Piracy and sales

Mynight said:
You'd probably know more than me on this but are there different levels of service offered by Denuvo?

Seems it's been bypassed on some games but not older ones. Just wondering if it's different protection levels/poor coding or just more interest in cracking certain games :confused:.
Click to expand...

I'm not that clear on the technicalities of how Denuvo works....but I understand it's different on different titles. No idea on the licensing costs, but clearly the economics work out or people wouldn't be using it.
 
I don't think Denuvo is a good thing as now people are offering paid activation's for Denuvo protected games and thus profiting from piracy, where as before with the traditional cracked .exe the developers were still losing money but people were not really profiting from it as it was freely available (some site may have made ad revenue though).
 
Denuvo is a good thing. Rise Of The Tomb Raider PC sold almost 1M copies so far & counting I doubt it would have sold anywhere near as many if it were not protected by Denuvo. In a few weeks it gets the last major update & a load of DLC which again would never have made its way to PC without strong sales (PC has outsold XB1 by a long way!).

Doom PC sold just over 1M copies now and again without Denuvo I doubt it would have been as popular.

So many game key sites around now selling for 25-30% less @ launch than RRP & way cheaper than Steam so no real arguments can be made for Piracy as the Steam refund policy means you can get your money back if uncertain!
 
spudbynight said:
Piracy isn't stealing. I'm not passing any judgement on its ethical status, but it isn't stealing.
Click to expand...

I think if I made a game and was selling it for £10 a go and £5 of that money went to me as my earnings as my job and some one downloaded that game for free from somewhere it would feel like someone is stealing £5 from me.

One issue is value these days, take FH3 which is getting superb reviews, many feel it is too expensive at £50 +. I am sure people would pirate this if available only due to the cost and the perceived value.

The thing is where else can you get something worth £30 for nothing by downloading it. I bet if we could do the same with Alcohol or food we would be and it would be just to see if we liked the taste of it or because it is too expensive to buy...

It is so we can justify it to ourselves, it's not really that bad, wrong and so on.. I worked in retail as a manager for over 20 years and we catch 1000's of kids stealing make up as they can't afford it so it's not new. People want what they can't afford and will at times do what is needed to get it.
 
Last edited:
mid_gen said:
You can't stop people ever pirating your game, but what you can do with Denuvo is stop them pirating it in the first 30 days or so which is when you make most of your full-price sales. You can come up with a lot of cases where someone wouldn't have bought it, but the fact remains that there are a lot of people that will buy a Denuvo protected game at full price that they wouldn't have bought if they could pirate it.

As long as the economics of that (cost of Denuvo vs estimated sales lost to piracy) makes sense, developers are going to do it.
Click to expand...

Fair enough - but the trade-off is a bunch of ticked-off consumers who will think twice before purchasing...not sure if that has ever been quantified in terms of how many lost sales it means but personally if I hear about intrusive DRM mechanisms I will think twice, and would really need to WANT the game to consider a month 1 purchase.

Also bear in mind the "long tail" model that applies to digital especially, which I believe is where the lion's share of revenue is for both developer/distribution platforms for online digital: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_tail
 
AWPC said:
Denuvo is a good thing. Rise Of The Tomb Raider PC sold almost 1M copies so far & counting I doubt it would have sold anywhere near as many if it were not protected by Denuvo. In a few weeks it gets the last major update & a load of DLC which again would never have made its way to PC without strong sales (PC has outsold XB1 by a long way!).

Doom PC sold just over 1M copies now and again without Denuvo I doubt it would have been as popular.

So many game key sites around now selling for 25-30% less @ launch than RRP & way cheaper than Steam so no real arguments can be made for Piracy as the Steam refund policy means you can get your money back if uncertain!
Click to expand...

I disagree, ROTTR and DOOM are both excellent games and would have sold on their own merits, just like The Witcher 3 did which had no copy protection at all.

And third party key seller's actually do harm the industry.
 
The Long Tail applies more and less depending on the type of game. AAA games shift the most revenue in the first 30 days when people are paying full price. There's obviously a significant amount pulled in later on through sales and stuff, but really the success of a AAA title will be measured on it's headline sales.

Indie games are a different matter, they don't have the budget for big launch day, their biggest sales volumes are usually when they've managed to get picked up by a youtuber or streamer.

As for intrusive DRM, I can't say that these days I've noticed it at all. All the main DRM platforms are pretty mature now.
 
Reemul said:
I think if I made a game and was selling it for £10 a go and £5 of that money went to me as my earnings as my job and some one downloaded that game for free from somewhere it would feel like someone is stealing £5 from me.
Click to expand...

Feelings don't have much of an impact on the law. As far as the law is concerned piracy isn't theft. If Person X stole your car you would be aware of it as you would no longer have your car. If Person X copied the game you worked on, you would have no awareness of it. You would still have everything you had prior to them copying it. If they had no intention of buying the game you haven't in that scenario even been deprived of the £5.

Reemul said:
It is so we can justify it to ourselves, it's not really that bad, wrong and so on.. I worked in retail as a manager for over 20 years and we catch 1000's of kids stealing make up as they can't afford it so it's not new. People want what they can't afford and will at times do what is needed to get it.
Click to expand...

That's a bad analogy, imagine if those kids were going into the shop and making a perfect copy of the makeup on sale. When they left, the shop still had the exact same level of stock and were unaware the kids had even been in.

This is however a topic that has been discussed to death on here and it wasn't the reason I started the thread.

MissChief said:
Except several Denuvo games have now been cracked? Rise of the Tomb Raider being the first a couple of months ago AFAIK.
Click to expand...

I found a handy reddit post with a status of which Denuvo games have now been "hacked"

Yes, it would appear that some of them have now some form of bypass. However this is many months after release and the majority of them remain unavailable.

I went to a famous bittorrent site and looked at the torrents for PC games. There is hardly anything recent and AAA available. It would appear that Denuvo has had pretty substantial success.

Legal cases against pirates have long tried to equate every download as a lost sale. I'm very interested to know if the sales of AAA games with Denuvo have had any sort of rise compared to sales of AAA games pre Denuvo.
 
Last edited:
I will always think piracy is wrong, regardless of how people romanticize the issue or try to justify it. I think you should be a responsible consumer more then anything else, not a tight fisted git who thinks the world owes them everything ;)

But the talk around piracy definitely needs to change. It's definitely not such a black and white issue in terms of missed sales and the like and the publishers need to try and see it all in a different light.
 
DrToffnar said:
I will always think piracy is wrong, regardless of how people romanticize the issue or try to justify it. I think you should be a responsible consumer more then anything else, not a tight fisted git who thinks the world owes them everything ;)
Click to expand...

I find it funny that some PC gamers spend ££££ on their computers and then want all their games for nothing or 5p in a Steam sale. :p

I'm the other way - I buy everything I see (almost) in the Steam sale. It's cost me and arm and a leg. So much that I don't have any money left to buy a PC to play the games on!
 
AWPC said:
Denuvo is a good thing. Rise Of The Tomb Raider PC sold almost 1M copies so far & counting I doubt it would have sold anywhere near as many if it were not protected by Denuvo. In a few weeks it gets the last major update & a load of DLC which again would never have made its way to PC without strong sales (PC has outsold XB1 by a long way!).
Click to expand...

I'd love to see a comparison with the sales for Tomb Raider
 
chickadee said:
I honestly don't get the whole piracy = stealing argument. Its like walking into Tesco and magically copying a loaf of bread and it appears in your hand leaving the original laying where it was. Nothing was touched, damaged or stolen.....
Click to expand...

Yeah lets ignore that this loaf of bread costs potentially tens of millions to get made and puts food to the table of thousands of families. If that is not stealing then I dont know what it is.
 
NZXT30 said:
Yeah lets ignore that this loaf of bread costs potentially tens of millions to get made and puts food to the table of thousands of families. If that is not stealing then I dont know what it is.
Click to expand...

you are missing the point that we are dealing with digital media that gets copied and shared at no extra cost to the company whose IP it is..
 
Denuvo may be somewhat effective for high budget AAA games but it was a waste of money for Playdead, the developer of Inside. The game was cracked in 2 weeks after release and its sales are worse than Limbo's despite the latter having no protection.
 
pooley said:
you are missing the point that we are dealing with digital media that gets copied and shared at no extra cost to the company whose IP it is..
Click to expand...

Yes, but at the far reaches of this argument lies a position where one copy, if that, actually gets bought, and is then cracked and shared with millions of others.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom