Eggyhead

Literally owning someone’s soul.

I just keep an iPad set up next to me when playing a game. I can look up guides, and use it to do online chat as well.

Okay just ignore the personal anecdote on how a little bit of piracy actually helped create a long-time paying customer of multiple franchises, I guess.

(gollumnotlistening.gif)

But furthermore…

When Denuvo survives for at least 12 weeks, piracy leads to nearly zero total revenue loss on average. The results suggest that Denuvo does protect legitimate sales to an estimated mean of 15 percent of total revenue and median of 20 percent, but there is little justification to employ Denuvo long-term (i.e. for more than three months), especially given that Denuvo can have negative technical side effects and is generally disliked by users.

The study itself, linked in the article, states that Denuvo is effective at protecting sales for only about 12 weeks, then it does more long-term harm than good.

If that’s the case, I wonder how much Denuvo suppresses sales of a game over its lifetime once those 12 weeks are over?

My first Final Fantasy game was a rom a friend all but insisted I play. Before that the idea of random encounters and turned-based combat were a huge turnoff to me, and I had no interest in buying it. Since then I’ve purchased a copy of nearly every game in the series, some more than once for different platforms. Same story for the Trails games and some others.

That’s a lot of money those companies would never had received if it weren’t for just a little bit of piracy to make a fan out of someone.

Typically the people I know who pirate because they want to play without paying are doing so because they don’t have the money. As mentioned countless times before, they would not have bought the game otherwise because they probably couldn’t afford it in the first place. Denuvo may (or may not, I don’t actually know) block pirates, but it doesn’t ensure the publisher is making any more money. It does however ensure that regular paying folks get a worse product. I think people have the right to be upset about that. They could just use a different DRM.

Advertisers love this one trick.

Sony is accused of abusing its dominant market position by forcing digital game and add-on purchases exclusively through the PlayStation Store, keeping prices artificially higher than physical alternatives.

Fair enough. If you buy a game physically from a store, you still have to buy its DLC and expansions directly from the PS Store, and it can’t be priced competitively.

🫡

Then they tell publishers and game developers that more players finish their games on Microsoft’s platform than any others!

No matter where I sign up, the server eventually shuts down and I have to migrate all my subscriptions and lose any posts I’ve contributed.

Look out, lemmy.world. I’m on this one now.