Bring back codewheels! (Ok, probably not)
Yes, these are my biggest fears. People seem to think it’s awesome Denuvo is shitting the bed but am really worried about the next Big Thing and how it will effect PC gaming.
People seem to think that after 30+ years of copy protection accomplishing little other than fucking over paying customers the publishers might change their minds about it, which seems like a massive overestimation of their common sense to me.
That’s just my point - since we are clearly stuck with DRM, I’d rather the devil I know (and that has never caused me any issues, and has proven to not cost any frames by existing) than whatever even more hardcore thing is coming.
If everyone just dropped DRM I do feel like the industry would not suffer greatly, perhaps even the opposite, but I just don’t believe that’s ever going to happen.
The next step is every game is a client that requires pulling from the servers to function. Basically everything becomes GaaS, MP, online only.
The step after that, which some companies are already working towards, is everything is just a streamed game. You don’t even have a client other than the streaming portal.
Well it’s not with an attitude like that!
Seriously though, we had worse, we didn’t’ settle for it, and it mostly got better. There’s no reason to settle now.
Well we do have another round of consoles coming out. Maybe we can watch Microsoft trip over their feet again to struggle for another ten years. The don’t you guys have phones and jobs guy will appreciate the effort.
I don’t know. Times have changed. Kids are completely used to not “owning” their entertainment media. None of them buy music. They stream it on Spotify, YouTube, or Apple Music. They don’t buy Blu-ray movies. They don’t even buy physical games. They play F2P games or a digital copy that lives in the cloud.
A discless Xbox could do okay for next-gen.
Well if the kids play F2P games, on mobile, PC, console… whatever, there is no reason to have DRM at all. I’m not seeing a good argument here for keeping it. If they want to sell games as a service… but we all know not ever game is going to do well as a F2P always online approach. They’re more likely to spend 1200 dollars on a new phone than a console… so who do the consoles want to sell to again.
There’s a big difference though between no disc and always has to be online though.
Except the very client/server or streaming models are the DRM.
Except they’re not actually buying a game. They don’t ever have to buy the game in that scenario. Hey if all the developers out there want to release fully playable games where everything they sell me is a emote or a skin, fine, make it always online. I’ll watch a large chunk of games fail when they do that. It won’t work for every game out there.
There will be epic fails and studios will learn some hard lessons. Eventually though, it will happen. The riddle will be cracked and people will just be happy playing online streaming games and it will seem archaic and silly that people bought games that didn’t need to be tied to a GaaS model.
I suppose future hipsters can revive disc games like vinyl records…
When you get a Rosie and roads are gun, I’ll check back. I’ve been seeing failed predictions about the future from various groups for my entire life. They were talking about the doom of PC gaming when I was still learning to read. I don’t think you have any more insight into the future than other do.
MSFT tried your game, and it largely failed. You might think that future is inevitable, but here is what i know, everyone always underestimates the future.
I could be wrong. Totally.
I’m just going by the trends, and no DRM vs always online GaaS seems to be pointing the way I’m saying.
I see what you’re saying but not too long ago, just like in the yester years, the industry believed install limits were the answer, and then loot boxes (currently being investigated by what seems like every government), and always online console pretty much failed. Again, having a game associated with an account and not having a disc is not the same thing as if you have no internet you cannot play.
If consumers actually settled for this could be worse, we’d have Tages and install limits and every time we tried to replace our over-priced GPUs.
I would suggest that failure was two-fold:
- Terrible messaging from Microsoft. They absolutely failed to get in front of it and explain why it’s good for owners vs. why it’s good for developers/publishers.
- Perhaps one generation too early
There will most certainly be at least one disc-less console in the next generation. It might be a lower-cost streaming only version, but Microsoft and/or Sony are for sure going to try it.
Well we kind of already have disc-less consoles, all the classics are that way. I don’t think the issue with discs is a thing so much as the always online push.
Please type the third word in the fifth line on page 13 to continue this thread.
You monster!
BUY 👏 GAMES 👏 ON 👏 GOG 👏
-Woke Gamer
DRM has some value. If a game can’t be pirated on release day, some non-zero number of people buy it who otherwise would have pirated. We don’t know what that number is, and the studios don’t either, they just make guesses. Largely non-educated guesses.
Those guesses combined with their completely understandable rage at people stealing their stuff leads to studios paying for copy-protection. Is it actually worthwhile in terms of money in the till? There’s no way to tell.