Beautiful story from a sad Ubi story:

edited in Questions and Answers
"I have no activation Code for Rocksmith. I ordered the game for my PC, I booked my wife a ticket for a week in Spain, took time off work, and filled my fridge with junk food," writes one unhappy customer, in typeface of increasing point size (and varying color.) "I sat down in front of my tv, in my Y fronts, with my beautiful SG in my right hand and... NOTHING. NO ACTIVATION KEY. YOU NEED TO FIX THIS. YOU NEED TO RELEASE A STATEMENT ON WHAT YOU INTEND TO DO ABOUT THIS."
Ubisoft shipped some games without activation codes, story: http://kotaku.com/5953443/guess-who-forgot-to-ship-activation-keys-with-their-latest-pc-release

I just thought that story was so... beautifully sad :) BWAHAHAAHHA.

DRM is just sad, but is it a necessary evil? Are big publishers running with DRM painting a target on their own head anyway? (more hostility more desire to crack) Or does it really have a place in big number publishing?

Comments

  • edited
    DRM is definitely bad for Indies. Piracy has a net positive effect for us (because we aren't spending millions and millions on awareness campaigns, and especially for new indies getting known is a huge challenge).

    I don't know. There's all this negativity from consumers over DRM. And a lot of people making compelling arguments against it.

    But I wonder if the big publishers have researched this and found that they'd make fewer sales if didn't use DRM. Maybe the bad consumer experiences don't ultimately get associated with the games and have little negative impact. I'm sure they're not just sticking their fingers in their collective bureaucratic ears.

    I think when everything is distributed digitally anyway DRM will be less nasty (I really hate owning a boxed copy and then having to sign up to Microsoft Live and link that to my Steam account all just to play a game I could have downloaded because the box is utterly superfluous and there's a 3Gb update for it anyway).
  • Agreed. I'm totally for gaming on my iPad, buy the game, get it, play it. Boxes... Pssffft.

    And I wonder if there's a big company that'd be ballsy enough to experiment with DRM and DRM free simultaneously and release some results... That's not ridiculous like... Who was it that claimed that Piracy accounted for 90% sales loss... It could have been EA. Or Ubi. Lol.
  • edited
    That 90% figure is derp. Pirates are always 90% of your players... but that's because about 30% of gamers in most markets are pirating (I thumbsucked that), but every Pirate installs far more games than the people who actually buy them.

    So even if pirates were to be buying games instead they'd only be an extra 30% (or less) and that's assuming they buy games at the same rate that other gamers do, which they wouldn't as they'd probably just go Free To Play (because they could never afford all the games they play).

    So probably the biggest market to lose out because of piracy it is the Free To Play market.

    But I did say before that maybe the big publishers know what they're doing. Even if they got 5% more sales because of draconian DRM that would be a win assuming the bad install experience doesn't negatively affect their sales (and I doubt there are good stats about that outside of the massive focus groups that I assume big publishers conduct).
  • This doesn't seem to be a DRM issue though. Before DRM "was a thing" games had registration codes that didn't use Internet activation, but justed ensured you bought the box. In this case it seems the box manufacturer (not the publisher) forgot to put the sticker in the box.
    Thanked by 1stavey
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