131–140 of 254 posts
Additeddly it would only prevent piracy and not cheating, but hey!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, to be honest, university textbooks (at least in US) is in general a predatory market. There are courses that require $800 worth of textbook. > who are ironically paying the most in tuition and housing oftentimes It's not ironic. They have no choice (other than not attending the university of course). If there is a loophole that lets students not pay the tuition fee without any punishment, a good amount of stude…
Diamonds are sometimes absurdly expensive with no valid reason. Do you believe this justifies robbing diamond stores?
- What is valuable as a symbol of love is something completely useless, but which requires you to burn excessive amounts of resources (money). This is because the act of figuratively setting your money on fire clearly signals that you're making a sacrifice (and the amount of money you thus burn also doubles as a proxy for your wealth).
- The scam was established by what's now over a century of ongoing marketing efforts to convince generations of people to consider diamonds as a symbol of love, thus to be priced per rules described above.
- The scam is maintained by finding ways to create artificial scarcity. For instance, lab-made diamonds are very cheap and made to much higher quality than naturally-found ones, but "naturally found" is a perfect discriminator to force scarcity around. Hence it's the mined ones that are used for jewelry.
Textbooks, or videogames, are products of utility, and don't have the aforementioned dynamics. The only thing that's happening is point 3: publishers trying to find a way to make artificial scarcity work, without a benefit of having a good discriminator (all bits are created equal) - hence DRM.
Of course none of that justifies robbery, but in all cases it does justify every effort to prevent artificial scarcity from being established and maintained.
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 just not play it because there was just no way I could ever afford it. Now as a grown up I'd much rather pay for the game both to support the creator as well as not roll the dice on a backdoored keygen. I HAVE to believe that the number of folks that can both aff…
> 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 t…
Is what? Pirated? How can you have concrete data of something that didn't happen? A copy that didn't sell can not count towards sales.
If it is based on sales estimation, then it could simply mean that the game didn't sell well because it was bad. Not every unsold copy of an estimation is automatically a pirated copy.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 tran…
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.
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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).
As far as I know SecuROM is popular because it takes a bit longer to crack, thus helping the publishers secure the critical sales of the first week. Afterwards many studios remove it again to make it actually playable. I guess that's also why AAA games are hyped so much before release, so that many people preorder it.
Never thought about it this way, but it does make perfect sense. Thanks!
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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.
> No game studio would want to spend resources (developers work and licensing cost) implementing anti-piracy for nothing. They are doing exactly that. Pretty much all research has shown that DRM schemes are ineffective and mostly just cause problems for legitimate users. The reason for DRM is mostly 1. Cargo culting. 2. Liability ass-covering (we did our best, it's the DRM company fault our game leaked!) "Company wou…
that and always-on gameplay generally do the job I think, atleast for games.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Diamonds are sometimes absurdly expensive with no valid reason. Do you believe this justifies robbing diamond stores?
What others said plus diamonds are only valuable because they're absurdly expensive. The scam works like this: - What is valuable as a symbol of love is something completely useless, but which requires you to burn excessive amounts of resources (money). This is because the act of figuratively setting your money on fire clearly signals that you're making a sacrifice (and the amount of money you thus burn also doubles…
But why is it your problem? Suppose I just wrote a sonnet sitting here in my spare time. I don't want others to know it though so I'll only share it under extremely-controlled circumstances for a lot of money to maintain this artificial scarcity. Why is it your moral imperative for you to crush my carefully-maintained monopoly on my stupid little sonnet?
Just imagine if you could simply prove the ownership of a game using well-understood multidecade-old cryptography (in a new way). That's what I hope GameStop[0] can become. Or whoever else. Additeddly it would only prevent piracy and not cheating, but hey! [0] https://nft.gamestop.com/
Or is the expectation that they'll somehow pivot from that to... I guess crypto? Aren't there dozens, hundreds, of companies in the crypto space already?
Did they buy one of them at least, or are they legitimately trying to build a crypto company from the ground up, with no stated innovation or insight into crypto?
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Dunno if you realized this, but once online-only games become unprofitable, the servers are down for good and the games become useless. If all games up to this point were like this, we wouldn't be able to play childhood games anymore. Gog.com wouldn't exist without all developers going back to patch their online only games etc.
That’s another drawback. And it’s one I’d rather have than stutter too (of course I’d rather have neither but let’s assume that’s not on the table). Games these days are often not even ready until a year or so after release meaning if you don’t trust the patch distribution to continue for a long time one shouldn’t even buy the games. An online requirement is pretty easy to patch out after a while. Obviously you trust…