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3DM claim to have cracked Denuvo
- Thread starter StalkerUKCG
- Start date
Mass_Pincup
Banned
That's if you're finishing the game and then asking for a refund. Here's what steam actually says:
http://store.steampowered.com/steam_refunds/?l=english
SmokedMeat
Gamer™
We're going to go in circles then, because being able to try something knowing you aren't locked into a purchase helps sales just as much.
No pirating needed.
If it helps sales just as much it means piracy helps sales in that case, which was the point.
holygeesus
Banned
Sorry but I don't buy any of the above - if people are pirating a game, if anything, if they like the game and tell their friends about it, they are more likely than not to offer to show them how and where they got the game for nothing, rather than influencing them to buy it.It's more likely to increase instances of piracy than increase sales.
I don't see how people can measure such a thing either. If people were genuinely demoing a game before buying, then all these illegal download numbers, would lead to increased sales, rather than PC sales continually lagging behind the console equivalents. If someone has a working, pirated copy of a game, I'd say a good 99% of them have no incentive to go out and buy exactly the thing they have been playing for free. Sure, there might be the odd morally sound pirate out there, but the majority will not spend money when they don't need to.
I read elsewhere, that a significant majority of people contacting publisher helplines for games, are having issues running pirate copies. That alone illustrates the entitlement that pirates feel. That doesn't point towards supporting the game financially, but they expect help with a game they have stolen? The mind boggles.
As to CD Projekt - they are hardly as blasé in regard piracy as is made out. Sure, they are actively anti-DRM, but as the following article points out, they are as staunchly anti-piracy.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2010-11-22-witcher-2-torrents-could-net-you-a-fine
I don't see how people can measure such a thing either. If people were genuinely demoing a game before buying, then all these illegal download numbers, would lead to increased sales, rather than PC sales continually lagging behind the console equivalents. If someone has a working, pirated copy of a game, I'd say a good 99% of them have no incentive to go out and buy exactly the thing they have been playing for free. Sure, there might be the odd morally sound pirate out there, but the majority will not spend money when they don't need to.
I read elsewhere, that a significant majority of people contacting publisher helplines for games, are having issues running pirate copies. That alone illustrates the entitlement that pirates feel. That doesn't point towards supporting the game financially, but they expect help with a game they have stolen? The mind boggles.
As to CD Projekt - they are hardly as blasé in regard piracy as is made out. Sure, they are actively anti-DRM, but as the following article points out, they are as staunchly anti-piracy.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2010-11-22-witcher-2-torrents-could-net-you-a-fine
Erm, so have they never heard of a VPN? I don't buy that for a second.
SmokedMeat
Gamer™
Why choose piracy when Steam lets you do it legally?
We don't know how often you need to take advantage of the refund system for it to be seen as abusive.
Instead of having to resort to refunds I would much prefer a way where you could download any game on Steam and try it out for a set amount of time, like how you can try the early access games on Xbox.
What has that to do with the fact that piracy helps sales in that case?
You are actively trying to move the topic to the moral ground, which is not what we are talking about.
Lanrutcon
Member
Steam does not approve of using a VPN to purchase outside your borders, for the record.
the topic was about whether piracy can help sales in some cases. it does.
the topic was never about whether pirates should continue pirating if there is an alternative.
Sure, but there's like a thousand CD key sites that work fine that Valve don't seem to do anything about.
SmokedMeat
Gamer™
Sadly developers don't seem too interested in doing demos that often.
Now you need to take this a step further.
If someone has a way to demo a game in a legal and in an illegal way, i would assume he would choose the legal way.
Meaning that there would be very few people who would choose to demo a game via the illegal route, which in turn means there would be very few instances where piracy helped sales due to being a demo (because most people won't use it as a demo, due to a better and legal alternative to do the same thing).
yes this is the case. you need to have someone gift the game to you. there are some businesses doing that on taobao.com for example.
some games does not allow gifting though.
They did, they implemented region lock as an option to developers.
Lanrutcon
Member
Are those keys attached to regions? I've never used those sites.
nkarafo
Member
When Portal 2 was released on Steam, i bought it day one. Unfortunately, it didn't work... I searched the internet and troubleshooted it for days and still couldn't figure out why it wasn't working. Some people suggested that i should re-install windows but why would i do this for just one game (all the others worked fine).
So there was this guy telling me to download a cracked copy. And so i did. And that worked! So the problem was some issue between Steam and my system.
In short, i had to download the cracked version to play a game i bought. I still couldn't play the multiplayer though... But all i wanted was to just play the damn game.
Not supporting piracy here, just mentioning another instance where a cracked version was useful.
So there was this guy telling me to download a cracked copy. And so i did. And that worked! So the problem was some issue between Steam and my system.
In short, i had to download the cracked version to play a game i bought. I still couldn't play the multiplayer though... But all i wanted was to just play the damn game.
Not supporting piracy here, just mentioning another instance where a cracked version was useful.
RipperGrim
Member
Lol saying piracy helps sales because it makes it available to a lot of people is a bunch of bullshit. Games don't need it because they all have marketing budgets, they don't need exposure and this isn't like game of thrones where availability island issue, steam is practically available everywhere and pricing can get extremely low depending on sales.
If you're pirating these days, you're not gona actually spending money on it.
If you're pirating these days, you're not gona actually spending money on it.
I am well aware of that, which is why it most likely will never happen.
But from a consumer standpoint it would be a great feature for Steam to add.
Why would you assume that? People don't worry about the legal implications of piracy, they just go the easier way.
Piracy wouldn't even exist according to your argument.
Its true that some pirates will just play another game of wait for the crack, but not all of them.
This isnt true, Witcher 3, game of the year, came without DRM, they gifted a lot of free content to the community, very frecuent patches and bug fixes, they sold their expansions at a very reasonable price, by the end of the year it was at 60% discount on steam, and guess what.. it still got pirated into oblivion. Perhaps, if people who pirate games and are willing to pay 1000 dollars or more for a PC should stop blaming the developers.
Not true, Im old enough to remember the monthly demo discs that came with PCGamer magazine. And people still pirated all those games.
Also, the "preserve for future thing"... do you really think people didnt pirated games back in 1980 when there was no multiplayer servers or DRM?
((((sorry wrong quote)))
Why do you look at piracy numbers instead of sales numbers when talking about a game success?
The Witcher 3 has already sold 1.4 millions on Steam, and during its first weeks half of the sales came from GOG, so it is probably near 2 millions on PC, maybe more.
Even then. I would say that downloading the game from steam is safer than downloading a cracked copy that might contain malware. So even if people ddin't care about the legality of this, I would assume they would care about their PC's safety.
No. According to my argument piracy wouldn't exist if it were only used as a way to demo a game.
But piracy does exist and the implication from my post is that it exist as a way to illegally get full games for free and not to "demo" them.
Either you quoted the wrong post or i just don't understand you. Copying a freely distributed demo disc wouldn't be piracy. And i never said piracy doesn't or didn't exist. Just that it's probably not being used as a demo, but for other purposes (such as playing the whole game for free).
Fear of malware has never stop people from pirating things either, because you don't have to worry about it if you know where to download from.
So I still don't know why do you think people who buy games they previously pirate have suddenly move to Steam because of the refund option.
I don't understand where this confidence is comming from. It's true if you want to download and play the whole game for free because you have no other choice.
But to demo a game? Now that they have a free, legal and 100% safe option of doing that, why would anyone take the risk of doing some thing illegal, potentially getting sued if in the US, and potentially getting his PC infected. I don't get it.
Because they have a much better option of doing that now.
Edit: Just for clarification, we are talking specifically about using piracy as a demo. People who were pirating the game to play the whole thing for free will obviously continue to do so.
Huge Succeeded
Banned
this is the shit that I don't understand.
let me get this straight.
'Most people who pirated the game wouldn't have bought it'. So I can't consider 'people who would have bought the game otherwise if piracy wasn't available', because by all accounts they basically don't exist. Cheap people don't exist according to GAF.
But.
I HAVE to consider the people who pirated the game and then bought it. Like they're in great number. Like they outnumber the former situation, which apparently doesn't exist. Because people are apparently more likely to pay for a game AFTER they've pirated it then they are to just... keep the perfectly valid free copy they've just pirated and keep on playing that.
Do I have to explain why that's unintuitive at the very least? 'Nobody pirates when they have the money to pay, the ones that do are such a small number that they're not even worth attempting to quantify! But you HAVE TO THINK ABOUT the pirates who went on to pay, those guys are certainly enough of a presence to consider!' Jesus christ
As I said, it is easier to just download games from torrent, play them, and buy some of them if you like them than buying them on Steam knowing you will be able to refund them later.
You don't even need to introduce a pay method to try a game from a torrent site.
People who usually download things just don't care about legal implications nor malware.
I think you are moving to the extreme case of someone who downloads very few things from the internet and not to the general case of people who often download things.
sales got nothing to do.. all games, movies and books are pirated, regardless if they sell well or not, or regardless if they cost 60 bucks to play or 1 dollar.
Do you guys really think that a five dollar game or e-book doesnt get pirated? If you guys want to pirate, go ahead, but stop making lame excuses like "I want to preserve it for the future, even if the crack came the same day the game went gold", or "its the developers fault because the game has bugs so I have to pirate it"
Just admit the thruth... you bought a new brand pc master race machine, and you dont mind stealing someone elses work.
I disagree. I think that the type of people you described, i.e. people who won't enter payment information to steam, don't care about the legal implications nor malware, won't actually buy most of the games they have played and are using the "piracy as demo" idea as an excuse. (Edit: because if they really wanted a demo, they have a safer way to do it, and they would have to enter payment information anyway if they have ever, once in their life, have actually bought a game)
I am downloading a lot of things from the internet, legally, and from known sources. Please don't compare, as far as safety goes, downloading a torrent to downloading legal content from official websites.
The message you answered to stated that to improve sales, companies have to add more value to their product rather than spending money trying to stop piracy.
You answered it wasn't true because TW3 has been heavily pirated, and I tell you piracy has nothing to do with the success of TW3 because it has sold a lot on PC thanks to CDProjekt doing things you yourself said.
Also I hope your last sentence wasn't literally referring to me, because I can count 385 games on my steam library.
You may disagree as well as I may disagree with pirates buying anything just because they cannot pirate it, but the thing is both are perfectly valid points to have in mind because no body has been able to prove a correlation between piracy and sales.
And my last sentence was referring to people downloading things illegally from the internet(music, movies, games, etc), which is something pretty standard.
petran79
Banned
For World of Goo it also mattered that the European publisher did something insane. They forced you to have the disc in the DVD drive in order to play a 100-150 Mb game. I did the mistake and bought it. Then I was forced to grab the pirate version to avoid the hassle...
Machinarium, being a Flash game, could also be played inside a web browser on any OS.
holygeesus
Banned
I don't buy that either. If, as you claim, people are using pirated copies of games and then buying them if they like them, they are having to introduce a payment method at some stage of the equation, unless they are never going to buy anything from Steam. It seems a bit of a stretch to me.
You don't get charged by downloading from a torrent site, you get charged by downloading a game from Steam. It is pretty straightforward.
You don't get charged only if you don't buy it.
Meaning that if you used the torrent as a demo for a game you are interested in playing, you should expect to be charged as well. The only way you can be sure you won't be charged is if you download a torrent and have no intention of buying the game at all.
I understand what you are saying, but i just see it as an excuse for pirating.
King Gilga
Member
Cool, I could not care less about piracy one way or the other but I hope it and all DRM inevitably gets cracked.
You have a very poor opinion of gamers in general it seems, much like the big companies, which is why so many people justify pirating - "they don't care about me, why should I care about them?" This is not, by the way, a justification for piracy, but that bad blood is a major rift often brought up in comments constantly on warez sites. Companies like Valve (at least in terms of DRM and pricing) and GOG have proven that if you treat your customers with respect and not as opportunistic criminals, it pays dividends long term. Maybe you just know a lot of shitty people who don't give a damn about gaming?
And you can't measure the effects of piracy on sales with any form of accuracy either. But consumers see things from a consumer perspective. I'm outright bias in this case (of course I am as a consumer) because of how many game series I've bought over the years that started out with pirated copies or swapping of console games. And I've seen it first hand the evolution from pirate to person who buys every game in a series day one; but I guess this is all anecdotal.
I'm not sure why you posted that article (especially one that doesn't mention them backing down from their position after backlash) as it seems pretty self-evident that companies would prefer people to pay for their games (to put it mildly). So much of this has the word piracy as an umbrella term for downloading a copy of a game without direct paying for it. It does not take into account the situation of the person doing it and the long term connection between them and gaming. Like, if I ever play San Andreas again (which is likely as I've just finished 3 and half way through Vice City), I'm pirating a copy so I can have the full radio stations. I've that game on both PS2 and PC, but the pirated version is the superior version, and that's completely fucked. New customers would be paying for an inferior version to the free version, and some games flat out don't work because of older anti-piracy methods - trying to bring this back around to Denuvo.
As for the whole customer support thing: citation needed, because right now I'm just wonder why my copy of Dragon Age Inquisition is still not working properly unless I apply a crack. Also, considering how games are tweaked so much these days and often for outright egregious reasons, the quicker a game is cracked the better. MGSV right now is not the same game I played on launch.
Why would I want to be charged for just trying a game? That was the idea behind pirating it.
In my head these people pirate many games a month, they uninstall the vast majority of them a few hours later(or even minutes), they complete some of them but are not willing to buy them, and they end buying just a couple or three of them.
Very few games actually have gifting disabled, but all gifts purchased in certain regions, namely...
...are automatically restricted to said regions (e.g. a gift purchased in Central/South America can only be redeemed by users in Central/South America).
charlequin
Banned
It's not 2007 anymore. Thousands of modern games -- including some big releases -- don't need to be cracked because they're released DRM-free on at least one storefront. If there were a clear, dramatic sales impact from being piratable this would be the place to see it, but no such significant effect seems to exist.
Putting aside that pc indies from eight years ago were in a market (both for sales and for piracy) that was completely, utterly different from today... This concept of "piracy rate" is meaningless. I could go download a game ten thousand times and make a big change to its "piracy rate" but nothing would change about the business realities of that title. When companies analyze this stuff internally, even the most piracy paranoid don't use a ratio like this.
If you don't care about legality, safety and have no intention of entering payment details, why would you want to be charged at all? That's the idea behind pirating it.
Which is exactly what i am saying. It is piracy to get free games, not as a demo.
And sometimes, they will buy a game, to make themselves feel better, to be able to pretend that their piracy is "just for a demo".
So it comes down to: some people will buy some of the games they pirated with the intention of playing for free from start to finish.
Your initial claim was that piracy helps sales because it allows demoing games. I wouldn't call this type of behavior "demoing". For actual demoing of games you would use steam and the refund system.
And that is what most people probably do, they pirate everything and don't buy anything.
But there are some people who pirate games and buy some of those games only because they have been able to pirate them before.
You should keep moral accusations away, because they have nothing to do with this.
These people are called potential customers buy many companies and developers, because they know they are willing to buy some games if they consider it is worth paying for them.
And Valve has made PC gaming a whole business success thinking that way and adding value to the platform, games and community, instead of demonizing pirates and trying to fuck them with strong DRMs that only decrease value of the product.
So this has nothing to do with demoing games at all. It's just about pirating games. And sometimes the thief might feel generous enough and actually pay for the product that he has stolen.
So I see your initial claim that piracy helps sales because it is being used as a demo, as false. You could argue that it helps to sell a few more units to people who feel guilty after they pirated the game, but i don't call such behavior "demoing" a game.
I guess this British study (Ofcom) needs to be posted here :
http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/binaries/research/telecoms-research/online-copyright/deep-dive.pdf
At the time in which you call them thieves instead of pirates, in a purely business discussion, you kill the debate.
And you can call it what you want, my original point was buying a game thanks of being able to pirate it before, moral implications apart.
Woo-Fu
Banned
Lack of evidence isn't evidence of lack. Short of the ability to travel to an alternate universe that differs only in whether or not a particular game has DRM it will never be possible to demonstrate what effect piracy/DRM has on sales numbers.
Which seems a meaningless distinction if you're a publisher. I don't care how much more a pirate spends on media if they're not spending it on my products. It is a good argument for DRM though, so that you insure that your products aren't the lowest hanging fruit.
Yea it's not just that study either, there are a few different studies that have shown the same thing. Pirates spend significantly more cash on media than "honest customers."
I assumed this discussion was specifically about pirating as a means of demoing a game helping game sales. For which steam is a better alternative. (Edit: meaning people who intend to demo a game would be better off using steam's refund policy)
If you have phrased it as playing the entire game for free, and then maybe, if you felt like it, buying it after the fact, then obviously steam's refund policy couldn't have been a substitute, since steam won't let you play the entire game for free and then ask for a refund if you didn't feel like paying for it. But i don't see this as "trying or demoing a game".
If your intention is to talk about the general idea of piracy helping/hurting sales/profits due to other types of behavior, it would be a more complicated discussion since its hard to say whether more people would have bought it legally (and for what price) if they weren't able to pirate it.