Get rid of DRM

[Sarxis]

Just do it. Your competitor GoG and others are going to take more and more of the market share at this point.

"Release the prisoners!"

[Snapjak]

Origin. Doin fine with their DRM.
Battle.net. Doin fine with their DRM.
Uplay. Doin fine with their DRM.
GoG. Only one without DRM on everything sold.
Humble. Whoops they sell lots of Steam/Origin/Uplay ony stuff.

Nah, DRM ain't goin away.

[SpunkyJones]

Why? What’s wrong with a bit of DRM?

[Chronos Notashi]

Originally posted by SpunkyJones:

Why? What’s wrong with a bit of DRM?

If Sonic Mania, Rime, and other games with Denuvo say anything, the problem is that some forms of DRM tend to do more harm to legitimate, honest customers (i.e. doing hundreds or thousands of callbacks during certain loading times which often, unironically, slow down games on all but the most powerful hardware, and can possibly slow down even THAT) than harm towards the hacking/pirating they're meant to keep out (ex: it took crackers/hackers no more than a week to bypass Sonic Mania's DRM, and cracking Rime* and Resident Evil VII took less). Not to mention that it's often hit-or-miss as to whether a developer will care enough to frequently update their DRM protection, or just leave it as is and hope that simply having it will dissuade people from hacking their games (and we ALL know how well THAT works out).

*Funny thing about Rime: the devs of the game weren't initially convinced that Denuvo was the cause of the game's loading issues, but promised that they would remove Denuvo if it was cracked. Not only did the crackers take the challenge head on, but they also revealed that Denuvo was, in fact, the reason why the game's loading was so slow. Iirc, the dev's followed through on their promise.

[sfnhltb]

Originally posted by King of Pain:

Humans are inherently subservient.

There was a time that games had little to no DRM at all. Then it was added and people protested, but obviously corporations won because more people supported it.

But look at the first response you got. People defend it and want to be ruled by their corporate masters.

By the way, GOG is not the only one selling DRM free games. Humble and GamersGate also sell DRM free games among others...

And so does Steam. It is up to the publishers/developers if they want to add DRM to their products sold here (either 3rd party or steamworks), and plenty choose not to, at least 1500 according to the follow list:

http://steam.wikia.com/wiki/List_of_DRM-free_games

[ONe_mOMENT]

Originally posted by sfnhltb:

And so does Steam. It is up to the publishers/developers if they want to add DRM to their products sold here (either 3rd party or steamworks), and plenty choose not to, at least 1500 according to the follow list:

http://steam.wikia.com/wiki/List_of_DRM-free_games

I would call bs on the validity of that list. It lists games that 'run' without steam. Though it "running" and being functional are totally different.

Good example being if you prevent steam from running, the game wont save for a number of them. So yeah it will run but... You cant do anything?

Guess im nit picking but if a game isnt fully fuctional without steam, then i dont think it should be included on that list, as steams absence is restricting functionally. While not DRM, its still preventing you from using the game without it.

(I have no issue with DRM personally. Ill use whatever if it has a game i want. But this list just seems like someone was offended by another person saying "But Steam is DRM" and went into defence mode to prove them wrong.)

[Washell]

Originally posted by Sarxis:

Just do it. Your competitor GoG and others are going to take more and more of the market share at this point.

"Release the prisoners!"

So start shopping there! They don't have the games you want to buy? Now, why oh why would that be...

Shareholders/publishers don't want to sent out multi-million dollar investments without protection. So they don't, although they're perfectly willing to release it on GOG without DRM months to years later to finally sell to the no-DRM die-hards.

[Aspiring Champion]

GOG stands for Grandpa's Old Games, doesn't it? Most were released before DRM was even an acronym.

[SpunkyJones]

Originally posted by King of Pain:

Humans are inherently subservient.

There was a time that games had little to no DRM at all. Then it was added and people protested, but obviously corporations won because more people supported it.

But look at the first response you got. People defend it and want to be ruled by their corporate masters.

By the way, GOG is not the only one selling DRM free games. Humble and GamersGate also sell DRM free games among others...

Humans are inherently cheap.

I work at a company that sells software that has DRM type restrictions, cause guess what? Otherwise our software would be pirated left and right, we wouldn’t receive a single penny from most customers, and I, among thousands of others, wouldn’t get paid.

So ya, I don’t hsve a huge issue with DRM if it’s not intrusive to my gaming experience.

[Spawn of Totoro]

To me, GOG also has DRM. DRM means no restrictions, yet some multiplayer games require a GOG account and GOG Galaxy to even have LAN game access. 8-Bit Armies for example.

GOG is likely not to get most game (especialy AAA games) on in their store until long after they have been out elsewhere, so it balances out as well.

Finaly, it isn't up to Steam/Valve to removed the DRM. Developers can, and have, released games with no DRM on Steam, so it can be done if they want to.

https://pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/The_Big_List_of_DRM-Free_Games_on_Steam

[RagingRumskullian]

I think if we banned DRM on a Steam, we’d loose so many big games that Valve would actually loose more money than if they keep DRM allowed.

[Start_Running]

Originally posted by Snapjak:

Origin. Doin fine with their DRM.
Battle.net. Doin fine with their DRM.
Uplay. Doin fine with their DRM.
GoG. Only one without DRM on everything sold.
Humble. Whoops they sell lots of Steam/Origin/Uplay ony stuff.

Nah, DRM ain't goin away.

Humble sometimes has the DRM free copies but yeah has anyone else noticed that humble seems to not feature GoG based bundles much. Weird.

Originally posted by Aspiring Champion:

GOG stands for Grandpa's Old Games, doesn't it? Most were released before DRM was even an acronym.

DRM and copy protection has been around since the 1970's they just had various forms. One of the early ones was the disks themselves. They would use some proprietary formating on floppy disks to make them hold just a little more than the standard 1.44. Whether in installing or playing the game expected the disk to have a certain size and formatting. if that wasn't there, No go.

Then there were the codewheels and manuals. COpying a cartidge was pretty much a lost cause. When CD's came around the media itself was the drm because at the time even the biggest HDD's were only as big or a little bigger than the CD's. Even if you could copy all the files to your HDD it would mean giving up a good chunk of it , especially since there was no real way to burn CDs.

It wasn't untl the advent of CD Burners in the consumer market that you found the rise of things like CD-KEys and then the software on disc drm like you see with securom and such. NOw encryptionbased DRM is becoming a thing.

It's been a steady cat and mouse game and the devs always have the nuclear option.

[Aliquis Freedom & Ethnopluralism]

Early CD games was large due to lots of uncompressed audio tracks and video content in cut scenes and such.

The actual executables and textures and such not necessarily.

(Quake, C&C)

[Start_Running]

Originally posted by Aliquis Freedom & Ethnopluralism:

Early CD games was large due to lots of uncompressed audio tracks and video content in cut scenes and such.

The actual executables and textures and such not necessarily.

(Quake, C&C)

And do you think they didn't have the ability to compress those things?
Also the simple thing was that even if you copied the executeables in more than a few cases those executeables would still go looking for those audio and vid files on the cde.


The point is. If thieves did not exist, neither would locks..

[Satoru]

Originally posted by ONe_mOMENT:

Originally posted by sfnhltb:

And so does Steam. It is up to the publishers/developers if they want to add DRM to their products sold here (either 3rd party or steamworks), and plenty choose not to, at least 1500 according to the follow list:

http://steam.wikia.com/wiki/List_of_DRM-free_games

I would call bs on the validity of that list. It lists games that 'run' without steam. Though it "running" and being functional are totally different.

Well then let me educate you

https://store.steampowered.com/app/243950/Divinity_Dragon_Commander/

This is a game on steam. It has

1) Steam multiplayer
2) Steam match making
3) Steam Cloud
4) Steam achievements
5) Steam leaderboards
6) Steam trading cards

The game is 100% DRM Free

Yes it is

If the game doesn't detect steam, then it drops out all the steam features. Mulitplayer no longer uses steam and instead users direct IP options so users can join other servers directly.

The game is 100% functional without steam.

There is nothing on steam that inherently makes a game require Steamworks

There is nothing on steam that inherently makes it require steam

Steam does not force it

A developer must CHOOSE to do this

[Start_Running]

Originally posted by Satoru:

A developer must CHOOSE to do this

And many do choose to.