It seems that you're using an outdated browser. Some things may not work as they should (or don't work at all).
We suggest you upgrade newer and better browser like: Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer or Opera

×
Community
General discussionRPS's article on videogame DRM in 2020(47 posts)(47 posts)
(47 posts)
Pages:
1
2
3
4
This is my favourite topic
Posted May 28, 2020
high rated
RPS posted an article about the current state of DRM and the videogame industry.
Speaking for myself - I'm more and more of the opinion that gamers are as most to blame as the publishers on this matter.
If people keep buying products with DRM on them, the seller sees it as "OK" to keep selling similar products.

But here's the article:
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2020/05/28/whats-the-state-of-drm-in-2020/

What do you folks think?
Posted May 28, 2020
high rated
It's indeed both the fault of people who buy DRM'ed games and publishers, the recent example of Doom Eternal before the outcry is a situation i really despise and one that happens frequently enough, Devs and Publishers who patch in shit like Denuvo and MTX a while after the game has launched is beyond scummy and a good reason why i stay away from DRM at all costs.

I'm also tired of hearing bullshit excuses in favor of DRM.
Post edited May 28, 2020 by ChrisGamer300
Posted May 28, 2020
high rated
avatar
karnak1: But here's the article:
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2020/05/28/whats-the-state-of-drm-in-2020/

What do you folks think?

Back in the late 2000s...
I'm thinking the article ignores "copy protection", something that has existed in many forms since... decades before "the late 2000s".
Post edited May 28, 2020 by teceem
Posted May 28, 2020
Great read. Thank you!

The comments are great, too. Lots of goglodytes in there.
Posted May 28, 2020
high rated
What would you like us to say? There are a very small percentage of the market which care about this topic, the vast majority are in favour or ambivalent to the topic. Within this small group there is disagreements on what constitutes drm, facilitates drm, and what surrounds drm.

For drm is a problem, for all the given reasons, bad performance, system damaging, lack of control etc. It is always pushed forward as either anti piracy or cheat barring, and as for combatting piracy that is a total lie, they know ass well as everybody it merely delays the inevitable. Those who won’t pay never will, those who want to pay but won’t because of drm will pirate, and those who don’t care will buy, so the publishers are only losing those who buy because of drm which from above is a tiny market share.

But drm alone is not the whole problem. Far more intrusive are clients, with their platform for drm, for microtransactions, for data capture, for taking control/knowledge away from users and replacing it with empty “achievements”. Also to blame is multiplayer only games, mmo’s, whose sole purpose is to generate vast amounts of cash over a long time feeding the item selling markets and the skin markets all of which slowly funnel down into single player games. Then there is also the cancer of streaming, the system where the user has no control, owns nothing, is merely at the end of a tube throwing money down the tube whilst those at the other end watch and record.

These items, and those buy regardless, have led to the situation where publishers do not need to care, they can pretty much do whatever they want without recourse. Sure doom eternal having denuvo caused a stir, but the next one probably won’t. Rarely is there any outcry. Was there much outcry when a load of mods got removed from public access to be sold on workshop or creators club? No, and now we are finding models who can’t manage to release for any other sites, or just don’t want to. That is the new norm. Just as denuvo is the new normal, and someday soon there will be something even worse.

Thankfully there are groups out there which work to remove these things, but not only, provide professional grade compressed installers with component used installers, so that game you once brought on games for windows dead you can finally play all those years later.

TL;DR; Nobody cares about it in 2020, just a few tinfoil wearing loners who don’t play cool things like fortnite.
Posted May 28, 2020
avatar
karnak1: But here's the article:
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2020/05/28/whats-the-state-of-drm-in-2020/

What do you folks think?
avatar
teceem:

Back in the late 2000s...
avatar
teceem: I'm thinking the article ignores "copy protection", something that has existed in many forms since... decades before "the late 2000s".
I do remember well those copy protection schemes. Like those blasted code-wheels, the "search game manual for word X on page Y", etc...
I 'member that every time I launched a legally bought game I had to spend some minutes answering the damned copy-protections. While kids who had a cracked copy only had to press "enter" to start the games.

And to think that we're in 2020 and in several Youtube comments, one can still see plenty of people defending Denuvo and the profit margins of small publishers like Activision, WB, EA and other enterprises who barely make enough money to pay their office cleaning ladies.
Strange times we live in.
Posted May 28, 2020
DRM is part of the modern industry, consumers simply don't care unless it directly effects how their system runs. We could argue about how to inform the masses, but it won't change any real amount, even more so given how wide DRM spreads across all forms of media these days.

Of course, there is a pretty nice gap for stores like GOG and itch to inform people about what DRM is and make people mindful of it, but that's not done with simply saying fck-drm, it merely just briefly draws attention to the statement, rather than the intent.
Posted May 29, 2020
avatar
ChrisGamer300: It's indeed both the fault of people who buy DRM'ed games and publishers, the recent example of Doom Eternal before the outcry is a situation i really despise and one that happens frequently enough, Devs and Publishers who patch in shit like Denuvo and MTX a while after the game has launched is beyond scummy and a good reason why i stay away from DRM at all costs.

I'm also tired of hearing bullshit excuses in favor of DRM.
True, check Steam which has a nice number of DRM games like Denuvo DRM, yet many gamers are so thrilled about the new ( remakes) of Resident Evil they just take the DRM .

Other examples: the Mortal Kombat games and many similar famous games based on marvel and other very famous comics are usally filled with DRM , but still the gamers buy them and the listprice is usally quite high (+_+)

Anyway i always enjoy reading the topics where people really seem to enjoy playing games that are loaded with DRM.
avatar
Tallima: Great read. Thank you!

The comments are great, too. Lots of goglodytes in there.
GoGlodytes ?

i heard about troglodytes

Google :

(especially in prehistoric times) a person who lived in a cave.
a hermit.
a person who is regarded as being deliberately ignorant or old-fashioned.

Post edited May 29, 2020 by gamesfreak64
Posted May 29, 2020
avatar
Linko64: DRM is part of the modern industry, consumers simply don't care unless it directly effects how their system runs. We could argue about how to inform the masses, but it won't change any real amount, even more so given how wide DRM spreads across all forms of media these days.

Of course, there is a pretty nice gap for stores like GOG and itch to inform people about what DRM is and make people mindful of it, but that's not done with simply saying fck-drm, it merely just briefly draws attention to the statement, rather than the intent.
The word "consumer" says it all... If a consumer is not interrupted while consuming, he/she is having a perfect consumption.
Posted May 29, 2020
avatar
nightcraw1er.488: What would you like us to say? There are a very small percentage of the market which care about this topic, the vast majority are in favour or ambivalent to the topic. Within this small group there is disagreements on what constitutes drm, facilitates drm, and what surrounds drm.

For drm is a problem, for all the given reasons, bad performance, system damaging, lack of control etc. It is always pushed forward as either anti piracy or cheat barring, and as for combatting piracy that is a total lie, they know ass well as everybody it merely delays the inevitable. Those who won’t pay never will, those who want to pay but won’t because of drm will pirate, and those who don’t care will buy, so the publishers are only losing those who buy because of drm which from above is a tiny market share.

But drm alone is not the whole problem. Far more intrusive are clients, with their platform for drm, for microtransactions, for data capture, for taking control/knowledge away from users and replacing it with empty “achievements”. Also to blame is multiplayer only games, mmo’s, whose sole purpose is to generate vast amounts of cash over a long time feeding the item selling markets and the skin markets all of which slowly funnel down into single player games. Then there is also the cancer of streaming, the system where the user has no control, owns nothing, is merely at the end of a tube throwing money down the tube whilst those at the other end watch and record.

These items, and those buy regardless, have led to the situation where publishers do not need to care, they can pretty much do whatever they want without recourse. Sure doom eternal having denuvo caused a stir, but the next one probably won’t. Rarely is there any outcry. Was there much outcry when a load of mods got removed from public access to be sold on workshop or creators club? No, and now we are finding models who can’t manage to release for any other sites, or just don’t want to. That is the new norm. Just as denuvo is the new normal, and someday soon there will be something even worse.

Thankfully there are groups out there which work to remove these things, but not only, provide professional grade compressed installers with component used installers, so that game you once brought on games for windows dead you can finally play all those years later.

TL;DR; Nobody cares about it in 2020, just a few tinfoil wearing loners who don’t play cool things like fortnite.
wow nice long post , as for tin foil if disliking DRM and disliking intrusive clients and online spying/snooping on users accounts / windows 10 accounts.

Single player does not fill the pockets of the gaming and media companies, many licences that used to be bought are now a forever subscription like fotoshop , more of the same with some updates paid until eternity thats what they want gaming to be.

Some guy from EA had a video on Youtube about it, cant remember the title and i have no bookmark of it ....
in short : no more hadware needed, just a lightning fast internet and play in the cloud with friends all over the globe, no more hassle with pc or hardware that is too slow or cant match other players.

Anyway the video is very funny to watch, too bad i cant find it ....


this link is old but still interesting to read:

https://www.destructoid.com/ea-boss-proudly-refuses-to-publish-single-player-games-234402.phtml

there are new articles too ....
Post edited May 29, 2020 by gamesfreak64
Posted May 29, 2020
The conclusion on the end of the story is indeed something to consider for the future. Is there any use for property if you can have acces to huge library's online for 5 euro's a month? ( oke 10 ) Not to mention other combinations that supply state of the art working games onto your system with the possiblity to track your own progress. If i was sixteen in this age and would be raised with such an offer i don't think i would need a lot of pushing to see the benefits or found many ways to argue about such a contract.

Digital Rights Management is a necesity maybe best viewed as the solution that have been just in the news here in the Netherlands for a plague. There was a sort off caterpillar plague last year where the hairs from the caterpillar can bring forth all kinds of irritating conditions to humans. One of this year's answer to prevent such a plague happening again was a kind of glue band attached to a tree with the obvious idea of catching the caterpillars on the glue strip. The caterpillar in question moves in groups and does so in a line, head tails so to speak, if the lead caterpillar comes into some form of trouble the next in line would change direction and move away from the caterpillar in an opposite direction and this is of course where the trouble starts. The news was filled with photographs of those glue strips with some caterpillars, birds and bats who got caught on the glue strips too while hunting for an easy caterpillar snack not to mention a variety of sometimes rare bugs and other little creatures who are attracted to the glue strip for what ever reason. There was also a specialist comment about how the need for caterpillar eridicators attracted all kinds of shady figures that seemed to have no wildlife knowledge what so ever......

I found the news a bit hilarious but also pretty shamefull. Pretending to life in one of the richest countries in the world but comes up with buttwipe solutions to several problems. The comparrison with DRM is easily made i guess. Personally i don't have any trouble with DRM, i am not rich, my only secrets are about a cheating girl, who am i to shout about the choices made by companies granting my favorite toys ?
Posted May 29, 2020
avatar
nightcraw1er.488: What would you like us to say? There are a very small percentage of the market which care about this topic, the vast majority are in favour or ambivalent to the topic. Within this small group there is disagreements on what constitutes drm, facilitates drm, and what surrounds drm.

For drm is a problem, for all the given reasons, bad performance, system damaging, lack of control etc. It is always pushed forward as either anti piracy or cheat barring, and as for combatting piracy that is a total lie, they know ass well as everybody it merely delays the inevitable. Those who won’t pay never will, those who want to pay but won’t because of drm will pirate, and those who don’t care will buy, so the publishers are only losing those who buy because of drm which from above is a tiny market share.

But drm alone is not the whole problem. Far more intrusive are clients, with their platform for drm, for microtransactions, for data capture, for taking control/knowledge away from users and replacing it with empty “achievements”. Also to blame is multiplayer only games, mmo’s, whose sole purpose is to generate vast amounts of cash over a long time feeding the item selling markets and the skin markets all of which slowly funnel down into single player games. Then there is also the cancer of streaming, the system where the user has no control, owns nothing, is merely at the end of a tube throwing money down the tube whilst those at the other end watch and record.

These items, and those buy regardless, have led to the situation where publishers do not need to care, they can pretty much do whatever they want without recourse. Sure doom eternal having denuvo caused a stir, but the next one probably won’t. Rarely is there any outcry. Was there much outcry when a load of mods got removed from public access to be sold on workshop or creators club? No, and now we are finding models who can’t manage to release for any other sites, or just don’t want to. That is the new norm. Just as denuvo is the new normal, and someday soon there will be something even worse.

Thankfully there are groups out there which work to remove these things, but not only, provide professional grade compressed installers with component used installers, so that game you once brought on games for windows dead you can finally play all those years later.

TL;DR; Nobody cares about it in 2020, just a few tinfoil wearing loners who don’t play cool things like fortnite.
avatar
gamesfreak64: wow nice long post , as for tin foil if disliking DRM and disliking intrusive clients and online spying/snooping on users accounts / windows 10 accounts.

Single player does not fill the pockets of the gaming and media companies, many licences that used to be bought are now a forever subscription like fotoshop , more of the same with some updates paid until eternity thats what they want gaming to be.

Some guy from EA had a video on Youtube about it, cant remember the title and i have no bookmark of it ....
in short : no more hadware needed, just a lightning fast internet and play in the cloud with friends all over the globe, no more hassle with pc or hardware that is too slow or cant match other players.

Anyway the video is very funny to watch, too bad i cant find it ....

this link is old but still interesting to read:

https://www.destructoid.com/ea-boss-proudly-refuses-to-publish-single-player-games-234402.phtml

there are new articles too ....
Well, that is of course another point. This gen tech can’t give the speeds and bandwidth needed for what people want, let’s create a new gen. oh hold on, every web site now pushes out stories in video rather than text, need a new gen tech to get more bandwidth speed. Oh hold on, now they are streaming games across it, need a new tech to get more speed bandwidth....
You see where I am going with this. Things don’t advance fast enough to keep up with the SHT that people put on it.
Posted May 29, 2020
avatar
karnak1: But here's the article:
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2020/05/28/whats-the-state-of-drm-in-2020/

What do you folks think?
Overall a pretty good article and I liked how GOG was presented in it, and they did manage to mention that Steam and Epic have DRM-free games as well, but those stores don't have any real policy regarding it.

What would have been nice though was to mention more aspects on issues DRM can bring. Now it was more about "Denuvo might affect performance" and "in the past DRM used to have install limits etc., not cool". There are also other aspects that might not be clear to someone who thinks "DRM? Why should I care?", like:

1. When the service/store from where you bought the game ceases to exist, you will lose your ability to play the games with DRM, games that you have bought over the years. (The counter-argument, which the last time I saw yesterday on the Steam forums, was "Steam will be around forever so this does not matter", which is of course a bullshit argument. Steam will not be around forever, nor will Netflix, Spotify etc. Sometimes the end might come surprisingly fast, when there is some technology or de-facto standard shift or somesuch. You never know.

Like, Nokia used to be the biggest mobile phone manufacturer a little over 10 years ago, but suddenly they just withered, and stopped making phones many years ago already. Saying that the Steam service will be around forever is just as believable as saying that Nokia phones will be produced forever, and will remain as the most common phone brand forever. Yet, they didn't.

2. The fact that a game requires an online client to play it may in itself make it impossible for you to run the game in not-so-distant future, due to backwards-incompatibility. A simple example: you have an older Steam game that works properly only on Windows XP, or let's say Windows 7 (not 10). What happens when the Steam client drops support for that old OS like XP or 7? Then you can't play that old game even on XP or 7 because the client refuses to run on those old OSes. The game would otherwise still play there just fine, if there wasn't that client.

(And yes that is a real life case for me, when Steam dropped support for Windows 2000, and suddenly I couldn't play my Steam games on my Windows 2000 PC anymore, just because Steam refused to run there anymore.)

EDIT: Those other issues seem to be covered pretty well in the comments section though.
Post edited May 29, 2020 by timppu
Posted May 29, 2020
avatar
nightcraw1er.488: TL;DR; Nobody cares about it in 2020, just a few tinfoil wearing loners who don’t play cool things like fortnite.
Not necessarily. The few times I've discussed about DRM with other gamers in real life (they were naturally Steam users, my co-workers at two different workplaces), their response was not "but I don't care", but more like "hmmm, funny, I've never really thought about that, good point...".

They started from normal discussion about games, during which I might mention that I actually buy most of my games on a non-Steam store (GOG) and of course the other person is quite surprised and wants to know why would I buy somewhere else than Steam.

Then I quickly summarize that I am on GOG due to DRM-free, and they are like "huh? what does that mean and why does it matter?" and I start with the question "What happens when the Steam service closes its doors for good? How are you going to play your games then?", and then I can see their eyes widening and a light bulb light up above their head.

Not that they become GOG converts there, or course I might also mention that many games are not on GOG so Steam etc. may be the only option to buy such games, and both agree that if there is no choice, I guess one has to put up with DRM in order to play a game... but still I feel the mission is accomplished when they have that revelation moment that DRM can indeed be problematic in the long run.

tl:dr; I feel it is much more about "Huh? DRM? What is that?" than "Yes yes I know, but I just don't care, DRM doesn't matter to me.".
Post edited May 29, 2020 by timppu
Posted May 29, 2020
avatar
karnak1: Speaking for myself - I'm more and more of the opinion that gamers are as most to blame as the publishers on this matter.
If people keep buying products with DRM on them, the seller sees it as "OK" to keep selling similar products.
No offense, but Breaking Fucking News Indeed. Was that ever in doubt? It's just that some particularly dim people act like Big Bad Corporations are pushing this stuff, but Poor Oppressed Gameres can do nothing but acquiesce, because not playing the newest shiny Assassin's Fifa: Modern Kombat is simply unthinkable. And the other 90% simply give zero shits and seen no problem with DRM, or day one DLCs, microtransactions and other rubbish like that.
Pages:
1
2
3
4
This is my favourite topic
Community
General discussionRPS's article on videogame DRM in 2020(47 posts)(47 posts)
(47 posts)