Denuvo Blames Gamer Toxicity for DRM Protection Hate

M76 said:
Time and time again it was shown that if a game is good and in demand it has no trouble selling millions of copies in a few days without DRM. The only potential problem is the game being received poorly and no DRM can save you from that.
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There is no comparison point though, it's impossible to generate a real number. Besides, it's not about what effect DRM has or doesn't have on sales. Denuvo trades on fear, fear works wonders, politicians use it to scare people into supporting them just like companies use it to scare other companies into paying them. Make up a problem, blame "bad guys", hock a bullshit solution to a problem you dreamed up in the boardroom.

You don't even have to produce a single number, hell you don't even need to prove what effect your solution will have, you just have to promise to make the bad guys pay for all the awful things they never did.
 
I don't pirate games, I complain about denuvo causes issues on muh Linux box, and Windows boxes too. Robbed of performance using drm!

I am old and toxic tho, so that part is right.
 
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Twisted Kidney said:
There is no comparison point though
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That's the point. I can't prove it and they can't either. The whole DRM industry is based on faith. Which puts it on par with scientology in my book.

But wouldn't you rather have 3 million satisfied customers, or 3 million +/- ? amount of dissatisfied ones?
DRM is not the difference between failure and success in AAA, it is throwing customer satisfaction under a bus and reversing back through it with prejudice in hopes to squeeze out a few extra dimes.
 
Twisted Kidney said:
There is no comparison point though, it's impossible to generate a real number. Besides, it's not about what effect DRM has or doesn't have on sales. Denuvo trades on fear, fear works wonders, politicians use it to scare people into supporting them just like companies use it to scare other companies into paying them. Make up a problem, blame "bad guys", hock a bullshit solution to a problem you dreamed up in the boardroom.

You don't even have to produce a single number, hell you don't even need to prove what effect your solution will have, you just have to promise to make the bad guys pay for all the awful things they never did.
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Denuvo sells itself to investors, because they want some “protection” that their money won’t be “stolen” by people pirating the games.

But given the astounding losses many publishers have taken lately investment is down, studios are leaning heavily into cost cutting. Cost cuts mean cheaper games, cheaper games mean smaller investments, smaller investments means less need for protection that suddenly is a larger percentage of the budget.

That’s why Denuvo is pushing positive marketing right now, they are trying to convince publishers and developers that their negatives are far smaller than it’s perceived.

The fact they are having to spin things like this is good for us, it means they are having to actively seek projects to be included into instead of being hired by default.
 
Lakados said:
Denuvo sells itself to investors, because they want some “protection” that their money won’t be “stolen” by people pirating the games.

But given the astounding losses many publishers have taken lately investment is down, studios are leaning heavily into cost cutting. Cost cuts mean cheaper games, cheaper games mean smaller investments, smaller investments means less need for protection that suddenly is a larger percentage of the budget.

That’s why Denuvo is pushing positive marketing right now, they are trying to convince publishers and developers that their negatives are far smaller than it’s perceived.

The fact they are having to spin things like this is good for us, it means they are having to actively seek projects to be included into instead of being hired by default.
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I recall seeing the pricing for Denuvo and it was absurd, but it really wasn't that big compared to some budgets. The continuing cost over months after release really adds up, though.
 
I don't know, my opinion is that good games sell and DRM fundamentally punishes the people buying your game and less so the pirates. See the makers of good games figured out long ago that people then passing your game around for free to their friends / family is just more marketing. Does it always 1 for 1 = more sales? No, but in general people like a game, they'll come around and buy it.
 
M76 said:
That's the point. I can't prove it and they can't either. The whole DRM industry is based on faith. Which puts it on par with scientology in my book.

But wouldn't you rather have 3 million satisfied customers, or 3 million +/- ? amount of dissatisfied ones?
DRM is not the difference between failure and success in AAA, it is throwing customer satisfaction under a bus and reversing back through it with prejudice in hopes to squeeze out a few extra dimes.
Click to expand...

You and I think of the games, the board doesn't give a rat's rosy rectum about the games or the customers. All they care about is the pirates, and the money they might lose, the shareholder value that might not be maximized, they don't need to know anything more than Denuvo slays the villains that impede the line god. I would love to see a real study of the impact of DRM or its absence on sales, piracy, share value, and a comparison of the cost of Denuvo vs lost sales due to piracy before the DRM is cracked. Denuvo in particular becomes quite expensive over time, I believe.

I know that data would never be released, that would be like the gaming industry's Necronomicon. Too many secrets in there, probably too much information about the disdain industry execs have developed for their customers. My gut tells me that Denuvo costs a company more than lost sales would, I can't imagine a world where the all-important shareholder is concerned about a lack of DRM. They just worry about the line god.

It's just information I would love to see distilled out of financial reports and sales, though it's pretty much impossible to do.
 
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Sir Beregond said:
I don't know, my opinion is that good games sell and DRM fundamentally punishes the people buying your game and less so the pirates. See the makers of good games figured out long ago that people then passing your game around for free to their friends / family is just more marketing. Does it always 1 for 1 = more sales? No, but in general people like a game, they'll come around and buy it.
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I can't believe that is true. It might be true among many of us here, but I doubt it is among the general gamer population. Word of mouth more than anything still moves numbers, so a person who may have pirated a game might talk about how good it is in online space or among their friends, and that could increase sales. How a person came about acquiring said game is specious. This circles back around to how it's practically impossible to actually prove that DRM improves or does not improve initial sales numbers, though.
 
Armenius said:
I recall seeing the pricing for Denuvo and it was absurd, but it really wasn't that big compared to some budgets. The continuing cost over months after release really adds up, though.
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Right but $400k when a budget is $60M is marginal, less than 1% of the budget over the first year of a game when it reasonably makes the most in sales.
But $400K when the budget is $10M, and now it's 4% and statistically significant, and bean counters take note of that because that money is very easy to justify going to something that will impact sales.
I would joke about it going to QA but I think we're beyond that being funny, and it's turning tragic instead.
 
Lakados said:
Right but $400k when a budget is $60M is marginal, less than 1% of the budget over the first year of a game when it reasonably makes the most in sales.
But $400K when the budget is $10M, and now it's 4% and statistically significant, and bean counters take note of that because that money is very easy to justify going to something that will impact sales.
I would joke about it going to QA but I think we're beyond that being funny, and it's turning tragic instead.
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As someone that works no one in corporate gives a shit about QA. Just get the shit out the door. I seriously don't know how I even still have a job at my company lol.
 
Twisted Kidney said:
You and I think of the games, the board doesn't give a rat's rosy rectum about the games or the customers. All they care about is the pirates, and the money they might lose, the shareholder value that might not be maximized, they don't need to know anything more than Denuvo slays the villains that impede the line god. I would love to see a real study of the impact of DRM or its absence on sales, piracy, share value, and a comparison of the cost of Denuvo vs lost sales due to piracy before the DRM is cracked. Denuvo in particular becomes quite expensive over time, I believe.

I know that data would never be released, that would be like the gaming industry's Necronomicon. Too many secrets in there, probably too much information about the disdain industry execs have developed for their customers. My gut tells me that Denuvo costs a company more than lost sales would, I can't imagine a world where the all-important shareholder is concerned about a lack of DRM. They just worry about the line god.

It's just information I would love to see distilled out of financial reports and sales, though it's pretty much impossible to do.
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I don't know how such study would be conducted. How you can prove someone bought a game because they couldn't pirate it, or that they didn't buy it because they could pirate it? It would have to be a survey and even then it's after the fact. People may respond one way but act another.

That said, I wouldn't be surprised if more than 50% of people who pirate only do so because it's free, not because they would have bought it but chose not to. But certainly, some amount of people go to buy a game then before doing so check their favorite torrent site to see if the game is up there.

But another thing to factor in is how many people buy games but never play them? These are sales from people who either lack time or interest in the product, so while the process of transferring the game to them cost virtually nothing the convenience is triggering for people. It's basically money given to the publisher by people with zero/minimal interest in the product that had it been a physical copy, a sale that probably would not have been made. Is the amount of people who pirate vs the amount of people who buy it but never play it is close to a wash?
 
1.1.2.3.5... said:
Why is that impossible?
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There is no method by which you could release a game in an apples to apples comparison where one does and one doesn't have DRM, where the DRM itself is the isolated factor.
There would be too many other factors to reasonably say that the DRM did or didn't have an effect that couldn't be reasonably attributed to many other things, economy, other launches, market conditions, the quality of the game itself, etc...
 
bigdogchris said:
I don't know how such study would be conducted. How you can prove someone bought a game because they couldn't pirate it, or that they didn't buy it because they could pirate it? It would have to be a survey and even then it's after the fact. People may respond one way but act another.
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DOE would most likely give a definitive answer. Don't challenge stats people with a good time. I have built and tested predictive models on account behaviors for accounts that didn't happen. And then we went out and paid for the data to test my model against ground truth and it did pretty much exactly what I expected it to in terms of performance.
 
Lakados said:
There is no method by which you could release a game in an apples to apples comparison where one does and one doesn't have DRM, where the DRM itself is the isolated factor.
There would be too many other factors to reasonably say that the DRM did or didn't have an effect that couldn't be reasonably attributed to many other things, economy, other launches, market conditions, the quality of the game itself, etc...
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How do you know there's no method? You're making a claim that things cannot be done based on things statisticians literally do.
 
1.1.2.3.5... said:
DOE would most likely give a definitive answer. Don't challenge stats people with a good time. I have built and tested predictive models on account behaviors for accounts that didn't happen. And then we went out and paid for the data to test my model against ground truth and it did pretty much exactly what I expected it to in terms of performance.
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True but statically the best selling games of all time have had some means of copy protection, Denuvo amongst them, simply because copy protection on huge successful AAA titles has been a thing for a long time. So any data you would have to start with is tainted.
It would make successful indi titles that suddenly took off that didn't have it seem like statistical outliers
 
Lakados said:
True but statically the best selling games of all time have had some means of copy protection, Denuvo amongst them, simply because copy protection on huge successful AAA titles has been a thing for a long time. So any data you would have to start with is tainted.
It would make successful indi titles that suddenly took off that didn't have it seem like statistical outliers
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You can normalize outliers
 
If i wasn't overly engaged with work i would see what kind of model is possible with public data. I bet one could make a reasonable model.
 
1.1.2.3.5... said:
How do you know there's no method? You're making a claim that things cannot be done based on things statisticians literally do.
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You have product A, of Genre A, release by company A
You have product B, of Genre A, released by company B

One has copy protection one doesn't, the company's brand and the different product itself are variables that can't be isolated from the DRM, their direct competition in this scenario form a bigger variable then the DRM. Change it to the same company with the same genre and now dealing with market saturation and stagnation and not DRM, etc.

It's a very hard one to prove, sadly most of the data out there that exists shows that DRM overwhelmingly helps sales, sadly most of that is provided by the MPAA, and other media groups relating to Movies, TV, and Music where it can be directly shown that as internet improves sales decline, until a point where all the content gets paywalled behind streaming services then subscription numbers go up. Where the streaming service itself is the DRM.
 
Lakados said:
It's a very hard one to prove
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Now make it so i have 5k rows of data and i categorize them into drm vs no drm and then categorize confounding variables.

You don't think that would show anything? If out of 5k games of various budgets and expected sales, you split those into those with and without drm, there's nothing to say? I would argue it's even bigger than just games as you have DRM for more than just games and a lot of data across content (less so now).

As long as I have enough data, I suspect I could make a fairly predictive linear model. Devils in the details so maybe not, but nothing we currently know suggests it would not work.
 
1.1.2.3.5... said:
You can normalize outliers
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You can but sadly when you do, it shows that DRM helps, because the games that have DRM have gone on to be huge sellers, but is that because the DRM did it's job or because it was attached to a game that was going to be huge anyways because.
Like if there was suddenly a new Gears of War game, and it had DRM. Did the DRM contribute to the sales, or is it the fact that its a new Gears of War game itself.

Then somebody release a similar game, without DRM, how can you limit out the consumers other factors, did they get the game because they like GoW, did they not get the game because it was a cheap copy of said GoW game, was it price, what other games came out at that time, was it buggy, etc..

If anything the best bet would be to train an AI by feeding it game consumer data, to build a series of algorithms that see itself as various stages of gamer ranging from casual to no-lifer, then see if it starts making decisions based on DRM and pirateability of titles.
 
Lakados said:
You can but sadly when you do, it shows that DRM helps, because the games that have DRM have gone on to be huge sellers, but is that because the DRM did it's job or because it was attached to a game that was going to be huge anyways because.
Like if there was suddenly a new Gears of War game, and it had DRM. Did the DRM contribute to the sales, or is it the fact that its a new Gears of War game itself.

Then somebody release a similar game, without DRM, how can you limit out the consumers other factors, did they get the game because they like GoW, did they not get the game because it was a cheap copy of said GoW game, was it price, what other games came out at that time, was it buggy, etc..

If anything the best bet would be to train an AI by feeding it game consumer data, to build a series of algorithms that see itself as various stages of gamer ranging from casual to no-lifer, then see if it starts making decisions based on DRM and pirateability of titles.
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You're AI example is basically what making a linear model would be doing and it would do a better job. We play these games all the time with billions of dollars of bank portfolios and the FED overseeing it.
 
1.1.2.3.5... said:
You're AI example is basically what making a linear model would be doing and it would do a better job. We play these games all the time with billions of dollars of bank portfolios and the FED overseeing it.
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I get that but all the models done to date have shown DRM helps, but they were funded by the likes of the MPAA and RIAA (now just known as the MPA), so it's not like we can trust the source, but there has yet to be a decently funded counter study.
 
Armenius said:
I can't believe that is true. It might be true among many of us here, but I doubt it is among the general gamer population. Word of mouth more than anything still moves numbers, so a person who may have pirated a game might talk about how good it is in online space or among their friends, and that could increase sales. How a person came about acquiring said game is specious. This circles back around to how it's practically impossible to actually prove that DRM improves or does not improve initial sales numbers, though.
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That's fair, and in which case still casts doubt on if DRM is worth it or not if you can't actually prove sales numbers one way or another.

What I do know for certain is that DRM can and has posed issues to gamers and affected game performance with many titles that had it.
 
Lakados said:
I get that but all the models done to date have shown DRM helps, but they were funded by the likes of the MPAA and RIAA (now just known as the MPA), so it's not like we can trust the source, but there has yet to be a decently funded counter study.
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I was not aware of any existing studies. That's a fair complaint.
 
Sir Beregond said:
That's fair, and in which case still casts doubt on if DRM is worth it or not if you can't actually prove sales numbers one way or another.

What I do know for certain is that DRM can and has posed issues to gamers and affected game performance with many titles that had it.
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But proving that those performance penalties had a negative impact on sales is another thing entirely.
I mean if we look at recent history, launch issues don't seem to be a huge contributing factor in poor sales some titles are going to go big day 1 regardless.
 
Lakados said:
I get that but all the models done to date have shown DRM helps, but they were funded by the likes of the MPAA and RIAA (now just known as the MPA), so it's not like we can trust the source, but there has yet to be a decently funded counter study.
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It is not like they were made by people that sales DRM techs, here that seem to be made by the people that would pay for it and have the greatest interest to get it right (as it will cost them money and the one that would lose money if DRM does not help).

I would imagine many game studios (like movie studio) made a bit of A/B testing before deciding, like movie studio did, if language-market has enough difference to be able to release the same game with vs without in different market, or very similar game/sequels with vs without.
 
CrimsonKnight13 said:
I think it'd be hilarious to toss such an idea at 4chan & see how well they progress with it. See how Shia LaBeouf's hide & go seek flag event went. :ROFLMAO:
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I pondered what this might be saying and I fear it's all over my head (easy job). I am aware of 4chan, but that's about it. I know who Shia LaBeouf is from crappy transformer movies, but that's about it.
 
Lakados said:
But proving that those performance penalties had a negative impact on sales is another thing entirely.
I mean if we look at recent history, launch issues don't seem to be a huge contributing factor in poor sales some titles are going to go big day 1 regardless.
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True. I can't argue against that. Millions of people buying the same day 1 disasters.
 
Sir Beregond said:
I don't know, my opinion is that good games sell and DRM fundamentally punishes the people buying your game and less so the pirates. See the makers of good games figured out long ago that people then passing your game around for free to their friends / family is just more marketing. Does it always 1 for 1 = more sales? No, but in general people like a game, they'll come around and buy it.
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yeah it makes you wonder how nintendo, sega and all the game devs ever made any money back in the 80's and 90's when we use to borrow/lend games to friends and family or just rented games for the weekend for a couple of bucks? really the fact of the matter is it's just companies being greedy. that's why they want all the sales to be digital so there's no way to lend games anymore.

same goes for movies. and all the people on here complaining about pirating i bet use to rent movies for a couple bucks back in the day and have a bunch of people over to watch it. weren't you breaking the rules by doing a "public showing" how did the movie companies ever survive that? heck if you had two vcr's you could even dub the movie while you were watching it. same with cassette tapes. man things were great. you never had to listen to anyone complaining about stuff like that back then.
 
d3athf1sh said:
yeah it makes you wonder how nintendo, sega and all the game devs ever made any money back in the 80's and 90's when we use to borrow/lend games to friends and family or just rented games for the weekend for a couple of bucks? really the fact of the matter is it's just companies being greedy. that's why they want all the sales to be digital so there's no way to lend games anymore.

same goes for movies. and all the people on here complaining about pirating i bet use to rent movies for a couple bucks back in the day and have a bunch of people over to watch it. weren't you breaking the rules by doing a "public showing" how did the movie companies ever survive that? heck if you had two vcr's you could even dub the movie while you were watching it. same with cassette tapes. man things were great. you never had to listen to anyone complaining about stuff like that back then.
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There was that scary looking fbi warning...haha
 
Twisted Kidney said:
a comparison of the cost of Denuvo vs lost sales due to piracy before the DRM is cracked.
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It doesn't matter if it prevents 1 million pirated downloads or a 100. What matters is how many of them will buy the game immediately if they can't pirate it. Not to mention the ones who would've purchased it if only they could've tried the pirated version first. And how many people choose to not buy it specifically because of the DRM. These are all unknown variables. And they are unknowable too, there is no way to measure the true impact of DRM on sales.
Twisted Kidney said:
I know that data would never be released, that would be like the gaming industry's Necronomicon. Too many secrets in there, probably too much information about the disdain industry execs have developed for their customers. My gut tells me that Denuvo costs a company more than lost sales would, I can't imagine a world where the all-important shareholder is concerned about a lack of DRM. They just worry about the line god.
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Any such data would be predictions at best, based on preconceived notions. And also produced by those with vested interest in producing a specific result.
 
When you start normalizing data, you enter the realm of statistics, damn statistics, and lies. Yeah, they can be useful, and tell interesting stories, but don't believe even half of it.
 
Nobu said:
When you start normalizing data, you enter the realm of statistics, damn statistics, and lies. Yeah, they can be useful, and tell interesting stories, but don't believe even half of it.
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Of course you can manipulate things to make a lie....but that's only if people are unwilling to actually look at the analysis with a critical eye.
 
M76 said:
And also produced by those with vested interest in producing a specific result.
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Not necessarily in the past industry group (i.e. sellers of the final product, the only people actually interested in the actual efficacy of the product that exist) did produce them, not just the seller of drm type product, I think.
 
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