This becomes incredibly interesting in terms of e.g. Denuvo. This anti-piracy middleware has been shown to make games unplayable, and this EU law seems to support removing it.
It's understandable from a publishers perspective.
Even if it only lasts a month before being cracked, it allows the publisher to capture that first month of sales without competition from TPB. That first month is typically the most important time in a game sales lifecycle.
Counter to that, it should be a policy to remove Denuvo 90days post launch, as it does, in fact, cause performance issues and such.
Ah yes, the publisher's perspective. They can't deal with the fact it's the 21st century and copyright makes no sense, so they offer an inferior version of the product with performance issues, dependency on company servers they'll certainly turn off at some point, etc.
Nothing like humiliating your loyal consumers by making them pay for a game that's inferior to what pirates get for free.
Actually copyright and all IP legislation is ever more important for businesses as ever more of the wealth companies have is in IP. But this is legally delicate time, companies don't want to squeeze so hard it raises public ire, but sure as anything they don't want to let go of a drop of IP 'leverage' they don't have to.
Right. It's all about the companies, isn't it? It's all about their leverage, their power, their profits, their god given right to eternal rent seeking.
They forget that copyright is part of a social contract. In its original form, it was something like this:
> we'll pretend your work is scarce so that you can make money
> after a while, it will enter the public domain
Copyright only works because we allow it. We're all pretending this stuff can't be copied and distributed infinitely and at zero cost. We're the ones doing them a favor. We were duped. They assured us that eventually the works would become public property. All of it will one day belong to all of us. That was a lie.
Of course they don't want to let go of their imaginary property. They want their copyrights to last forever so they can extract their rent out of their state granted monopoly for all eternity. So they lobby the governments and systematically rob us of our public domain rights.
So I will no longer pretend this stuff is scarce. It's not. It's data, nothing but a huge number stored on a hard disk. Not a single person on this earth owns that number. It's trivial to copy and distribute it. Everyone needs to know this truth. We need technology that makes it painfully obvious and easy for everyone. Technology that proves it by subverting the business models of these rent seekers. Services like Sci-Hub.
The whole notion of companies hoarding intellectual property is absurd. Intellectual property was never meant to give leverage to companies, it was meant to give them an incentive to create new products and works. Intellectual property expires. At least it would expire if the system worked properly instead of being co-opted by corporations with deep pockets and lots of lobbyists.
If these companies are hoarding wealth in the form of IP, the only just outcome is the one where they lose it all.
> They forget that copyright is part of a social contract. In its original form, it was something like this:
>> we'll pretend your work is scarce so that you can make money
>> after a while, it will enter the public domain
That is not even close to the original form of copyright. In its original form, copyright was a monopoly held by the crown (and granted to printers) for the purpose of censoring works the crown didn't want published.
The people that pirate games are not the one that would have bought it day one. It's always the same wrong reasoning about piracy, they think that if one person pirates the game the same person would have gone and bought it. It's not, someone that wants to play the game but not pay for it doesn't care about waiting a month (but sometime even just a couple of days) to find the crack online.
DRM was proved to not work, and only impact on people that buy the media with restrictions such as reduced performance, making the game size bigger, requiring an internet connection even for playing offline, having to activate again the game when they change hardware or reinstall the operating system, have even DRM that are basically malware and reduce the stability of the whole operating system and reduce its performance by installing some low level components that are active even when you are not playing the game, and so on.
In my opinion if games are all DRM-free people would still buy them, game studios would still make money, and users will be more happy (and possibly buy more games).
> The people that pirate games are not the one that would have bought it day one
There is also a nonzero number of people who would buy a game if piracy was not an option, or if there was significant enough friction in pirating it.
Denuvo and other DRM of varying levels do work in their intended function, for some period of time. Sometimes it's cracked before release, and sometimes it takes a while, depending on interest in the game, the current status of cracking groups and all sorts of other things.
So the calculation is pretty simple: Will the sales gained from the few pirates who would buy if they can't pirate, be higher than the sales lost due to the impact of a bad DRM implementation and/or the "stink" of it?
Publishers think that's a gamble worth taking every time, because 1) they assume their devs will get the DRM implementation right, or right enough 2) gamers don't really vote with their wallets, and/or the ~15% performance loss of a bad DRM implementation doesn't really eschew or discourage the supermajority of buyers. The market simply doesn't care.
There's also the PR and sales bump from the later "Denuvo has been removed!" patch (and it gets the game back in the news, after all) but I'm going to assume that it's negligible for this discussion.
In most cases/industries you'd assume the professionals would be right, but we're talking about the games industry - legendary for its shortsightedness and general idiocy - far too many obviously bad ideas get way too much money behind them. Very similar to the movie industry in that regard
And oh look at the one other industry still shooting itself in the foot with regards to piracy. Streaming is changing that for movies - you can see why so many are going for games streaming style services - just nobody has figured out the model
There's simply a gap between the games and media one wants to play and the games and media one wants to buy. Whatever the reasons are (I'm not sure I'll like it, DRM or bugs might make the game unplayable, I'm unwilling to pay full price to have a look, I don't want to commit to a subscription, I'm an irresponsible freeloader...) piracy fills the gap in a way that is impossible with material goods, and it will always be so. There's no way out, and DRM just erodes goodwill. For example, I stopped buying Sony audio CDs, even from artists I like, after the rootkit scandal of many years ago.
It's a little more complicated than this. Sometimes media (or games) are easier or a combination of easier & cheaper to pirate/workaround drm than obtain legally. E.g. Netflix notoriously has location restrictions on where their licensing applies, and people use vpns to work around these. They literally can't pay Netflix more money to e.g. watch the US catalog from Australia. Or see also how much game of thrones was pirated, especially before hbo had a standalone streaming service. For a while you could get it only as a cable add on, so some cord cutters turned to piracy.
When content is available easily and at a reasonable cost, it's often a better experience to buy than pirate. Sure, there are some people who will still pirate everything but there's a lot in the middle who are willing to pay something.
People who are "willing to pay something" typically have an entertainment budget and are willing to spend that money on high-priority beneficiaries (e.g. struggling publishers and starving indie artists that they'd like to see more work from, works so great that they inspire gratitude, live entertainment that cannot be pirated, gifts for someone else).
Choices of entertainment to pay for diverge from choices of entertainment to consume, and piracy accommodates the difference.
Yes, but if someone is set on pirating the game, they'll just wait until its cracked in a month before playing it. So really, publishers aren't going to gain any sales compared to not including DRM to begin with. If they do it's going to be a tiny, tiny fraction.
A closely related topic is "the tail of game sales." You will probably find game developers talking about it if you search for that. Honestly, though, the (frankly ridiculous) propensity for pre-order success radically upsets this argument.
