General / Off-Topic DLC DRM and the good ol days.

[Mobius]

What happened to the good old days?

Most of us can say that we was there at the beginning of home entertainment, those days when you got hours of fun from two sticks and a ball bouncing from one side of the screen to the other or for those of you who would wait 6 minutes to for a game to load,
We have all seen change and not all of it for the best,
I remember the days when DRM meant going to page 15 paragraph 3 word 15.

Remember checking out the cheat pages in your favourite computer magazine,
That’s all history as company’s like EA now sell you that service at £8 a pop,
Or when an expansion pack was an entire new game with new missions and weapons,
Now its drip feed to you in single mission DLC or weapon upgrades packs.
How about when map packs were free in your favourite FPS.
Now you are required to purchase a £40 subscription or buy them at £12 each.
When did it start going all wrong who do we blame for this culture?
Is it Xbox live for starting all this in the first place or do we blame those who buy into these services.
Where do we draw a line against always on DRM?
At what point does it get out of hand when half the games missions are to be brought as DLC.
Or have I got the wrong end of the stick, is there something good to come out of all this and I’m just missing something.

 

[Giskard]

I think if you look at the history of computer games, publishers have always attempted to protect their investment in some way. It's not like copy protection is a new idea.

In the spectrum days, there were all sorts of protection systems that were implemented: codes that were in manuals, special 'turbo' or 'hyper' loading protection systems, lensloks etc.

The problem is, the copying of games is still rife. And if you are a company that has poured enormous resources and money into its development, what do you do about it?

I think it's very hard for companies to just sit back and do nothing. The people who really want the game for free, are always going to get it. But I do think it can help against the more 'casual' cheapskate.

Having said that, it seems to me that things are changing a little bit nowadays. (Maybe that's just my positive outlook on life!) I think companies are seeing that the best way to help prevent piracy is to engage with the players/fans more openly. To make the best game they can and price it fairly.

 

[Mobius]

I havent an issue with companys protecting their property, its how they protect it, look at Sins of a solar empire for example, a very succsesful RTS that has no DRM, you only need to register the software to be able to play online and recieve updates, and their expansion packs were dirt cheap.

and if you look at all the Kickstarter games, none of them have DRM.
Elite Dangerouswont have any DRM.

 

[DigitalDuck]

I don't see the problem with DLC either - aside from the fact that expansion packs have been around for ages, they are entirely optional. People seem to think that the alternative of paying for more content is getting it free, but it's not. You effectively have 3 options:

1. Game for £50, no extra content
2. Game for £50, extra content for £10
3. Game for £60, extra content included

Given that option 2 lets me decide whether I want 1 or 3, that's surely the best option?

When "half the game's missions are brought out as DLC", then you decide how much you'd pay for the game + those missions, how much you'd pay for the game - those missions, and then look at how much they cost. If you think it's worth your money, buy it, otherwise don't.

That applies to everything else you can buy too. DLC just gives you more choice of what your money buys, game-wise.


DRM is something that should probably be given up on by now, for the most part it's an inconvenience to regular consumers and not to pirates, which means it's failing.

 

[Mobius]

So how would you feel if Elite dangerous decided that 10 of 25 ships that could be put in at lunch was taken out so that you would have the option to buy them at say £5 each as a day1 DLC , or if they decided to remove all the Empire faction missions, so you could buy them at a later date.
Take Assassins creed 2 for example several missions were removed from the game, you didn’t have to play them but to know the secret of the game you needed to purchase those missions to understand the full story.
It’s akin to taking out chapters from a book, would you buy a book with missing chapters. When you know perfectly well that those chapters had no reason being removed.

 

[Kerrash]

Did you consider pre ordering SimCity like I did then Möbius?

I am not certain of a point in time or a particular person/group we could blame for it all starting to go wrong. It seems like there has been a gradual progression to the awful situation we have today.

All I can say for certain is that I am glad things such as KickStarter and the bad press that DRM failures are getting, as they are starting to reverse the trend.

 

[Kerrash]

So how would you feel if Elite dangerous decided that 10 of 25 ships that could be put in at lunch was taken out so that you would have the option to buy them at say £5 each as a day1 DLC , or if they decided to remove all the Empire faction missions, so you could buy them at a later date.
...

Umm, ask for a refund as the ships were part of the KS promise?:S
I see your point though, but it is a fine balance; the game needs funding it is just a question of how much bang for you buck is deemed 'fair'

 

[DigitalDuck]

So how would you feel if Elite dangerous decided that 10 of 25 ships that could be put in at lunch was taken out so that you would have the option to buy them at say £5 each as a day1 DLC , or if they decided to remove all the Empire faction missions, so you could buy them at a later date.

Well, no, because I pledged on Kickstarter, and it's a completely different model to buying the game. I'd expect that content too.

If I was buying the game and it would normally cost £40, and Frontier decided to sell it for £25 and then three packs of five ships for £5 each, I wouldn't care either way because I'd still be paying the same amount. I'd just have the choice to make the game cheaper if I don't want some of it.

Take Assassins creed 2 for example several missions were removed from the game, you didn’t have to play them but to know the secret of the game you needed to purchase those missions to understand the full story.

And those extra missions cost money to make as well as to buy. I'd rather not have to pay for the extra missions if I don't give a crap about the story.

It’s akin to taking out chapters from a book, would you buy a book with missing chapters. When you know perfectly well that those chapters had no reason being removed.

Not really - it's more akin to DVDs. You can buy a standard film-only copy for a low price, or you can get the "special edition" which includes deleted scenes ("removed" scenes), out-takes, special features etc.

Why should I have to pay the "special edition" price when I only want to watch the film?

 

[Magma]

DRM is something that should probably be given up on by now, for the most part it's an inconvenience to regular consumers and not to pirates, which means it's failing.

There are two kinds of pirates though: crackers who break the protection, and freeloaders who use and distribute the cracked versions.

It's an inconvenience to regular consumers and freeloaders, but not to crackers who see breaking the protection as a challenge.

Most companies who use DRM believe that as long as the dedicated crackers can be locked out of supplying the game freely for the first couple of months, most of the freeloaders will be converted into consumers by simple action of their impatience exceeding their principles. As long as the cost of the DRM procedure is less than the profit gained by the extra sales, then adding in the DRM was worth it from a financial perspective.

I've never actually had any problems with DRM personally. Has it affected many of the people here?

 

[DigitalDuck]

Most companies who use DRM believe that as long as the dedicated crackers can be locked out of supplying the game freely for the first couple of months, most of the freeloaders will be converted into consumers by simple action of their impatience exceeding their principles. As long as the cost of the DRM procedure is less than the profit gained by the extra sales, then adding in the DRM was worth it from a financial perspective.

That seems fair enough, but it does require constant creation of new forms of DRM...

I've never actually had any problems with DRM personally. Has it affected many of the people here?

I've only been affected by one case (quite a while ago), which I got around by downloading a cracked copy instead...

 

[Davidtq]

I've never actually had any problems with DRM personally. Has it affected many of the people here?

Yes...

I think it was spellforce or something, the game worked fine under xp, but the drm system wouldnt work un vista, nothing wrong with the game just the DRM...

I think it was star wars lego was the same DRM caused problems not the game itself. Both times despite being a paying customer I went to the pirates for my technical support fix of their buggy DRM.

Most games that require a disk in drive I will use a pirates patch on a legitimate copy just to preserve disk life. I have lots of games I HATE swapping disks. I hate the chance of damaging disks.

These days 90% of my game purchases are via steam. It can be a bit of a pain having to have a connection to get steam launched etc, but 99.9% of the time its completely unobtrusive and as a bonus no disks in drives, no piracy patches and no disks to get damaged. Even there though some devs decide on a limit of 5 times that you can install a game which I find absolutely infuriating.

Despite being a voracious purchaser of video games (my personal steam account has 75 games, we have 5 steam accounts in the family, we have shelves full of legally bought cd's sometimes up to 6 legal copies of one game!) theres been times where DRM issues have made me seriously consider piracy. When a legitimate paying customer gets a worse experience than a non paying pirate its gone very badly wrong.

Anyway Im going to end before I go into a full on rant about some IP holders attitudes to licensing.

 

[Hanni79]

I've never actually had any problems with DRM personally. Has it affected many of the people here?

I think my saddest experience was Anno 2070. It lost connection pretty regularly, but the only real hint it happened was the near instant crash of your economy. There is a Playerbase called "Arch" which can hold equipment to boost various stats in your Singleplayergame. Those only work if you are connected though and some of those boost were pretty major (like 30% more energy). So you either had to completely not use them or have incredible luck you did not loose connection. Playable ? Yes. Fun ? Hell no.

Anyway Im going to end before I go into a full on rant about some IP holders attitudes to licensing.

Nothing else to say in my mind Sorry, I couldn't resist .... the URGE

P.S. My last 2 PCs featured two drives for exactly one reason : Mainly played game upper Tray, secondary game in the lower one. I love those round thingies when they are untouched and shiny.

 

[Mobius]

Most games that require a disk in drive I will use a pirates patch on a legitimate copy just to preserve disk life. I have lots of games I HATE swapping disks. I hate the chance of damaging disks.

These days 90% of my game purchases are via steam.

im the same, most if not all my games that required the CD would all have a NoCD.exe. and pretty much all my games are now on steam.

http://steamcommunity.com/id/mobiuspc/games?tab=all

 

[DrBaggy]

What happened to the good old days?

Most of us can say that we was there at the beginning of home entertainment, those days when you got hours of fun from two sticks and a ball bouncing from one side of the screen to the other or for those of you who would wait 6 minutes to for a game to load,
We have all seen change and not all of it for the best,

I remember the days when DRM meant going to page 15 paragraph 3 word 15.

Remember checking out the cheat pages in your favourite computer magazine.

Agree with a lot of this Mobius. They were happier times (or maybe we were just younger and more easily pleased!)I think the hardware being slightly flaky made the the excitement of a world appearing on a screen even more magical.
However, I personally am happy to be without checking words on paragraph 13, needing to load 10 floppy discs or editing my config.sys and autoexec.bat

Having said that, DRM and always-online are horrible developments. Let's hope EA get their fingers well and truly burned over the Sim City fiasco

 

[Mobius]

I think with simcity showing just how bad always online DRM can be, will be one of the turning points for EA, and the other turning point is when they shut down the servers leaving people with nothing but a box and a activation key,

I have no simpathy for those who buy EA products and even less sympathy for when they start complaining that they cant play their game anymore.

 

[Jason S]

There are a lot of good and full indie games out there that are cheap or free. The problem is trying to find them as search engines tend to promote the big guys.

Take Oolite for instance, I mean these are the good days still and better in many respects.

Agreed though that the games that get the marketing and the most spent on them are often the ones that rip you off. Not speaking of ED in this of course, but the publisher driven money cash cow games promoted everywhere.