Square Enix's silence about the PC version of Nier Automata

haha man, some of these responses form the pc haters...still using the 2001 strawman argument of piracy in pc is rampant. and i thought id heard it all. why even bother responding to those comments? remember when ubisoft said the same thing? now they release everything on PC. Bandai namco, EA, dont see piracy as an issue. Maybe in a smaller studio like Platinum games (which hasnt done anything good since revengeance and bayonetta) and the paranoid big and brainless company thats squarenix, but where others have embraced the platform, these guys are still stuck in 2001.
 
Clear said:
Making less revenue per unit sold likely isn't a great incentive for publishers to support the PC platform in future.

Units shifted makes for nice PR, but revenue generated is what counts. Most importantly you can't rely on a volume sales model when the product itself has a somewhat niche appeal in the grand scheme of things.
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Then companies like Squeenix can either handle their PC releases properly or fuck off back to console land (which has been working just fine for 90% of the publishers fyi)
 
Clear said:
Making less revenue per unit sold likely isn't a great incentive for publishers to support the PC platform in future.

Units shifted makes for nice PR, but revenue generated is what counts. Most importantly you can't rely on a volume sales model when the product itself has a somewhat niche appeal in the grand scheme of things.
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If you want to make good revenue per unit sold, you dont stealth release your game later.


Sakujou said:
you pre-ordered something with no release date, what is your problem?
sony has the exclusive rights, square never promised anything except that the game will come to pc. they never said when. so i dont see a problem. its a japanese game, and the first will hit consoles before any other platforms.
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I haven't pre-ordered it though. I said I have 60 bucks and if they want it, well, they should be more talkative. :p
 
Izuna said:
Wait, are you telling me that this might not happen?

:S
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Nah, it's defintely coming.
Clear said:
Making less revenue per unit sold likely isn't a great incentive for publishers to support the PC platform in future.

Units shifted makes for nice PR, but revenue generated is what counts. Most importantly you can't rely on a volume sales model when the product itself has a somewhat niche appeal in the grand scheme of things.
Click to expand...
Bingo.
That's why you release day-and-date (or at the very least very soon after) so that you can charge full-price and use the marketing hype you have going anyway.
Because the longer you delay a port, the less you can charge. Very few are going to buy a game for full-price if it's half a year or a year later, and already cheaper on the console side.
Arc System Works tried this recently with Guilty Gear Xrd Revelator -- guess what, sales reflected that.
 
Ascheroth said:
Arc System Works tried this recently with Guilty Gear Xrd Revelator -- guess what, sales reflected that.
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Yeah, that wasn't a good move on their part. At least now the PC version of Rev. 2 will see a same day release and the consoles once it's released in the west.
 
Ascheroth said:
Nah, it's defintely coming.

Bingo.
That's why you release day-and-date (or at the very least very soon after) so that you can charge full-price and use the marketing hype you have going anyway.
Because the longer you delay a port, the less you can charge. Very few are going to buy a game for full-price if it's half a year or a year later, and already cheaper on the console side.
Arc System Works tried this recently with Guilty Gear Xrd Revelator -- guess what, sales reflected that.
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Exactly, very few games can get away with charging full price with a late port to PC, unless the delay is a few days or ~ 1 week or so. GTA, RDR from Rockstar can definitely do 6+ months to a year delay at full price but not many other games can. When Danganronpa V3 comes to PC potentially 6 months late, they had better not try charging $60 like the PS4 release or they are going to see near 0 sales, and even then delaying the PC release date of a niche game is already going to drastically reduce sales.
 
GhostTrick said:
If you want to make good revenue per unit sold, you dont stealth release your game later.
Click to expand...

Who says they are going to "stealth release" anything? Don't you think it might be wise as to see how the PS4 version performs first before making any concrete plans?

In case you haven't been paying attention the overwhelming majority of pre-release promotion for this game has been centred on the Japanese market.

Hell, even on the rare occasions the PC version has been mentioned it was stressed that a core intention with the PC build was to make the game playable on relatively low-end hardware because that's where the PC market is at apparently in Japan.

In short EVERYTHING has been focused on Japan because Japan is the only place where the original Nier sold decently. The low priority of the PC build is just a consequence of that. The obvious point of comparison here is with Dark Souls, which if you recall got a similarly low-end port to coincide with the launch of the Artorias expansion, not the titles initial release.
 
Clear said:
In short EVERYTHING has been focused on Japan because Japan is the only place where the original Nier sold decently. The low priority of the PC build is just a consequence of that. The obvious point of comparison here is with Dark Souls, which if you recall got a similarly low-end port to coincide with the launch of the Artorias expansion, not the titles initial release.
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That's a false equivalency.

Namco had yet to dip their toes into the PC platform at the Dark Souls release, electing to release a cheap port in order to mitigate risk. When the Souls series turned out to be a huge success on the platform, subsequent ports received more resources.

Japanese titles, including from Square,have had phenomenal success on the platform and will likely see good success with the Nier release. What's happening here is very likely to be a standard Sony marketing deal that we've seen consistently. When the Developer/Publisher outright refuse to discuss the PC version of the game until Sony release, it's due to Sony's involvement monetarily. There's no other rational explanation.
 
jrcbandit said:
Exactly, very few games can get away with charging full price with a late port to PC, unless the delay is a few days or ~ 1 week or so. GTA, RDR from Rockstar can definitely do 6+ months to a year delay at full price but not many other games can. When Danganronpa V3 comes to PC potentially 6 months late, they had better not try charging $60 like the PS4 release or they are going to see near 0 sales, and even then delaying the PC release date of a niche game is already going to drastically reduce sales.
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I wouldn't even say this is exclusive to pc ports.
Like, I can't imagine selling late pc-to-console ports at full-price would fly either, it's just common sense. For example, XCOM2 launched at 40$ for consoles, I think.
About Danganronpa, I don't think it's going to come much later, if late at all, to PC. Console versions are published by NISA and the news where from them I think?, but Spike Chunsoft has been self-publishing at Steam and their bringing things day-and-date now.
 
Grief.exe said:
That's a false equivalency.
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No its not a false equivalency at all, both approaches are about risk mitigation.

Go to 24 minutes in this video for Saito laying out exactly what their tech approach was regarding the PC version.

Does this parity-port sound like an approach that's tailored to the taste of western PC gamers?

This is from last August, and even then they were undecided on whether they were going to do a LOWER SPEC pc build.
 
Grief.exe said:
That's a false equivalency.

Namco had yet to dip their toes into the PC platform at the Dark Souls release, electing to release a cheap port in order to mitigate risk. When the Souls series turned out to be a huge success on the platform, subsequent ports received more resources.

Japanese titles, including from Square,have had phenomenal success on the platform and will likely see good success with the Nier release. What's happening here is very likely to be a standard Sony marketing deal that we've seen consistently. When the Developer/Publisher outright refuse to discuss the PC version of the game until Sony release, it's due to Sony's involvement monetarily. There's no other rational explanation.
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This. If you think otherwise you're foolin yourself.
 
BernardoOne said:
That's more on luck than Denuvo. As an example, Kaldaien stopped trying to make a 60fps mod for Symphonia because of a DRM that operates similarly to Denuvo.
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Symphonia's DRM has long been removed, so that's not the only thing that's stopping a 60fps mod.
Also, according to Kaldaien, Symphonia's DRM was far more intrusive than Denuvo.

Kaldaien said:
VMProtect gets in the way of every conceivable thing you would want to do with a game. It doesn't even have to be modding, it could be as benign as setting driver graphics settings per-game -- which cannot be done when the executable name is random on every launch.
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https://steamcommunity.com/app/429660/discussions/0/152391246766189609/?ctp=21#c152391920351564615

And, in reply to:
What about Denuvo, Kal? Does it allow modding? Will SweetFX, for example, work? What about things like SKSE from Skyrim, would that work?

I don't have any game with Denuvo, Berseria will probably be the first.
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Kaldaien said:
All of that stuff works perfectly fine with Denuvo.

The only thing that Denuvo does do that might make things difficult is prevent you from attaching a debugger during application startup. So if you have a mod project that's not stable to begin with and it's crashing the game at startup fixing that can be a bit of a problem --- that said, a lot of games without Denuvo have this same restriction.

Thoroughly tested mod software like SweetFX, etc. will have no problem working with Denuvo.
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https://steamcommunity.com/app/429660/discussions/0/152391246766189609/?ctp=21#c152391920351577556
 
ezodagrom: depends on the types of modding , but we know for sure that stuff like SKSE or JC2 MP is not possible (unless the devs help as they did with JC3MP)
 
prudislav said:
ezodagrom: depends on the types of modding , but we know for sure that stuff like SKSE or JC2 MP is not possible (unless the devs help as they did with JC3MP)
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While I don't know much about those mods (or the process of modding in general), I guess it's related to what Kaldaien says about what may make things harder is Denuvo preventing a debugger from being attached on startup.

From a quick search, a problem with JC3MP early on was analysing/reverse-engineering the game.
- Has Just Cause 3’s supposedly uncrackable Denuvo anti-tamper solution been an obstacle for the team? What other technical issues have you encountered if any?

- It sure has been in the first weeks. It made analysing and reverse-engineering the game very hard but we have overcome most of those issues.
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https://justcause3mods.com/meet-nanos-jc3mp/

I'm guessing such mods are not impossible for those who know their way around Denuvo, maybe?
 
NieR Automata of course will come to steam. PC version is still in progress. Yosuke Saito asks player to wait just a little bit and enjoy the PS4 for the time being.

They're working on the copy protection system of NieR Automata
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lol, yosuke saito can go fuck off.
 
This all could've been so much easier had they not gone silent for months for apparently no reason lol

Will now wait for reports on the DRM, but the release date turned out more than acceptable in the end
 
So the March 10 release makes this beyond clear that this was a Sony marketing deal preventing discussion of the PC version.

See you guys again in the next thread where the same few posters ask us to explicitly prove this somehow.
 
Grief.exe said:
So the March 10 release makes this beyond clear that this was a Sony marketing deal preventing discussion of the PC version.

See you guys again in the next thread where the same few posters ask us to explicitly prove this somehow.
Click to expand...

Except... they are now discussing it? That must be one shitty "marketing deal". Sony got ripped off.
 
ZVMZ10z.jpg

From this video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e41x8VPQVMw&feature=youtu.be&t=2m2s
 
Vanille said:
Except... they are now discussing it? That must be one shitty "marketing deal". Sony got ripped off.
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Fuck Sony for paying to keep PC users in the dark about the release date of a highly anticipated game. Marketing exclusivity deals are the worst.
 
The thing is they will probably wonder why the PC version has hardly sold.

Surely as a business you want to promote all your platforms to maximise income. Fucking stupid.
 
LePie said:
Around an hour ago SE changed it and uploaded the no-PC-release-date-version of the trailer instead (changing "27_Nier_Battletrailer_ENG_ESRB_Multi_r01.mp4" into "9_Nier_Battletrailer_ENG_ESRB_Sony_r01.mp4").
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Well those file names sure throw Sony under the bus.....
 
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