burn that capital down. It's far more realistic that if it ever goes downhill that it'll be a long, slow slog and for quite a while there's likely to be buyers lined up to take over in an attempt to recover or work the userbase into a new system. There's too much value in the company for it to just up and disappear.

On top of that, even if that ever happens and a means to keep playing games already bought does not get released there's still a good chance that developers/publishers take it on themselves to allow their licenses to be moved to another platform before the end comes. We know Steam already has the systems for it since that's exactly what GOG connect uses to allow people to get a license for Steam game on GOG.

The high base prices is probably the result of the sales culture to begin with. It's clear some games just keep a higher base prices so on sales they can get a high percentage and still get X for their game. In that sense you could argue the market has already adjusted to it in some sense and it's just on the customers to realize that you're paying premium if you're paying full price and need to wait for sales to get good deals (naturally... lol)

Steam has actually been dialing back it's percentages in the last years though the biggest push probably came when the flash sales ended due to the implementation of their new Refund policy. From the sales overall I'd say they're probably recommending publishers to aim for 66% lately. 90% has actually become a rarity except for old/cheap games.

I definitely agree there's a promotional aspect to piracy as well, it's just sadly again impossible to tell the levels to which it affects games.

This is one of the reasons I doubt actual sales recovered from piracy would break even 10% of pirated copies but the numbers on piracy are so massive that can still be a significant amount for the games involved.

While I do agree with listening to your paying base I think many of these companies are capable of doing both.

As I've said before. I think it's reasonable for a game to use DRM to protect it's profits (granted, it should be one that works enough to justify it). And in my opinion, ideally I'd like the industry to move to a standard where that DRM gets removed from the game after say 2 years, when the biggest sales spikes have already happened.

If there's research I'm not aware of any, I'm talking about personal observation over the years. I also didn't claim it was a meaningful market, I said there's no proof that it isn't one and that it might be.

I'm not convinced – Steam has a much broader audience than GOG, and I would guess the majority are not terribly tech-savvy. Whenever the issue of Steam's online DRM comes up, you can be almost certain that someone will bring up a statement by Gabe Newell that if Steam ever shut down, they would release an unprotect patch. However, those quotes are from a time before Steam started selling third-party titles, and applied only to their own games. Those people don't seem to understand that Valve would not be legally allowed to crack other publishers' games.

That may be, but it's a blind trust thing. People sink hundreds and hundreds of dollars into their Steam collections. Even mine must be in the value of a few thousand spent by now. And the risk is that everything would be gone at once.

But also leaving aside the special case of Steam for a moment (and considering that many games on Steam include additional online DRM independent from Steam): it's down to trust in the goodwill of the company, to care about buyers of products who have long since stopped making any money for them. Would most companies really care to patch out the DRM of a discontinued game? And if it's discontinued because the company closed down, there wouldn't even be anybody left who is responsible, allowed, or paid to do that.

It's understandable for an online game, which depends on someone running and paying for the servers. But not for a game whose only online dependency is an artificially included online check. Remotely disabling a purchased product like that – I expect courts to have some interesting opinions on how okay that really is, once it starts happening more frequently.

If the company is still around. Or if the new owner who salvaged the rights can be bothered. Both of it is often not the case. I'll harp on about the No One Lives Forever example again, sorry. That's an award-winning, fan-favourite game that is dead, missing in action, because nobody can be arsed to sort out the licensing. Luckily, the game was released before the online DRM times, so the limited number of copies still floating around can still be played. More recent games won't be so lucky.

You're right, and those are some good points.

I still think in general the average prices at which people get games have dropped considerably. From my teenage years, I was used to paying $80 to $120 for a new full-price game. And that was the 90s, where both the production and marketing budgets for games were way smaller. But of course, there's lots of factors. In the 90s, teenage boys like me were also pretty much the only ones buying games, unlike today :)

If the industry could actually come together to agree something like that, it would be a very big step in the right direction. The profit window for games is extremely short. I think I also heard somewhere that you pretty much have to break even within the first week, or you're not going to at all. And, as you might have noticed, one of my main gripes with DRM is how much it hurts the longevity and preservation of software. If a DRM expiration could be provided from release (a patch in escrow, maybe?), that problem would be solved.

Your example does not mean those people don't know how the service works. It's an example of people thinking they might be fine anyway despite how it works. Also, just as an aside, you wouldn't need to crack any game to do that, all it would require is a Steam client that doesn't call home to check for the license. Although I don't think this scenario is likely to happen I do think it's within Valve's rights to change the client as they want.

Agreed that there's always a risk of a company going under or being done with a game already but that's a risk you run with many games these days as the market has been moving towards games as a service for a long time already. It kind of depends on the terms you bought the game for whether anything meaningful could be done about that in court. I imagine if a game is really purposely disabled for no good reason circumventing it with a crack would probably be condoned at that point. If it's simply end of life and the license is carried on by a company planning to do something with it I'm not so sure that would be the case.

Agreed, if they're still around. Licensing is always a horror sadly. Though it doesn't have to happen near the end of Steam for instance, even now I'm building a backup GOG library of my Steam collection and perhaps in the future there will be more services taking advantage of similar opportunities. I completely understand the longevity argument and agree it's an issue of DRM. It's not an issue for me personally but I can see how it would be for others. That's part of the reason why I think a reasonable solution is to drop the DRM after a while. But yes, that does mean someone needs to be around to do that so you do still run into the risk of dead companies and the like. There's also the question of what to do with expansions etc. Eh, problems for another time, if it ever happens.

You're right, it was the wrong example. It's not the same audience as Steam, but one that always comes to mind is Reflexive Arcade, one of the biggest casual games stores in its day. They shut down around 10 years ago, and although it's weirdly difficult to find information about it now, I remember that a lot of customers there were hit completely by surprise when they learned that they would lose their games when the service closed. They were given a grace period of something like 3 or 6 months to activate all the games they purchase, but after that, if they ever changed computers or re-installed Windows, they wouldn't be able to activate them anymore. There was no patch provided, no remedy at all. Simply, that's it, thank you for playing, please pay for the games a second time at some other store. Despite the fact that Reflexive is still in business! (They still publish and develop, just no longer distribute third-party games).

I have very little hope that people are generally better educated about these things now. Every time a single-player game was released with always-on DRM, there was (thankfully) so much noise from people who didn't know what they were getting into. It's good to remind oneself that for popular games, the majority of players are not "hardcore gamers" who read games magazines, or would read blogs or websites where they would learn about DRM. They just buy the pretty box at Walmart.

That would be very nice. The good thing about GOG is that it's definitive. One you own it here, you have it DRM-free forever (if you carefully back up and archive, yada yada, but then you also lost your non-DRM games in the retail days when you broke or lost your disks). All the problems would be solved if we could get all publishers to, sooner or later, release also on a service like GOG :)

Well - after reading bits and pieces of the conversation about DRM here I like to say where I am standing at this subject.

I think there are only two consumer-friendly possibilities.

1. Just publish your games DRM-free on a platform like GOG.
The Witcher 3 was published on GOG and the sales where big enough to argue that publishing a game DRM-free has no big backlash on the sales. Could this game have generated more income if it was heavenly DRM protected? Maybe, but that's not the point. The point is that consumers are not as "cheap" as some publishers seem to think they are. For me putting an heavy DRM on your product signals a deep distrust in your consumer base, and that does not sit well by me (or with consumers in general).

2. Publish your games with a time-limited DRM.
In this case you protect your product in the time frame it has the highest expected sales. After that time frame the product should become DRM-Free. The easiest way is by publishing an DRM-unlocking patch. This has several advantages. First: As said - The game is protected during the critical first sales stage and thus will generate income because there are enough people that want to play the game the moment it is released. Second: It does not make much sense for pirates to put resources in cracking the game, because it will be DRM-free after a certain period anyway. Third: It will send a strong positive signal to your consumers. This will generate a goodwill that should not be underestimated. People would accept such a time-limited DRM far more easy than a permanent DRM, provided (and this is important) that this time-limit should be a bit reasonable (weeks or months, rather than years).

Lastly - this DRM stuff is not the only thing that is poisoning games nowadays. There are also things like micro-transactions, for-sale-lootboxes, miniature-DLC's (cloths, garment, a single weapon and so on) and even (since lately) payed save slots (really!), that leave a bad taste in the mouth of the consumer. But that's an whole other, and utterly horrific, can of worms.

So that's why GOG chose that (paraphrased) Game of Thrones title on the release post; well, i can say that i'm even more interested to the game now, than i was before. ;)

Happened to me twice; first time it was with Alone in the Dark 4, a game i've never managed to play and eventually i gave it away; second time it was with Borderlands which had an online date check (i think it was managed by securom) and even though i've been able to play it when it was released, i tried to install it recently and it just can't connect to the server to do the stupid check; serves me right for buying games with online DRM. Having said that, i didn't have any problems with (pre-2008) offline DRM such as disc checks etc. Not sure if there is still that kind of less obtrusive DRM in 2018 though.

edit: typo

Quite true, there are many other bad business pratices (several of which you mentioned) exist independenly of DRM.

While personally the presence of DRM disqualifies a game from consideration for purchse, it's by no means the only thing which can (there are some EA titles for example which I wouldn't be interested in pick up even DRM free, and even within titles I would buy there are quite a few which I wait years first so I know what the complete game looks like before deciding if I'm going to pick it up).

Awesome. I am glad to see it reaching its end.

The first installment was a great experience but I was reluctant to start the middle one and then wait for the end of the trilogy, so I postponed the purchase.
Now I do not have any excuse :).

I look forward to playing the rest.