Kotaku Counterpoint,

You are again referring to other issue unrelated to DRM and piracy. DLC/micro-transactions are separate issues.

Your argument is getting very weak now. Your basically saying that publishers are stupid which is possible but completely unrelated to is DRM even effective or helpful.

I’ve replied to your a couple times with actual official sales data and the DRM crack for the entire console did not hurt sales.

When did I claim pirates are dumb again. I said they are cheap and their price sensitivity is all the way towards the want it for free range.

Hardware sales are an easy figure to show. Total market software sales requires more research and yet you cherry pick the facts and don’t provide backup so I’ll do the research you failed to do while referring without referencing remarks without actual data.

Have you heard of something called the market hand. Freenium games exist in their own space just the same as games like Witcher 3 sell very well too. Some gamers play mobile F2P only while some do both, it varies and it isn’t like DRM is helping anything or moving the market. People play games because they are fun not…

You know this thing about marketing it doesn’t have to be based on anything real they just claim it delays piracy and helps a lot but if you think about it consoles have years of DRM protection that prevents piracy but they too get cracked eventually yet their ecosystems do not tank as a result because fans and…

Your logic fails again as RE6 was not well received and likely lost a lot of goodwill from fans. And if you know anything about trust and goodwill it is easy to burn and hard to gain.

Basically if your going to have your game leak onto pirate sites you probably don’t want it to be a buggy mess as your conversion rate into possible future paying fan is much lower and you could actually generate negative press/word of mouth which would be bad.

If your game isn’t good DRM or not it isn’t going to sell well. Refund policies are more of a threat to bad games than pirates as upset customers are far more likely to refund a game since they actually paid money for it.

Doubtful piracy has been around since the start of the game industry with floppy disks and primitive DRM which didn’t work.

I have UPlay games with mods that bypass and remove Uplay because they mod too much content to allow for even any type of online play. Legit games can be cracked too sure it is against license terms but if you can play it you can crack it. Unless the computer is entirely hosted in the cloud it is physically impossible…

Not really Denuvo is a type of DRM technology and all in all it doesn’t work very well if not backed up by always online software. Fundamentally the only thing that can be done to make it impossible to crack is not to make single player games.

Your argument is still flawed in that you assume the free group has the money to spend. Even if they do you also assume that they would bother buying the game when it isn’t free.

Technically its the consumer’s choice to shop at GameStop. I think it is pretty much common knowledge they like to sell used games and if your a real fan then you would also know about the vote with your wallet and buy new or even pre-order games.

This mindset would be pretty bad for youtube and twitch as people are “enjoying” the game without paying the developer. Nintendo gets quite a bit of flak for being the worst in terms of mutually beneficial dealings with streamers and youtube channels.

Pirates want games for free temporary protection at full price would convert basically none especially with evil DRM slapped on the label.

Games are a product and even when you get a game for “free” the developer would have had to make a deal with say Nvidia or AMD to package their game for “free”. Individuals trading individual keys on what amounts to a gray market is ok.

Updates are probably possible because the alpha game engine code unprotected it makes reverse engineering the underlying code trivial. Which means in future patches the DRM protection is much weaker as the attacker already knows 90+% of the engine code especially the most likely area’s the DRM would be applied to.