Bethesda removes DRM from Rage 2 after just two days

[Sky Spark]

I hope this means Doom Eternal will only have it for less than a few days if it does have it at launch. Too bad Rage 2 is a mediocre game even without denuvo. ID should stick to what they know, that being shooters that aren't open world and story driven.

[mr moose]

16 hours ago, bradwiggo said:

I don't see how it is though? Surely if you are planning on pirating something you won't mind waiting a few weeks? There will still be plenty of people who buy the game. DRM isn't necessary at all. 

Money talks, anything that will give the game companies a few more dollars will be in effect.  Every thing from their own store fronts through loot boxes and DLC to DRM that squeezes a few more pennies out of the game overall.

 

Money talks,  You can bet your arse the major labels have considered what will give them the biggest return, investing millions in DRM or playing the DRM free card.  It appears trying to be cool and hip with your customers doesn't net as much cash as Preventing them from stealing from you if only for a few weeks.

 

 

[Eaglerino]

21 hours ago, valdyrgramr said:

There's really no point to anti-piracy matters on the SW side as they usually fail within a month. 

that's usually the idea, keep it locked down for the initial burst of sales then it doesn't matter so much after that

[DildorTheDecent]

I guess that's neat for the 3 people that bought Rage 2.

[Teddy07]

On 5/17/2019 at 9:13 AM, valdyrgramr said:

There's really no point to anti-piracy matters on the SW side as they usually fail within a month. 

Yes that used to be 10+ years ago but it got pretty sophisticated to a point where it is not even worth it sometimes because it takes too long.

[Sauron]

On 5/17/2019 at 9:10 AM, LukeSavenije said:

I don't mind it having a DRM for the first day, even as heavy as Denuvo. It keeps some money for the developers before it gets cracked. So I think it was a bad idea from Bethesda to not running it on their own launcher in the first place.

 

Any thoughts?

I think the game was pirated on launch day so the presence of DRM only made the experience worse for paying customers - as it always does.

[Arika]

good. Denuvo is shit

[Trik'Stari]

Allegedly the game has already been cracked.

 

Allegedly.

[illegalwater]

On 5/17/2019 at 4:10 AM, NyetARussianSpy said:

It all about the delay, Denuvo still takes days, good enough for sales.

I keep seeing people move the goal posts on this awful DRM. Originally it was the whole first month that had the strongest sales and Denuvo was "good enough" because it didn't get bypassed/cracked until month(s) later, then it started getting bypassed in the first couple weeks.. now we're down to a couple days. If Denuvo starts getting bypassed within hours of launch, will you still defend its use?

[illegalwater]

24 minutes ago, NyetARussianSpy said:

So, I'm okay with slightly less FPS and a little shite performance if that means I can play offline.

Yikes.

24 minutes ago, NyetARussianSpy said:

The alternative for them instead of going the DLC and online-only route is to release on closed platforms only (i.e. consoles), now we don't want that, do we?

No, the alternative is to stop using DRM. Or at least use DRM that doesn't have a negative impact on paying customers.

CD Projekt Red has shown you can forgo DRM and still sell 10+ million copies.

[mr moose]

6 hours ago, System32.exe said:

Yikes.

No, the alternative is to stop using DRM. Or at least use DRM that doesn't have a negative impact on paying customers.

CD Projekt Red has shown you can forgo DRM and still sell 10+ million copies.

 

I think nearly everyone would prefer DRM free, but the reality is that's not going to happen unless you can find away to prevent piracy.

 

Until sales figures show these companies that a negligible amount of sales are lost to piracy then it won't go away.     Contrary to popular belief, no company intentional antagonizes their consumer base when there is no gain to it.

[ravenshrike]

6 hours ago, mr moose said:

Until sales figures show these companies that a negligible amount of sales are lost to piracy then it won't go away.  

The only time piracy has a negative effect on a game is when it's pretty bad, not just a little bad, or if it's released early. The latter is rare for games and leaves the former. At which point the point of DRM is to sucker people into buying a shitty game.

[jagdtigger]

8 hours ago, mr moose said:

unless you can find away to prevent piracy.

CDPR already found it. Just make a game that is actually worth the price....

[mr moose]

1 hour ago, ravenshrike said:

The only time piracy has a negative effect on a game is when it's pretty bad, not just a little bad, or if it's released early. The latter is rare for games and leaves the former. At which point the point of DRM is to sucker people into buying a shitty game.

 

Make believe.  Even the heavily touted EU report into the cost of piracy was misplaced wishful thinking.  There just isn't any evidence to back that position.

 

Like it or not the whole institution of DRM came into being because people pirated.  It has simply snow balled from there.   No one likes DRM and it doesn't make people buy games so if it does nothing for sales revenue then there is literally no reason for it to exist.  Game companies are in it for the money, nothing else.

[mr moose]

Just now, jagdtigger said:

CDPR already found it. Just make a game that is actually worth the price....

So one game sells a bit over 10M copies while other games with DRM sell in whole multiples of that?  not really a convincing argument.     Maybe if you could point to an array of AAA titles without DRM that outsell their DRM counterparts I would be willing to look further into it.

[jagdtigger]

Just now, mr moose said:

So one game sells a bit over 10M copies while other games with DRM sell in whole multiples of that?  not really a convincing argument.     Maybe if you could point to an array of AAA titles without DRM that outsell their DRM counterparts I would be willing to look further into it.

Dont sell well huh?

https://www.pcgamer.com/the-witcher-3-outgrossed-some-of-2017s-biggest-games-because-its-just-that-good/

[leadeater]

24 minutes ago, jagdtigger said:

CDPR already found it. Just make a game that is actually worth the price....

 

9 minutes ago, jagdtigger said:

Dont sell well huh?

https://www.pcgamer.com/the-witcher-3-outgrossed-some-of-2017s-biggest-games-because-its-just-that-good/

 

A game without DRM can sell very well while also still being pirated on a large scale. Selling 10 million copies doesn't show it wasn't pirated, just that it managed to sell 10 million copies.

 

Many game developers would love to sell 10 million copies though so if you are sure you can do that without DRM and the confidence to back that belief then that's great, I don't think the majority are or their publishers would allow it even if that were the case.

 

Stardock who make and publish a large number of games I like to play has historically been on the no DRM side however when they first released Sins of A Solar Empire, a game that turned out to be highly popular also turned out to be highly pirated and Stardock had to introduce DRM in to a later patch + expansion of the game. This DRM was then later relaxed to requiring a Stardock account and registering your game to the account for multiplayer, meaning single player was again 'DRM free'.

 

The above is my personal example of a game that is worth the price, highly popular, DRM free that due to piracy had to introduce DRM going against a fundamental philosophy of Stardock.

[jagdtigger]

20 minutes ago, leadeater said:

had to introduce DRM in to a later patch + expansion of the game

Which got broken in a matter of weeks at which point it was wasted money....

[leadeater]

22 minutes ago, jagdtigger said:

Which got broken in a matter of weeks at which point it was wasted money....

And you know that how, I'm pretty sure Stardock knew what they were doing to both go ahead and do it and also track the effects and know when to dial it back like they did. Don't think it was weeks either and you're making the false logical jump that the DRM being cracked means the majority of those who had or were going to pirate the game acquired the crack.

 

You're assuming a lot from no information.

[jagdtigger]

Just now, leadeater said:

And you know that how, I'm pretty sure Stardock knew what they were doing to both go ahead and do it and also track the effects and know when to dial it back like they did. Don't think it was weeks either and you're making the false logical jump that the DRM being cracked means the majority of those who had or were going to pirate the game acquired the crack.

 

You're assuming a lot from no information.

Well if i can wait for games to come down in price its not that wrong to assume that pirates can behave the same way....  To top it off so far no game dev/studio disclosed how much of the revenue gone down in the sink-hole called DRM. The only reason i can think of why they dont release it is the fact that it is not as effective as they want it to compared to the price of it.  If it was so good they would plaster it all over the internet IMO.

[leadeater]

10 minutes ago, jagdtigger said:

Well if i can wait for games to come down in price its not that wrong to assume that pirates can behave the same way....  To top it off so far no game dev/studio disclosed how much of the revenue gone down in the sink-hole called DRM. The only reason i can think of why they dont release it is the fact that it is not as effective as they want it to compared to the price of it.  If it was so good they would plaster it all over the internet IMO.

I don't particularly care about what it costs or why they don't release that information as to the point I was giving you. Their one was extremely basic and likely did not cost much at all. For a company that does not do DRM investing a lot for a single instance is not something they would do. Stardock actually has the sales figures and dates of when the DRM was put in place and later adjusted so I'm very sure they know exactly the sales impact of what they did, along with why they did it.

 

I brought a physical copy of the game and later brought it again on steam. SteamDB estimates there is around 2 to 5 million owners of the game, on steam, so my example pretty well address the situation of having a game worth the money selling well enough to still require DRM protection.

 

Also as a reminder, Stardock 'does not do DRM'.

[Stefan Payne]

The Problem there is that there isn't necessarily a correlation between pirating and buying the game.

 

If the game is good, people buy it, even if they did pirate it.

If the game is no good, people don't pirate it.

 

What some companys seem to underestimate is that there are a couple of people who have time but no money.

Those People then also waste their time, besides playing the pirated games, with recommending it to other people - who don't have much time but Money.

So they buy the Game that was recommended to them by a pirate...

 

Though there should be some kind of thing implemented that makes it harder to share the application...

 

Are there studies about Piracy and so on??

[Stefan Payne]

On 5/17/2019 at 9:10 AM, LukeSavenije said:

Bethesda removed the Denuvo-drm from Rage 2 only two days after releasing. The developers say they have had a 'number' of requests to do that. 

I call bullshit on that.

BUT:
They couldn't tell the truth.

I heard somewhere some time ago that Denuvo has a money-back guarantee that gives you the money back if the game was cracked within a certain amount of time. 

That might be the case here as well as it was cracked rather quickly. And thus the agreement between Bethesda and Denuvo allowed them to remove it.

[bradwiggo]

On 5/18/2019 at 5:45 AM, mr moose said:

Money talks, anything that will give the game companies a few more dollars will be in effect.  Every thing from their own store fronts through loot boxes and DLC to DRM that squeezes a few more pennies out of the game overall.

 

Money talks,  You can bet your arse the major labels have considered what will give them the biggest return, investing millions in DRM or playing the DRM free card.  It appears trying to be cool and hip with your customers doesn't net as much cash as Preventing them from stealing from you if only for a few weeks.

 

 

The Witcher 3 didn't have DRM, I don't remember any news about thousands upon thousands of people pirating that. DRM isn't necessary, even if it makes them slightly more money, they don't need slightly more money, they need to care about the consumers more. 

[ravenshrike]

13 hours ago, mr moose said:

There just isn't any evidence to back that position.

Under that standard, the only position on piracy that has truly significant evidence is that a bad piece of entertainment leaked early leads to lost sales.