MudMan

I very much support Ukraine in the war, but… yeah, that’s horrifying. Just on a human level.

I mean, some of those end on a closeup of somebody’s face. That’s up there as some of the most haunting shit I’ve ever seen. I’ll be thinking about that for a very long time.

About damn time.

This thing is my favorite MMO by some margin and it’s not even a MMO at all.

Yeah, in some ways I think playable content vs cosmetics is a more functional distinction than DLC (or MTX) vs expansions. The big thing that changed is that games now will sell you visual items for bragging rights, rather than stuff for you to play.

I would suggest that not buying those is a good idea, but clearly a bunch of teens and rich people disagree with me on that one.

See, this is the part where I’m not going to dismiss your experience, because a lot of this was super regional, but I’m going to say my experience was not that at all.

I definitely spent most of the money I put in arcades AFTER I had a 16 bit console. The “arcade>marketing>console port” hype cycle went on for a decade after the NES first became a thing.

And Live Gold is just a sign of something that was going on everywhere. The first free to play hits were happening, WoW was taking over the world and making GaaS mainstream… and yeah, online gaming was becoming a thing on consoles and getting monetized in brand new ways.

But also, I’d say expansions were a thing way before DLC became a dirty word. Because Groundhog Day I distinctly remember having conversations with angry nerds in the mid 2000s explaining that there wasn’t much of a difference between DLC and a lot of the expansion packs and shovelware content expansions being pushed around all through the late 90s.

And of course there are tons of games you can buy as a complete thing. As I said above, I’ve been playing Silent Hill 2, Metaphor and a bunch of other stuff that is very classic in its structure. Another constant of gaming nerdrage is that people don’t care if what they like continues to exist, they are mostly clamoring for the things they dislike not existing, which I’ve never been on board with.

Well, we’ve gone from 24 and 5 to a 10 year compromise, so we can agree to disagree on that basis.

That said, I do disagree. You are underestimating how relevant arcades were in 2001. Soul Calibur may have been an early example of the home game being seen as better than the arcade game in 1999, but it was an arcade game first, I had played the crap out of it by the time it hit the Dreamcast.

And I was certainly aware of Maple Story before it was officially released here. And of course I mentioned WoW as the launch of the GaaS movement, but that’s not strictly accurate, I personally know people who lost a fortune to their extremely expensive Ultima Online addiction in 1997/98.

I am still not convinced that the experience of those gamers was any better or worse, me having been there in person. The kids in my life seem perfectly content with their Animal Crossings, Minecrafts and even Robloxes. The millions of people in Fortnite don’t seem mad about it. I sure was angrier about that Resident Evil business at the time than people are about the Resident Evil remakes now. Hell, I got pulled from playing a fantastic remake of Silent Hill 2 by an even better JRPG in Metaphor ReFantazio, and neither of those games features any MTX or service stuff. And of course that’s not mentioning the horde of games in the 20-40 range that are way better and more affordable than anything I had access to in the 90s.

People are nostalgic of the nostalgia times, reasonable or not, and time has a way of filtering out the nastiness, especially if you were too young to notice it. I was wired enough to hear the lamentations of the European game development community being washed away by Nintendo and Sega’s hostile takeover of the industry and their aggressive imposition of unaffordable licensing fees. I was aware of the bullshit design principles being deployed to milk kids of their money in arcades. I had strong opinions about expansion packs and cartridge prices. It’s always been a business, it’s always been run by businessmen.

Best you can do is play the stuff that’s good and ignore the rest.

Second best you can do is be publicly mad at the business driving unreasonable regulations that are meant to do the public a disservice.

Third best you can do is start archiving pirated romsets to privately preserve gaming history, blemishes and all, so we get to keep having this argument when the next generation of gamers are out there claiming that Fortnite used to be cool when it was free and had a bunch of games in there instead of requiring you to sign off your DNA to be cloned for offplanet labor or whatever this is heading towards.

They absolutely do. The market is full of remasters, remakes and re-releases. Having the originals readily available presumably diminishes the value of those, by the count of publishers.

That is not the same as saying that old games are available. Most of them are not, the market keeps reissuing the same handful of hits and landmark games (although we’re in an era of deep cuts now, we even have a Pocky & Rocky remaster, somehow). But they can’t set up regulations where you are allowed to lend out Spider-Man vs. The Kingpin but not Resident Evil 2, so here we are.

No, I’m arguing that if you’re trying to identify an era where the industry at large was not overmonetizing that’s your timeframe: From the death of arcades to the birth of modern casual gaming/F2P/Subscription services. By the numbers that’d be 2001-2005.

Before then you have arcades acting as the first window of monetization, where a whole bunch of console games started and where a lot of the investment went. After that you’re balls deep in modern gaming, with games as a service that are still live today, from World of Warcraft to Maple Story.

That’s a handful of years, at best. Any other interpretation has to ignore huge chunks of the industry that were behaving in the same way that makes people complain today. Either you dismiss arcade gaming despite it being the tentpole of the entire industry or you’re dismissing the fact that subscription and MTX games were already dominating big chunks of the space.

So no, it’s not 24 years. It never was 24 years.

And for the record, we knew at the time. We’ve been complaining since the 90s. I wasn’t joking earlier, “Ubisoft greedy” today is a carbon copy of “Capcom greedy” in 1997. I’ve been stuck in nerdrage Groundhog Day for thirty years.

Well, no, we’re talking about everything. Everything before 2010, explicitly.

I would guess most people just fill in whatever moment of their childhood there was when they would buy a thing and enjoy a thing and not worry about it too much.

Me being me (see the old codger self-identification up there), I substitute in the late 80s and 90s, when I would plead and beg for coins to squeeze in another 60 second gaming session and then go on to save for months in order to get a lesser version of that same experience at home for anywhere between 60 and 90 bucks (140-220 adjusted for inflation).

In the grand scheme of my memories, the five years after arcades were relevant and before Microsoft started charging a monthly fee to play online and Facebook started a games division are too short of a blip to consider a golden age. My nostalgia is on ranting angrily about having to purchase Street Fighter 2 for the fourth time and having Capcom re-sell the PSOne version of Resident Evil a third time for the privilege of having added analogue stick controls.

They really want to force gamers to buy the old games, just as they were, because those are next to free to adapt to a different platform and people will pay for them.

Not to be my usual old codger, but a lot of these game in questions were microtransaction-based to being with, in the very Farmville-y format of charging you a quarter for each set of three lives and then being ungodly broken and difficult to make sure those three lives didn’t last any longer than a minute each and entice you to pay for three more.

This absolutely sucks, is based on unjustifiable logic and takes the side of business over a demonstrable common good, but let’s not pretend the business logic behind it was invented in 2005. Game publishers have been game publishers longer than many of the nostalgic posters have been alive.

I genuinely stopped to think whether “next door” would prompt somebody to get pedantic about this and decided to keep it for expediency and to make the sentence flow better.

I’m not even mad about it, honestly.

Well, brand and image are relevant, in more ways than direct sales impact (something that “voting with your wallet” often ignores).

But mostly, and this is important, it’s worth remembering that Denuvo’s clients aren’t the people who buy their games, they are the people who sell the games. That’s who Denuvo is selling to. And Denuvo, which is a very big, if not the only, name in town for effective DRM on PC, would like to keep being that.

All else being equal, if Denuvo generates negativity in forums and a similar no-name competitor doesn’t a client (that’s a publisher, not a buyer of the game), may choose to go with the newcomer just to remove the noise, or to prevent an impact on sales they can’t verify.

But also, I imagine people working at Denuvo are kind of over being the random boogeyman of gaming du jour while other DRM providers are actively praised or ignored. I’d consider speaking up, too.

I probably wouldn’t because there’s very little to be gained from that, as this conversation proves, but… you know, I’d consider it.

EDIT: Oh, hey, I hadn’t noticed, but the guy actually responds to this explicitly. Pretty much along these lines, actually:

RPS: A lot of companies seem happy enough with the service Denuvo provides to keep using it. Why are you so concerned about public perception? Why not just let people have their theories and carry on doing your thing?

Andreas Ullmann: Hard to answer. So maybe it’s just… maybe it’s even a personal thing. I’m with the company for such a long time. The guys here are like my family, because a lot of the others here are also here for ages. It just hurts to see what’s posted out there about us, even though it has been claimed wrong for hundreds of times.

On the other hand, I can imagine that this reputation also has some kind of business impact. I can imagine that certain developers, probably more in the indie region or the smaller region, are not contacting us in the first place if they are looking for solutions.

Because currently, there is only two ways to protect a game against piracy, right? Either you don’t, or use our protection. There is no competitor. And I can imagine that there are developers out there who are hesitant to contact us, only because of the reputation. They would probably love to prevent piracy for their game, but they fear the hate and the toxicity of the community if they do so. And maybe they even believe all the claims that are out there - unanswered from us until today - and for this reason don’t contact us in the first place.

If I responded to it, I read it in full.

Also, yes, obviously.

Hollow Knight is from 2017, I don’t think it was out there draining business form this seven years later. Bloodstained is more recent, and that cost the same as PoP. Also the Ori games, which are priced the same.

Plus this launched half off on Steam and nobody bought it despite being cheaper than Bloodstained and Ori.

So… I mean, it could have been that, but it pretty clearly wasn’t that.

I feel like we’d all be much more on board with this if Poland wasn’t in the shadow of Hungary right next door looking like somebody’s cat had a serious episode on top of a keyboard.

No, that’d be the info we have on how Ubi games performed on both Epic and Steam. I have very little to do with it, I’m just pointing at it.

Ah, the vibes.

I mean, there are worse areas to run based on gut checks. Ultimately you buy whatever brands make you feel warm and cozy. But just so we’re clear, Steam is the granddaddy of both PC DRM and digital distribution with no ownership.

I get thinking their implementation is better, but I don’t know that I get “well, this one I actively root for, that one I consider a boycott-worthy deal breaker”.

I don’t and have never worked at Ubisoft, Mr McCarthy.

Multiple people have explained a hypothesis that doesn’t fit the information we have. Them being multiple people doesn’t make it true.

Not to my knowledge, but I bet not being on Steam had more to do with it than Denuvo, by far. There is no indication that DRM software discourages sales, to my knowledge. If it does, at worst it breaks even.

I will buy the DRM-free option every time, but every piece of data out there suggests that “I will never play a game with Denuvo” people vastly overestimate how much of a practical impact that stance has.

Me, I’m just weirded out that people are so mad about some solutions they know but not about Steam DRM or any other solution that isn’t known widely by name. You know, since I’m sharing all my unpopular gaming hot takes here.

Yeah, so I just checked, it brings up a Ubisoft Connect windows and then boots. It has less of a launcher than, say, Baldur’s Gate 3.

I don’t know if it makes you log in the first time or it creates a new thing for you by default, but I can tell you I had more account and launcher trouble running Warframe on a new PC this week than I did playing any recent Ubisoft game.

BTW, you can link up your Steam account to Warframe now and not have to log in each time and man, that only took a decade. Still didn’t piss people off as much as Ubisoft being on Epic, though.

Yeah, I fully agree that they’ve stuck to a template far too closely for far too long. That’s part of why I’m frustrated that this one went as poorly as it did, since it very much isn’t that.

I think the hostility to any non-Steam platform is unwarranted, although annoyance is annoyance. That said, the Ubi launcher on Steam right now is just a pop-up, I don’t think it makes you log in each time if you have everything linked.