Comment on Former Valve writer says PlayStation killing physical discs is no conspiracy: "You, the consumer, have made your choice, and the choice is for digital"

• GoatSynagogue@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  But the games people want to buy on steam aren’t on GoG, and there’s no Steam vs GoG sales charts for people to point publishers to and say “look! Look how much money we will spend if you go drm free on GoG!”.

  Also there’s just no denying it, and even trying is disingenuous - a game like GTA 6 releasing on GoG without DRM would sell significantly less than it would in a platform with DRM. It’s just the truth. It would be on torrents and every download site the minute it’s released, and millions and millions and millions of people who were going to buy it would get it for free instead.

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  • edible_funk@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Last I looked into it video game piracy actually had a net benefit on sales. Any advantage DRM has from a sales point of view is null after about 3 months post launch anyway. It can and does kill small indie devs but any big boy in the industry, piracy usually benefits sales.

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    • GoatSynagogue@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Piracy never has a benefit on sales. Where are you getting that from?

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      • edible_funk@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        Don’t be so sure. Apparently they publishers don’t make hard numbers publicly available anymore so there’s no good data but there was a survey of denuvo games.

        A Denuvo-protected game cracked in the first week after release can expect to make about 20 percent less revenue than if the DRM had remained in place, according to the study, while a crack six weeks after a game’s release only costs an estimated 5 percent of theoretical total revenue. After 12 weeks, new sales are so negligible that “developers could eventually remove unpopular DRM schemes with minimal losses (and possible gains from strongly DRM-averse consumers)

        arstechnica.com/…/the-true-cost-of-game-piracy-20…

        Unfortunately that still doesn’t answer the question but until publishers post honest numbers we’ll never have the proper metrics to measure the actual impact piracy has. But in the day freeware like Doom basically relied entirely on piracy for sales so it’s not an out of pocket take that piracy could benefit sales. It is an old take though. I’m old.

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  • ampersandrew@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Plenty of the games people want to buy are on GOG. Definitely not all of them, but you can find GOTY winners like Clair Obscur and Baldur’s Gate 3, games that should have won more awards like Kingdom Come: Deliverance II and The Alters, awesome indie games like Mina the Hollower and Escape from Ever After, plus the old stuff that GOG restores like Dino Crisis and Alpha Protocol that had pent-up demand. There’s no chart to compare sales, but developers talk, and they know their own sales data. Firms like Circana buy sales data and then sell the analysis back to help companies figure out what will help them make more money, including where people are buying video games.

    Also there’s just no denying it, and even trying is disingenuous - a game like GTA 6 releasing on GoG without DRM would sell significantly less than it would in a platform with DRM. It’s just the truth.

    That’s easy to claim and impossible to prove. Baldur’s Gate 3 released day 1 without DRM and still went on to sell over 20M copies; how many people do you think pirated it? Millions and millions? There are some people who are always going to pirate, but I think most prefer the experience of just buying the damn thing and getting better service out of it, not the least of which is quick and easy patching. We also now live in a world where Denuvo is fully broken open. There’s no difference in one’s ability to pirate once the game has been cracked at all. Piracy is going to happen one way or another, and GTA6 is basically guaranteed to make more money than any other video game that came before it.

    In the terrible state that the video game industry is in for developers, releasing a big AAA game DRM-free would be the last game they ever release.

    This is demonstrably false, given the AAA games that release on GOG all the time.

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    • GoatSynagogue@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      given the AAA games that release on GOG all the time.

      Why could you only name like 3 then? Which 2026 AAA games have released on GOG?

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      • ampersandrew@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        Which GOG release bankrupted a company by way of piracy?

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