xIcarus:

Seriously, people who pirate your game don't want to buy your game.

False. There is a whole plethora of statistics and researches made on this subject that speak the contrary. According to your logic, websites such as GOG should have went bust years ago, instead they grow and only get more popular. By modern standards each one of you here is a pirate, and in more than one way, however that doesn't stop people from buying games . I don't buy every game out there, neither do I play every game out there. My steam library is massive over the years, same goes for my GOG library. However the DISGUSTING recent trend of releasing half baked shit games (which includes AAA+ titles, majority of early access e.t.c.) and hoping that people jump on them and eat them while hot is not leading industry into the right direction. Back in the day we had Demo versions of games for a purpose - to Try/Test out a Product. Now for the most part term Demo is extinct. Which results in people first Pirating something to Try it out, only after they buy it. Normal Logic. You don't buy a car without test driving it, first you give it a try, you like it, only afterwards you Buy it. Not the other way around. Make good solid games, release demos for them, use Client oriented practices and people will Buy your Stuff.

@xIcarus that is just wrong. Wrong wrong wrong. Just wait a sale and buy it, if you can't afford it for any normal reason, ask someone to borrow you the game or just skip it. I agree that the point is just that game pirating is not punished in any way. As always the stupid comparing, but is true, is that you would steal a car with this way of thinking if no one could see/punish you, and at the end when you used it, you would go back and say `it was usefull, now i have the money, i would like to pay for it` this is not accepted from our society yet. Creating a good game takes time and money and investments, if you want to use it , enjoy it, you have to pay back the time that people spent over it. Same is for movies / music and all the things that you can create a digital copy of it. On the other side there are tons of free to play games around, just use those.

mikev190:

Steam doesn't refund money instantly so that's not good. I think 10 hour trials should be on every AAA game at least. Quality speaks for itself and these publishers try excuse their rushed devs

How long does a refund take?

wavetrex:

It's funny when this "pirating" is done not to avoid paying for the game... but to avoid paying for electricity (and air conditioning electricity) because the DRM is pushing CPU to 100%...

This is a good point you raise here and this normally slips past the minds of the average person who isn't really conscious about the amount of power their PC consumes, or have enough money not to worry about it! In Germany, cost per kwh is twice what you find in most other countries, somewhere in the region of 0.28c per/kwh! The power usage delta between CPU idle, or lets say 'minimal' usage (<10%) and pegged at close too or on 100% can be massive depending on your CPU architecture and age. This is likely somewhere between 60-80 Watts extra on average, based on a Core i5 (Non Overclocked). When you get into the realms of heavily overclocked CPU's, that delta could potentially be well over 100 watts. If you take the above max power delta into consideration, multiply that by an average amount of hours of game play per day and then factor in the cost per khw over a year, a DRM riddled game could cost about 30 Euros extra in that year alone. You're being robbed, twice, at the same time. I would never buy any game that has this level of 'Protection' enabled. For me that's essentially boosting the 'base' EU game price from 70 Euro to 100 Euro, and that's just mad. I'm certainly not going to be out of pocket even more, just to enjoy a DRM riddled game! The next time you launch a game on your PC, have a think about how much its costing you... 😉 Thank god i haven't overclocked my fridge yet....

Well for me it is GOG all the way ,i don't exactly have hardware for playing new AAA games ,so for me there is double benefit of GOG : no bullsh*t DRM,and second is as i play mostly older titles (relatively speaking ) they are patched games not some overpriced piece of s**t beta.

I'm also pointing out the ignorance of the end-user in this specific instance. I was ignorant to this also until just recently, so thought i would share. Its not just about the security of the company with their product, or the extra power needed to run the game, or the frustration when the machine simply doesn't have the processing power because all of the over-head is used to process the DRM, people also need to think of a.) Wear and tear that kind of performance inflicts on their hardware and also the financial cost. I'm sure there are more points we could link to it but cost is a pretty decisive factor. I'm going to go through a testing scenario over the weekend, from the least intensive games i have to the most intensive and see what the difference in power usage at the wall is... I'll probably regret buying three beers after seeing the potential cost 😉

CrazyBaldhead:

I can tell you know nothing about Denuvo. Your grammar reflects your thought process and profile picture all at once. Keep it up.

So where do you get off turning a reasonable comment stream into personal attacks? Keep it up... somewhere else. Try wccftech.

Good news, I stopped pirating about ~8 years ago and am glad I did. With the dawn of digital sales there are way better deals to be had (even just some time after release) if you don't want to buy at full price. I could understand the excuse In the past, when it was physical retail only, games were a lot more expensive, ESPECIALLY for poor countries like mine. But now? Just excuses. Sure the fact that this particular DRM increases CPU usage is indeed unfortunate and can be improved upon, but having uncrackable games is a good thing in my opinion.

Solfaur:

Good news, I stopped pirating about ~8 years ago and am glad I did. With the dawn of digital sales there are way better deals to be had (even just some time after release) if you don't want to buy at full price. I could understand the excuse In the past, when it was physical retail only, games were a lot more expensive, ESPECIALLY for poor countries like mine. But now? Just excuses. Sure the fact that this particular DRM increases CPU usage is indeed unfortunate and can be improved upon, but having uncrackable games is a good thing in my opinion.

Well opinions of users having top end gpus are irrelevant for common pirate's sense tbh. It is logical and proper for anyone giving more than 499$/599$+ for a gpu only to buy every game he wants. He belongs to minority.

mikev190:

Think its an average of 3-5 days till it appears in your bank account

This is pretty common for any business, typically 3-5 working days (weekend normally not counting towards it) DRM has been a curse of PC gaming for many years now, i remember back in the day assassin creed 2 and its always on online DRM, lose net for a second boom boots you off the game, now that was horrible. Hopefully one day companies learn DRM won't stop people from pirating the game, people do it for all sorts of reasons many of which are invalid ones. Then again people pirate all sorts of content these days without a second thought. What i hate is that it affects us, the people who actually buy the games, forcing always online or forcing your PC to work harder than is actually necessary to run the game or program, Even if it just 5% more cpu usage than otherwise, it's still something. There has yet to be a code or place people are yet to break into, it is always just a matter of time.

anxious_f0x:

Is there actually any hard evidence proving that Denuvo causes increased CPU load? Or is it one of those things that people decided to blame because of some poorly coded DX11 game running badly on PC? Feel free to link me to some tests or something.

There was an article a while back that provided some reasoning behind why the DRM was likely to blame. Ubisoft denied it, of course, but didn't provide any evidence to the contrary.

mikev190:

Think its an average of 3-5 days till it appears in your bank account

That't not so bad. I thought you'd say weeks 🙂

Netherwind:

Now, we don't have any statistics but I'm fairly sure that your situation isn't exactly common. I assume that a lot of pirates simply don't have the money to buy the game, maybe cause their parents prefer to buy alcohol for all the money, or just other reasons. Others assume that everything on the internet should be free and pirate due to principle. And some, like you, want to try the game before buying it. I actually did it myself a couple of times back in the days. I believe more in services like Steam who has this refund policy. You buy and try, if you are not content, you get your money back. This is better than Origin Access which costs money but since Origin is so crazy cheap, I assume it's OK. I hope more of the big publishers start using this practice since it saves money for the developers who don't have to create a specific demo for a game (probably costs a lot of money). Instead us customers can try the whole package and refund if we don't like it for some reason.

Well either way, if they don't have the money they're not going to buy it so it's a lost customer anyway. However, I forgot about Steam refunds; that actually makes for a good way of trying out games, valid point. Origin Access is not so bad either, what's bad about it however is their bullshit strategy. When you sign up for it it's (or at least used to be, not sure now) automatically set to renew every month. That's one of the main reasons EA has lost me as a customer forever. I paid more than half a year for Access without even knowing, and I was careful about renewal when I signed up; nothing was mentioned but I guess a freaking EULA is a bulletproof way of making sure you get away with it since few read it (myself included). And you know what? It's not about the lost money, $5/month is not a great amount of money. It's about the games I could have tried and about the idea of screwing people over. PLUS: every damn subscription I've ever had e-mailed me the invoice every time it was renewed. Not Origin Access. Because fck EA.

cryohellinc:

False. There is a whole plethora of statistics and researches made on this subject that speak the contrary. According to your logic, websites such as GOG should have went bust years ago, instead they grow and only get more popular. By modern standards each one of you here is a pirate, and in more than one way, however that doesn't stop people from buying games . I don't buy every game out there, neither do I play every game out there. My steam library is massive over the years, same goes for my GOG library. However the DISGUSTING recent trend of releasing half baked crap games (which includes AAA+ titles, majority of early access e.t.c.) and hoping that people jump on them and eat them while hot is not leading industry into the right direction. Back in the day we had Demo versions of games for a purpose - to Try/Test out a Product. Now for the most part term Demo is extinct. Which results in people first Pirating something to Try it out, only after they buy it. Normal Logic. You don't buy a car without test driving it, first you give it a try, you like it, only afterwards you Buy it. Not the other way around. Make good solid games, release demos for them, use Client oriented practices and people will Buy your Stuff.

I've never heard of such statistics, would you care sharing? I'm genuinely interested. And on the contrary, according to my logic platforms such as GOG should have grown; and they have. People don't like DRM, it's natural that a platform which sells games light on DRM will be successful. About the demos, Netherwind mentioned refunds which is a good way to try out games if you think about it; even though I'd argue they're a more inconvenient than a demo since you're going through the trouble of paying first and the potential waiting period for the refund. Transposing this into your car example, you don't buy a car and they get a refund if you don't like it. You try it out first. But I agree, that absolutely does not excuse publishers from releasing half-assed games just because some people like the title and instabuy no matter what.

asturur:

@xIcarus that is just wrong. Wrong wrong wrong. Just wait a sale and buy it, if you can't afford it for any normal reason, ask someone to borrow you the game or just skip it.

If you borrow the game from someone it's exactly the same thing as pirating, but on a lower scale. Someone is giving you access to a game you didn't pay for. In piracy, that's the crack publisher. In your example, that's your friend. The end result is that you're playing a game without paying in both of these scenarios. The fact that a crack publisher gives you the game instead of your friend is simply not a relevant distinction.

asturur:

I agree that the point is just that game pirating is not punished in any way. As always the stupid comparing, but is true, is that you would steal a car with this way of thinking if no one could see/punish you, and at the end when you used it, you would go back and say `it was usefull, now i have the money, i would like to pay for it` this is not accepted from our society yet. Creating a good game takes time and money and investments, if you want to use it , enjoy it, you have to pay back the time that people spent over it. Same is for movies / music and all the things that you can create a digital copy of it. On the other side there are tons of free to play games around, just use those. .

Yes, but as pointed out by cryohellinc it's not that black and white. You can go to the dealer/seller and ask for a test drive when you wanna buy a car, don't you? That's a demo. We don't have them anymore. Our only legal way of having a demo is to buy the car and then refund it if you don't like it. Is that acceptable in a normal society? No, that's not either. And that's the thing, I want to pay people back for their effort. I just don't trust them. Imagine if the guy you're buying a car from has a history of selling bad cars, cars which seem ok at first glance but a lot of stuff isn't actually working well when you drive it. Would you buy a car from that guy? That's exactly what EA is doing. See, it's not that simple. A middle ground needs to be reached, and we aren't there yet.

I'm an honest person, so I admit. I'm a pirate, altough I avoid it all costs. The only reason so far that I'm pirate it's because I do run a youtube benchmark channel of my 2 systems, both are very low end, so I end up just showing, how they can run their games on those systems, settings, framerate, and if there are tweaks available, I do show them. Either way, this last month I did brought a 1 month of origin access to benchmark NFS Payback and Star Wars BF2, I had multiple developers and publishers sending me out keys to test their games, but many others devs/publishers that didn't offer, I just can't buy them, so the only way to test them is to go with a pirate version, but I've always encouraged players to buy their games, I had also created a Patreon so I could get help to buy them and avoid piracy, but unfortunaly, I just got 1 patreon, and it got out after half year due to the fact he had gone to university. I even had a video that developers left a like on my twitter and they clearly knew that it was a pirated version, due to a very big username "CODEX". LOL. The thing is.. what I do with the games after benchmarking? I erase them, simply.. If I like them, I buy it, many times I just wait for sales because I can't pay for them on launch, but I wait until I buy it to start playing, I just forbid myself from playing until I buy it. For the games that I don't like or just remain too much expensive just like COD, I just don't play them. End of story... It's the only sign of respect I give to developers and publishers. I do pirate games, but to provide information regarding performance and settings, and to show to the world if they can run or not, and what they can do to run them. I don't use the pirated version to promote piracy, and I never reply to anyone asking where I did got the game. If you like the game, just buy it. Can't buy it on release? Buy it later, more cheaper, patched and more optimized.

i do not think borrowing a game to a friend is pirating. WHen you have it, he cannot play it. that's it.

xIcarus:

Well either way, if they don't have the money they're not going to buy it so it's a lost customer anyway. However, I forgot about Steam refunds; that actually makes for a good way of trying out games, valid point. Origin Access is not so bad either, what's bad about it however is their bullshit strategy. When you sign up for it it's (or at least used to be, not sure now) automatically set to renew every month. That's one of the main reasons EA has lost me as a customer forever. I paid more than half a year for Access without even knowing, and I was careful about renewal when I signed up; nothing was mentioned but I guess a freaking EULA is a bulletproof way of making sure you get away with it since few read it (myself included). And you know what? It's not about the lost money, $5/month is not a great amount of money. It's about the games I could have tried and about the idea of screwing people over. PLUS: every damn subscription I've ever had e-mailed me the invoice every time it was renewed. Not Origin Access. Because fck EA. I've never heard of such statistics, would you care sharing? I'm genuinely interested. And on the contrary, according to my logic platforms such as GOG should have grown; and they have. People don't like DRM, it's natural that a platform which sells games light on DRM will be successful. About the demos, Netherwind mentioned refunds which is a good way to try out games if you think about it; even though I'd argue they're a more inconvenient than a demo since you're going through the trouble of paying first and the potential waiting period for the refund. Transposing this into your car example, you don't buy a car and they get a refund if you don't like it. You try it out first. But I agree, that absolutely does not excuse publishers from releasing half-assed games just because some people like the title and instabuy no matter what. If you borrow the game from someone it's exactly the same thing as pirating, but on a lower scale. Someone is giving you access to a game you didn't pay for. In piracy, that's the crack publisher. In your example, that's your friend. The end result is that you're playing a game without paying in both of these scenarios. The fact that a crack publisher gives you the game instead of your friend is simply not a relevant distinction. Yes, but as pointed out by cryohellinc it's not that black and white. You can go to the dealer/seller and ask for a test drive when you wanna buy a car, don't you? That's a demo. We don't have them anymore. Our only legal way of having a demo is to buy the car and then refund it if you don't like it. Is that acceptable in a normal society? No, that's not either. And that's the thing, I want to pay people back for their effort. I just don't trust them. Imagine if the guy you're buying a car from has a history of selling bad cars, cars which seem ok at first glance but a lot of stuff isn't actually working well when you drive it. Would you buy a car from that guy? That's exactly what EA is doing. See, it's not that simple. A middle ground needs to be reached, and we aren't there yet.

Dig in, there a lot on Google. https://gizmodo.com/the-eu-suppressed-a-300-page-study-that-found-piracy-do-1818629537 https://twitter.com/Senficon/status/910483224731820033/photo/1?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fgizmodo.com%2Fajax%2Finset%2Fiframe%3Fid%3Dtwitter-910483224731820033%26autosize%3D1 https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/06/13/does-online-piracy-help-boost-sales.aspx If you speak Russian I can give you even more Russia based studies.

cryohellinc:

Dig in, there a lot on Google. https://gizmodo.com/the-eu-suppressed-a-300-page-study-that-found-piracy-do-1818629537 https://twitter.com/Senficon/status/910483224731820033/photo/1?ref_src=twsrc^tfw&ref_url=https://gizmodo.com/ajax/inset/iframe?id=twitter-910483224731820033&autosize=1 https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/06/13/does-online-piracy-help-boost-sales.aspx If you speak Russian I can give you even more Russia based studies.

But also there is a problem with price and tax... music and movies have seen their price fall down once online, it's more easy to accept to pay 0.99 Euro for a single than 5 Euro for the same thing on single CD, or 5 Euro for a VOD movie, than 15 Euro for a sit at cinema (even worse with big family). Personaly, i wouldn't get AC: Origin at 80 Euro, hopefully we have changed the HDD of the server for Seagate and get AC:Origin for free as bundled with each HDD... as AC:Origin is useless for work we have kept the code for us 🙂 And no the DRM doesn't feel so hungry

asturur:

i do not think borrowing a game to a friend is pirating. WHen you have it, he cannot play it. that's it.

And also they dont lie to you, it's in the licence of most company: -borrow game is forbiden -2nd hand game is forbiden etc etc... what is not cool at all it's what EA have made with hardware change limit...

I used to pirate games when I was in my teens and had no money. Back then, I couldn't afford those games anyways so it's like they lost money because of me (however, I did end up paying what little money I had for a game that I really liked). Now that I have a stable, well-paying job I buy all my games. This isn't out of principle of anything like that though - it's just that I can afford them now and it's the most convenient method (especially with online platforms like Steam). Most of the games in my Steam library are FPS games. It's my favorite genre, but this didn't develop overnight - my love affair with FPS stems back to my early days when I played pirated versions of Wolf 3D and Doom. If this early exposure didn't happen then my Steam library would probably look very different (or perhaps wouldn't exist at all). I also used to play games like Tomb Raider and certain RTS games (mostly Blizzard) and that heavily influenced my decisions to buy games like Warcraft 3 and the recent Tomb Raider games. People tend to stick to what they know so developing a relationship with gamers in their early years works to a company's advantage. It seems to me that this anti-piracy stuff is about maximizing short-term profits at the expense of long-term gains.

xIcarus:

Seriously, people who pirate your game don't want to buy your game. However people who pirate your game and enjoy it may buy your game if it's good, because they want to support you and perhaps because of some extra online features. This is exactly what I'm doing with Witcher 3, those guys just deserve my money even though I've already finished the pirated game. I pirated it because such RPGs are usually not my thing and I wasn't even gonna try the game, let alone buy it. Yet CDPR turned me from a pirate of their game into a customer simply because their game is more than great. When will this pointless fight against piracy stop? This version of Denuvo will get cracked (even if it takes more than a few days) and they'll have to spend money on developing a new one, the cycle that's been set until now will continue and nothing will change. Meanwhile this type of DRM is anti-consumer and I will never ever support any company which supports such practices. If your DRM-ridden game is good, I will pirate it so I won't have to deal with that crap. You're not only wasting money on useless sh!t, you're also losing customers in the process. The gaming industry has become a bit better lately compared to a few years ago but it's still a joke when you take companies like Ubisoft and EA into account. I honestly hope they go bankrupt, especially EA which has killed numerous studios with their retarded practices.

I dont pirate games and I'm not here to judge but for you to say that the only reason you pirated Witcher 3 was because you wanted to try it out seems like a pretty ridiculous excuse. Steam as well as most other online game distribution platforms allow you to return a game if you dont like it. Its nice that you decided to support them after playing it but why was it necessary for you to pirate the game in order to try it out?