Support NeoGAF

[Donald mac Ronald]

The cracks are random. there's no schedule for them to come out. so if you see a decrease in sales on games that are cracked early, it seems pretty straight forward that it's because people who would have have bought those games pirated it instead.

Space marine 2 has a huge focus on single player. Hasn't got any DRM so I assume it's been cracked, especially with that early build leak.

Piracy hasn't affected its game sales.

 

[Fabieter]

Piracy hasn't affected its game sales.

How can you back up that claim?

 

[clarky]

Space marine 2 has a huge focus on single player. Hasn't got any DRM so I assume it's been cracked, especially with that early build leak.

Piracy hasn't affected its game sales.

It definitely effects sales mate what are you smoking?

Are you telling me if games were impossible to crack then sales would not go up?

How do you know Space Marines sales would be the same if it was impossible to steal?

 

[The Mad Draklor]

The real question is if no Denuvo at all would affect sales.

How many copies are pirated because of Denuvo?

Which is why this study isn't particularly good. A good study will always have a control group as a reference point.

 

[The Fartist]

I bought Silent Hill 2 Remake on PS5, is it, hypothetically, ok for me to download the PC torrent, hypothetically?

Edit: asking for a friend, hypothetically.

 

[Punished Miku]

That's a shocking revelation. I figured that all these companies pay $25k for it for literally no reason.

shockedpikachu

 

[YCoCg]

I bought Silent Hill 2 Remake on PS5, is it, hypothetically, ok for me to download the PC torrent, hypothetically?

Edit: asking for a friend, hypothetically.

Morally, maybe, legally, no, the license you bought only applies to the console version, it does not cover other platforms.

 

[metareferential]

There's no logical way to link piracy to sales without taking into account popularity and quality of the game.

There is still no conclusive data on how piracy impacts sales.

If your product sucks, I don't even want it for free.

And DRM is shit.

 

[Wildebeest]

There is a lot of fraud in scientific papers and when it comes to scientific papers that make the headlines where someone profits from the conclusion you can expect it.

 

[BacklashWave534]

This study brought to you by Denuvo....

 

[yet_another_alt]

It's hard to quantify the amount of sales lost but you're delusional if think piracy does not affect game sales.
"Pirates would never buy a game anyway"
"Emulation is primarily for game preservation"
lol. lmao even.

 

[ReyBrujo]

People who pirate your game were never gonna buy your game.

You underestimate the convenience factor. People might pay for something but if they find it for free they might take it.

 

[Wildebeest]

You underestimate the convenience factor. People might pay for something but if they find it for free they might take it.

The only convenience factor you get from finding a game with Denuvo hacked from it is that you hope the game isn't all sorts of degraded and defective due to Denuvo, and you have only installed something relatively benevolent like Chinese spyware and crypto miners.

 

[ReyBrujo]

The only convenience factor you get from buying a game with Denuvo hacked from it is that you hope the game isn't all sorts of degraded and defective due to Denuvo, and you have only installed something relatively benevolent like Chinese spyware and crypto miners.

That's a different matter, many don't even know what Denuvo is or how it works, they only want to play the game, these are the "casual" players. You are talking about people who want to remove its protection to get better performance, or "hardcore" gamers who want every ounce of performance as possible, the kind of people who watch Digital Foundry to see if the game drops to 59fps before considering buying it.

Once you cross the line to the dark side, then why would you?

I know quite a lot of people who only buy determined types of games but they are pretty susceptible to buzz. Like, lots of people who prefer playing strategy or RPGs but when they hear quite a lot about Sparkling Zero they just download a cracked copy to test it out. It's as if you have never heard the "I test it to see if it is worth buying", sometimes those "tests" lasts the full campaign.

 

[Deleted member 1159]

I call this bs , people who pirate games, ain't buying games period.

Back when I sailed the seas, and we're talking like 15 years ago before I graduated college and had a real job, I would buy everything I could afford. And I'd like to think I've more than made up for it, both in buying what I had plundered, and supporting sequels, etc. at day one prices. It's definitely not black and white.

 

[JimboJones]

I don't really mind denuvo being in there for like 6months to a year but after that period it should just be dropped.
Also adding this to old games is pretty much unforgivable. At that point your just actively fucking over your genuine customers.

 

[clarky]

You underestimate the convenience factor. People might pay for something but if they find it for free they might take it.

You don't get any more convenient than Steam. Pirating something isn't just a case of hitting download most of the time. Add in the risk of Malware and the like and i'd say its less convenient.

I know quite a lot of people who only buy determined types of games but they are pretty susceptible to buzz. Like, lots of people who prefer playing strategy or RPGs but when they hear quite a lot about Sparkling Zero they just download a cracked copy to test it out. It's as if you have never heard the "I test it to see if it is worth buying", sometimes those "tests" lasts the full campaign.

Sounds like they are just justifying their own actions to me. I've never come across that in my life.

 

[Ozriel]

Companies lose money by giving denuvo money. They gain money by forcing some (not all) pirates to buy their game day 1. They lose money because of players who dont buy any game with denuvo implemented or because of reported technical problems, which can in turn lead to worse reviews and sales as well (in extreme cases). pirates who never buy games or are just very poor will still not buy their game especially with a steep pricetag like metaphor. pirates who just look to save money may ignore it as well, you know we have alot of alternatives nowadays. no piracy could theoretically mean less overall active players, which leads to less people talking about your game, which could in turn lead to less sales.

Topics like that are too black/white to me. Piracy cant only just reduced to "loss of sales". In many cases it may help to bring a niche product or medium out there to a new demographic.

The fact that publishers keep using Denuvo in succeeding games tells me all I need to know.
And anecdotal evidence, but most of the pirates I know go that route to save money they would have otherwise spent on buying games.

I've seen folks who've religiously bought every single Sony first party title, then stopped immediately they modded their console and started running pirated pkg files.

Word of mouth from pirates is meaningless, since that 'word of mouth' is usually gearing others into pirating too.

"Hey, this game is awesome, it costs $60 on Steam but you can get it for free by downloading from pirate sites" is an appealing message to many. I've seen people converted in real time.

 

[Davevil]

Piracy doesn't hurt videogame company

 

[darrylgorn]

Yet another reason not to buy games at launch.

 

[Edmund]

I have 4 friends with high end PCs (4080 and 4090) who only pirate games and play games that are on gamepass. It really sickens me to see people who are willing to splurge on a very high end pc but unwilling to spend money to support the developers.

I hope somehow denuvo finds a way to not affect the performance too much and also manage to find a way to keep games uncrackable for years.

 

[chakadave]

How can you back up that claim?

Same way people back up the claim that piracy decreases sales.
You can't count 100% of pirated copies as sales.

There is absolutely no way to say one way or the other. Ther eare in fact examples that DRM doesn't do anything except become an inconvinence and prohibity aspect to a game. See CDProject and GoG as positives and Denuvo and its like as negatives.

This board is weird. On one hand they are all for IP control and DRM while on the other they complain about licensing instead of owning games. You can't have both.

Either people own it and can do what they want with it or you can't and are ushering in and all digital all streaming future.

 

[realcool]

waiting for somebody to pirate the study so i can verify the claims

 

[Techies]

I'm fine with Denuvo being in at at launch as long as it gets removed later on.

Question is how long. Kind of waiting for midnight suns to remove theirs. Denuvo isn't free so I expect a point where it becomes a net negative long term.

It's a rare case where denuvo breaks uevr. Only case I can think of where it had an effect on gameplay was one of the injustice games.

 

[Zeusexy]

BS. Look at all the "study" sources and there's basically no data evidence on video games. Only music and movies.

 

[ResilientBanana]

So… after 12 weeks patch it out.

 

[Sentenza]

How can you back up that claim?

Ultimately, NO ONE can *conclusively* back up either claim (for piracy affecting sales heavily or not affecting them at all) because the only way to put the hypothesis to the test would be to release the same exact game, in the same exact conditions, on two parallel universes trying both with and without DRM.

What we can do is looking at how games tend to perform relatively to their budget, marketing, genre and having or not a DRM.
And what we can observe is
1- that a LOT of the biggest hits of the last few years were DRM-less releases
2- That games released with uncrackable DRM solutions (i.e. Denuvo, save spare cases where someone bothered to crack them early) seem to perform exactly with the expectations of their genre and they don't tend to surge at the top of the sales chart consistently, as they should according to DRM apologists.

 

[ChorizoPicozo]

... what about releasing broken games?

 

[YeulEmeralda]

I know this is neogaf and nobody cares about a game older than 2 weeks but poorfags can easily wait it out. Wouldn't be surprised if a good number of pirates don't have top of the shelf hardware anyway.

 

[chakadave]

Ultimately, NO ONE can *conclusively* back up either claim (for piracy affecting sales heavily or not affecting them at all) because the only way to put the hypothesis to the test would be to release the same exact game, in the same exact conditions, on two parallel universes trying both with and without DRM.

What we can do is looking at how games tend to perform relatively to their budget, marketing, genre and having or not a DRM.
And what we can observe is
1- that a LOT of the biggest hits of the last few years were DRM-less releases
2- That games released with uncrackable DRM solutions (i.e. Denuvo, save spare cases where someone bothered to crack them early) seem to perform exactly with the expectations of their genre and they don't tend to surge at the top of the sales chart consistently, as they should according to DRM apologists.

Exactly. Very few products fail because of cracks and downloads. A number of games fail because they release with broken DRM implementation.

I'd hypothesis the number of games pirated is about he same for all major releases.

EG if its bad and only sells a million copies it gets pirated 100k times. If its good and sells 100 million it gets pirated 100k times give or take a margin.

Then you get an average. Which for successful releases is marginal.

... what about releasing broken games?

Blame the pirates for all failures. or the incels and misoginist racist men.

 

[Sentenza]

It's hard to quantify the amount of sales lost but you're delusional if think piracy does not affect game sales.
"Pirates would never buy a game anyway"
"Emulation is primarily for game preservation"
lol. lmao even.

It's not that piracy doesn't affect sales in the sense that "No one will ever buy a game if they can't pirate them". I'm sure there's a certain percentage of users that will do exactly that.
The problem is that this would be just a face of the coin. It doesn't take into account factors like:

- people who actively avoid DRM
- people who don't care even remotely either way
- the fact that even if just "forced to buy" most people have only so much money they are willing to spend on this specific hobby and they would make choices.
- the "cultural penetration" element for which even people who pirate something may talk it up to others. I'd bet that more than negligible amount of sales over the years was "inspired" by someone who pirated a game and then praised it to others, leading to more sales. No one goes around praising a game they have not played first-hand.

For example the PS1 and PS2 climbed to be colossal success stories for Sony because -among other reasons- compared to all the competitors of their era their games turned out to be trivially easy to pirate.
The thriving pirate market for PS1 and PS2 software is precisely part of what made their meteoric rise to popularity. And while this meant some people would get some games illegally, it also means that after a while there was a far larger user base willing to spend money on the platform.

 

[Fabieter]

Same way people back up the claim that piracy decreases sales.
You can't count 100% of pirated copies as sales.

There is absolutely no way to say one way or the other. Ther eare in fact examples that DRM doesn't do anything except become an inconvinence and prohibity aspect to a game. See CDProject and GoG as positives and Denuvo and its like as negatives.

This board is weird. On one hand they are all for IP control and DRM while on the other they complain about licensing instead of owning games. You can't have both.

Either people own it and can do what they want with it or you can't and are ushering in and all digital all streaming future.

I think its fair to say that sales would be higher its delusional to say otherwise.

 

[Fabieter]

Exactly. Very few products fail because of cracks and downloads. A number of games fail because they release with broken DRM implementation.

I'd hypothesis the number of games pirated is about he same for all major releases.

EG if its bad and only sells a million copies it gets pirated 100k times. If its good and sells 100 million it gets pirated 100k times give or take a margin.

Then you get an average. Which for successful releases is marginal.


Blame the pirates for all failures. or the incels and misoginist racist men.

It doesn't make sense to claim that the number of downloads stays the same when a game is highly anticipated and well-received. In fact, it's widely documented across various sites that bigger, more hyped releases tend to be pirated more often than smaller ones.

From a moral standpoint, considering all the discussions we've had about studio closures and layoffs, it's fair to say that pirates share some responsibility, especially if they had the means to support the product but chose not to. In my opinion, people who do that are scumbags.

 

[simpatico]

This shit is written by Denuvo. I want them to name names. Which game would have sold 20% more if not for piracy? They won't say that though because the BS would be obvious. All piracy ever did for me in my younger years was make me buy more games. "Oh man this game is awesome, I don't want to get too far into it on this pirated copy" was the common conclusion. Now with Steam refund policy there is no reason to pirate. I think for a lot of people it was just trying things out. That was my usage at least. Can't think of any one game I actually spent multiple sessions on and completed that was pirated.

 

[FrankWza]

I have 4 friends with high end PCs (4080 and 4090) who only pirate games and play games that are on gamepass. It really sickens me to see people who are willing to splurge on a very high end pc but unwilling to spend money to support the developers.

I hope somehow denuvo finds a way to not affect the performance too much and also manage to find a way to keep games uncrackable for years.

And those are just the ones that will actually admit to it....

 

[chakadave]

I think its fair to say that sales would be higher it's delusional to say otherwise.

No it's delusional to say one way or the other. We can only guess.

It doesn't make sense to claim that the number of downloads stays the same when a game is highly anticipated and well-received. In fact, it's widely documented across various sites that bigger, more hyped releases tend to be pirated more often than smaller ones.

From a moral standpoint, considering all the discussions we've had about studio closures and layoffs, it's fair to say that pirates share some responsibility, especially if they had the means to support the product but chose not to. In my opinion, people who do that are scumbags.

I admit I should have said a percentage. But I'd guess still that even these big games don't have a large ratio of pirates va legit players.

Seeders and leeches are not the same as purchases. That is my point.

 

[Bojanglez]

Denuvo Stops Terrorism

 

[ReyBrujo]

Sounds like they are just justifying their own actions to me. I've never come across that in my life.

True, that behaviour is harder to find in USA or Germany than it's in Spain or Latin America.

 

[Fabieter]

The fact that publishers keep using Denuvo in succeeding games tells me all I need to know.
And anecdotal evidence, but most of the pirates I know go that route to save money they would have otherwise spent on buying games.

I've seen folks who've religiously bought every single Sony first party title, then stopped immediately they modded their console and started running pirated pkg files.

Word of mouth from pirates is meaningless, since that 'word of mouth' is usually gearing others into pirating too.

"Hey, this game is awesome, it costs $60 on Steam but you can get it for free by downloading from pirate sites" is an appealing message to many. I've seen people converted in real time.

100% agreed, most of the people justifng pirating do that one way or another themselves which is fine to each their own but all those excuses are tiring.

 

[Kamina]

Perhaps Denuvo payed for that research

 

[Trilobit]

I don't think pirating was even illegal in my country when I was young. It was as common as eating bread with butter. It wasn't until Hollywood lobbyists started excerting force on the authorities that it changed. Somewhere around the end of the 00's. I don't pirate, but I guess it's very common/legal in many countries and most likely many of those swashbucklers are poor teenagers who wouldn't have the money to buy stuff either way. Not condoning it though.

 

[Clear]

Let's be honest: Making the argument that "piracy is a victimless crime", is awfully convenient when you don't have any stakes in the game,

If it was your money, your job on the line, would you be so easy going about it?

Considering the way people freak when a game disappoints them somehow, (oooh stutters!), and especially those who would use the (ridiculous, in my view) "doesn't respect my time" complaint, excuse me for thinking that there's a truly spectacular double-standard at play.

 

[Ozriel]

And what we can observe is
1- that a LOT of the biggest hits of the last few years were DRM-less releases

Even if you assume 20% lower revenue due to piracy, 80% of a massive number is still a massive number.

Weird point to make.

2- That games released with uncrackable DRM solutions (i.e. Denuvo, save spare cases where someone bothered to crack them early) seem to perform exactly with the expectations of their genre and they don't tend to surge at the top of the sales chart consistently, as they should according to DRM apologists.

Denuvo games that would be big hitters without DRM would still be big hitters with the DRM.

Street Fighter 6 has DRM and it's selling faster than SFV did. Metaphor has DRM and it's Atlus most successful release on PC, going by launch window sales.

 

[chakadave]

Let's be honest: Making the argument that "piracy is a victimless crime", is awfully convenient when you don't have any stakes in the game,

If it was your money, your job on the line, would you be so easy going about it?

Considering the way people freak when a game disappoints them somehow, (oooh stutters!), and especially those who would use the (ridiculous, in my view) "doesn't respect my time" complaint, excuse me for thinking that there's a truly spectacular double-standard at play.

I'm ok with DRM and companies enforcing restrictions on products they sell.

I'm against the government involvement.

It's up to the company to protect their products. Not rely on government to throw people in jail.

Without the government enforcing any sort of punishment would be impossible and companies would probably be more creative and concerned with their customers.

Also IP laws are stupid and only protect first comers. It hurts everything else. Look at Disney. They literally changed laws to stop things from entering public domain.

 

[butane bob]

>New Study

Ah this crap pops up every few years. It's been BS since we saw it in the 80s and nothing's changed.
People who pirate games were never going to buy them in the first place. And if they can't pirate something due to denuvo, or a spinning cardboard wheel with magic codes on it that comes inside the box etc, they'll just pirate something else and play that instead.

 

[kevboard]

there is literally no way to accurately study this.

you would quite literally need to have access to 2 universes where the same game launches on the same platform at the same launch time and launch conditions... and in universe A the game has Denuvonwhile in universe B it has no DRM.

otherwise it's pure speculation if a game would or would not have sold as many copies if it didn't get cracked compared to getting cracked early.

there are so many variables there. maybe a game gets bad word of mouth shortly after release, making people avoid it after an initial sales surge. just 1 example.

 

[Gp1]

Bullshit. People who pirate aren't buying games period.

I usually ends up buying the damn thing if i like it. But that's me.

That's a shocking revelation. I figured that all these companies pay $25k for it for literally no reason.

shockedpikachu

I think you missed a 0 and a multiple on that 25k.

 

[StreetsofBeige]

I always wonder how they come up with those numbers. How do they know how many people played a piratetd copy and how do they know how many of those would have bought the game if no crack was available?

Our survey blah blah blah. I don't see how its possible to measure this stuff.

Next thing they'll be telling us is Outlaws doing so badly was all the pirates fault.

Impossible to calculate.

What can be calculated is an arbitrary number assuming let's say the difference between sales copies and total users with copies are all stolen. But as everyone says nobody knows how many would had actually bought it legit. If every person on Earth downloaded a popular Taylor Swift song so there's 8 billion copies floating around the world, there is no way 8 billion people would had bought it if there was an ironclad DRM system. So coming up with a 20% going rate would require some hardcore methodology I'd like to see.

I wonder what his methodology would be determining the sales effect of games released on GOG which are DRM free and can be shared in a household across different PCs..

 

[diffusionx]

Impossible to calculate.

What can be calculated is an arbitrary number assuming let's say the difference between sales copies and total users with copies are all stolen. But as everyone says nobody knows how many would had actually bought it legit. If every person on Earth downloaded a popular Taylor Swift song so there's 8 billion copies floating around the world, there is no way 8 billion people would had bought it if there was an ironclad DRM system. So coming up with a 20% going rate would require some hardcore methodology I'd like to see.

I wonder what his methodology would be determining the sales effect of games released on GOG which can be shared in a household across different PCs.

I think you can make a reasonable guess. First step, how many people pirate a game when they are cracked at different times? If a game is cracked on day one versus day 30, and how does that compare to how many copies of a game it sells? Both pieces of info can be pretty easily obtained.

Second, how many people who pirated would have bought it? It is likely quite a bit higher for games cracked on day one, since they are interested in the game. This is much tougher to gauge, if it is even 5%, that can be significant for a game that is downloaded hundreds of times on day one.

 

[clarky]

.

Impossible to calculate.

What can be calculated is an arbitrary number assuming let's say the difference between sales copies and total users with copies are all stolen. But as everyone says nobody knows how many would had actually bought it legit. If every person on Earth downloaded a popular Taylor Swift song so there's 8 billion copies floating around the world, there is no way 8 billion people would had bought it if there was an ironclad DRM system.

I wonder what his methodology would be determining the sales effect of games released on GOG which can be shared in a household across different PCs.

I was thinking on this yesterday. i think the only way to have a decent crack at figures would be to look at the digital sales of a title across all PC stores vs PSN & xbox and compare sales over time. Add in markers for when the game is cracked and see if it affects the sales on PC. You obviously need lots of samples but i think that would show you if Denuvo was having an effect and roughly by how much