It will always be about what value do you gain from DRM? With Steam, you could download any game from any PC at any time to play. So what will Sony and Microsoft or publishers give us in exchange for any new DRM schemes?
Entitled gamers, corrupt press and greedy publishers
- Thread starter patsu
- Start date
It will always be about what value do you gain from DRM? With Steam, you could download any game from any PC at any time to play. So what will Sony and Microsoft or publishers give us in exchange for any new DRM schemes?
Silent_Buddha
Legend
There are. But many of the remaining AAA PC exclusive devs will be moving onto consoles with the next gen due to the similarity in development. At that point there's not a whole lot of reason to remain exlusive to any one platform unless the platform holder owns the development house.
As to outselling a console version. Well, Diablo 3 being PC only basically outsold anything not named COD. It sold 3.5 million in the first 24 hours and 6.5 million in the first week. That's only 1 platform compared to 3 for COD. I'd be willing to bet it outsold COD for any given platform by a large number.
And that is even with tons of people in internet forums claiming they'll never buy it because Blizzard sold out by putting in the Auction House. I'm willing to bet they ended up buying it once they figured out they couldn't get a good working pirated version.
If you throw in MMO's. Most MMO's will sell over 1-2 million in the first month even if the MMO ends up failing. Again, probably mostly due to the impossibility to pirating them at launch. Then again development budgets for AAA MMOs are huge.
I'd be willing to bet that if piracy didn't exist (on console or PC), that titles on PC would outsell both consoles by a quite large margin.
Regards,
SB
Since the company I work for uses such online DRM I would say it is acceptable. But this is a negative aspect of the product for me as a consumer.
So let's say your main productivity software (development enviro if you're a programmer, Powerpoint if your a businessperson) and OS refused to work without an internet connection to provide always-online DRM. This is okay to you?
D
Deleted member 13524
Guest
I don't think Diablo 3 should be used as a sales flagship that somehow proves that always-on DRM works great for profit.
Yes, it sold 10 millions. But how many millions we're tricked into buying a game they couldn't play at all for two weeks? How many millions were put off by the always-on connection? How many millions we're put off by the RMHA? Differences in gameplay (mainly auto-level ups) from earlier Diablo games?
If a Diablo 4 came out in 2013 with the same structure and gameplay DNA as Diablo 3, how much would it sell?
Wii didn't prove innovative controls are the absolute recipe for a successful console. WoW didn't prove all MMOs are cash cows.
No single example is absolute for future analysis.
Yes, it sold 10 millions. But how many millions we're tricked into buying a game they couldn't play at all for two weeks? How many millions were put off by the always-on connection? How many millions we're put off by the RMHA? Differences in gameplay (mainly auto-level ups) from earlier Diablo games?
If a Diablo 4 came out in 2013 with the same structure and gameplay DNA as Diablo 3, how much would it sell?
Wii didn't prove innovative controls are the absolute recipe for a successful console. WoW didn't prove all MMOs are cash cows.
No single example is absolute for future analysis.
Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.
Legend
And you do that by adding together PS3/Xbox/Wii platforms? Last time I saw some figures a couple of years back, PC profit was equal to or above individual console platforms for a couple of the publishers, and that wasn't including the recent boom in digital downloads.
I've never understood how people claim the PC is a dying platform, but claim it by comparing it to the sales of three other platforms combined.
I think we have been around this question a few times, but maybe we lack some more detailed answers.
DRM is not an issue when it doesn't come in the way of me and the product i bought, so for example WMA DRM is crap because it doesn't play on all my devices like MP3 files do.
Games on a Media that i can not copy but that i can play like i please without any other special requirment except having the actual disc is perfectly fine, i don't expect nor do i require the ability to make a backup of my games or movies. In the movies case i may feel different if it actually was impossible
Online activation is not acceptable but in most cases i choose to live with it because there is no choice, and most are bought with Steam. And i feel pretty certain that i can find cracks in case steam dies (guessing here).
ODRM is not an issue if it's a game that only play online like WOW.
O-DRM in any other case is a 99.99% no sale for me, no money leaving my pocket and ido try to avoid other titles from the same publisher, even if they don't have ODRM.
I probably would not buy that product. But other people make different purchasing decisions than I would probably do.
Please do not lie. D3 was not unplayable for two weeks.
Often you have no choice. Say your company has 15 years of Inventor data or standardized on VisualStudio or you collaborate with multiple other people on documents with embedded graphics and they're all on Office...or Windows is the defacto standard.
It's one thing to say you'd go Linux/opensource and another entirely to do it successfully in a collaborative world.
I'll re-iterate my position, if the limitations are clear, and I can factor it into my purchase decision I'm fine with it. That doesn't mean I wouldn't rather it behaved differently, but there it is.
On the work tools front I work from home and there is F-All I can do without being VPN'd in to the office so always online is just not an issue at least for me. I do travel a lot for work, but I can't practically do any work on a plane anyway, it's either confidential, or I need access to hardware I just can't carry with me.
You work for Sony. You're stationed in Redmond, home of Microsoft. You work from home, a penthouse apartment overlooking the campus...you're a spy! Industrial espionage on a grand scale. How thrilling. Now we know who informed Sony about MS's 8 GB plans and made Sony raise their game.
You work for Sony. You're stationed in Redmond, home of Microsoft. You work from home, a penthouse apartment overlooking the campus...you're a spy! Industrial espionage on a grand scale. How thrilling. Now we know who informed Sony about MS's 8 GB plans and made Sony raise their game.
hehehe
Actually one of my personal rules is I never ask friends for information that's under NDA, if they want to volunteer it fine, but I got almost all of my Durango information 3rd hand.
And FWIW I had nothing to do with the 8GB...
"My" companies customer have invested shitloads in our products and it would cost them even more to switch to a competitor. Companies and people dig themselves into holes. Sometimes they're even nice holes, like the one Bilbo Baggins lives in
"My" companies customer have invested shitloads in our products and it would cost them even more to switch to a competitor. Companies and people dig themselves into holes. Sometimes they're even nice holes, like the one Bilbo Baggins lives in
right...so is this stuff acceptable?
I give a more real-world example. My company makes industrial controls based on embedded controllers, SCADA systems, sensors, analyzers, etc.
If we went to always-online DRM we'd force 50%+ of our customers to connect systems they firewall from the internet (or don't even physcally connect for security fears) and we'd cost them tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars per hour whenever their internet went out owing to lost production. Clearly this would be a really bad and unacceptable situation for always-online DRM.
The grey area becomes more consumer-related items like productivity. If you couldn't work on documents without an internet connection and you were on a business trip to one of the many places where there is no internet...well you're screwed. Want to give that snazzy presentation at a customer site but they don't have wifi or even internet? So it would seem that productivity software shouldn't use always-online DRM, right? Ditto for operating systems.
So why do so many see it as reasonable to have this restriction placed on non-online play modes of games that already have such play modes? It might be a game, but it's still software (paid for) with modes that don't require internet being forced to use it constantly.
In fact, I'd go a step further. There may be games that have no play mode without online, but the DRM portion should still be only periodic phone-home with grace periods (imagine you have to phone home on your CAD software in the middle of a big project and will lose everything because you don't have internet at that moment).
D
Deleted member 13524
Guest
I'm so sorry for being inaccurate.
Actually, some people had persistent connection issues (which means unplayable in always-on games) over 3 weeks after release:
http://eu.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/4064636470?page=1469
We use a Softimage version that ended up not being supported when autodesk bought it, at some point they simply shutdown the activation servers, leaving us stranded on a cold beach with an expensive piece of software that we would have to upgrade to a new version (without any real advantage for us).
Lucky for us we still have the 10gbit netcard that it's activated with and we could transfer the license to a new install because of that.
I have zero faith in anything that requires a activation from a server to work, grace period or not.
Thing is, there's actually a huge difference between games and productivity software. The former can be "used up" and effectively thrown away (you've beaten the game), the latter is needed continuously for work. Plus, expensive software for businesses just ends up being passed down to the end consumer in one way or another, but games ARE the end product.
tl;dr: Businesses can tolerate higher "costs" than people can because they can pass the buck to someone else.
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