The people working 8+ hours per day, every day of the week, almost every week of the year to make money for their company, are more reliable, by their actions, than any study or the opinion of a random on the internet (that has his/her own bias).
Everything is changing ? Yes, that has been the case, like, forever. Especially in the video games industry. So what ?
Yes, companies are greedy. So why would they waste money on something that doesn't earn them anything, even costing them ?
Rest assured that when you have a multi hundreds of million dollars project, pretty much everything that can be measured is measured and analyzed. Especially if said project is always connected to the internet and can report back.
Arguments about stupidity or evil are not really grounded in reality.
I cannot tell if you are dense, just want to start a fight, or are defensive because you have some skin in the game.
Stop, listen, and stop projecting.
1) A 40 hour work week is not special or long...unless you're from Europe. There 40 hours was pretty much an immovable wall. Anecdotally, I know of people doing far more....myself included.
2) If you release a study it's meant to be about something. A historic study of the pony express is great...but using a study of the pony express to develop your strategy for cell phone tower placement would be silly. This is about Denuvo...and is using studies based on Napster. As you've stated it's not about the greed...but it is...so why use a bad predictive model like Napster?
3) You...get this through your thought process...want to call companies greedy. I do not. I want to say that bad predictive models, based on 20 year old situations, can be used to justify some pretty heinous stupidity. Case in point, Netflix damaged piracy rates when they made shows available to stream for a reasonable price...which does not fit the Napster model because it makes basic assumptions of piracy being motivated by things that they don't quantify but being constant (
Slate article from 2011). Kinda seems like the piracy model falls flat when you make things affordable and easily available...whereas DRM is designed to prevent easy availability.
4) I support greed from companies...because companies are just a collection of people. Their "greed" puts food on tables. If they want to project to try and be the most profitable that's just dandy. The study...the point of this thread...is what I take umbrage with. Idiots, with tools they don't frame, are going to make bad decisions and hurt people because of their ignorance. This is the problem...they are going to read crap like this and project value into using Denuvo...a bad solution to a problem that cannot be quantified, but this study claims to do with actual emperical numbers.
5) I'm aware of analysis. Let me one-up this. To get a reimbursement of anything above $200 I need my boss to sign-off. They do a quick cost-benefit analysis of what I ask for, and approve it or not. This is small value, so it gets very little thought. A quarter million dollar machine gets the finance department to do a cost-benefit analysis, and it's based upon projected sales. They project that based off of the previous year...not the sales from two decades ago. I hope you get it...but in the event you don't, the analysis is timely and fits the current business model. That's the problem with using comparatively ancient references...for a gut-check...2002 was the year of the Pentium 4 processor.
6) Stupidity is using a bad model to justify Denuvo's inclusion. Evil is what you want to project...stop pretending I qualify this as evil. I'm old enough to know that DRM will never work if it puts up a 2" barrier to entry, let alone kills gaming entirely. Once it steps too far it'll die because people will suddenly not tolerate it anymore, and what was once "acceptable" will over night no longer be. The problem is that with DRM it's being sold to investors rather than the end user...so it'll take the death of companies (propelled by bad fiscal models, based on faulty data) to make that happen. How many "up to 20% below projection" failures can billion dollar projects take before they crumple companies?
So we are utterly clear, I want to give you a case study. Blizzard introduced Diablo mobile...and the result was the famous "Is this an out of season April Fools joke?" comment. Blizzard didn't listen. Diablo 4 came out, and the amount of loot you got from using paid gems literally amounted to days of normal grind. People were pissed...and they bled players. They have models that demonstrate the players were willing to spend money, and the whales would support them. Cool. They recently nerfed a bunch of builds for what seemed like no reason. They did so, apparently, to increase the grind (because these builds specifically minimized it). How healthy do you think the player base remains after another apparent cash grab on a game with a AAA price tag, which basically requires microtransactions?
Do you think maybe that model was wrong, and they've managed to produce a worse product?
Can you maybe see why "pirates can cost you up to 20% of sales" is a "the sky is falling" style hyperbolic thing to say based off of 20 year old reference material?
Barring all of the rest of this, can you please ditch the "greed" and "evil" crap? It's a childish way to look at what is going on.
Not all bad things are evil, greed is a loaded idea that is encoded to seem "bad," and if I never used either until responding to you...then maybe the fault is in your inability to understand there can be another point of view which doesn't believe that what is being done is inherently wrong...only really stupid in its failure to frame itself as anything but an advertisement for Denuvo.
-Edit-
To that Netflix thing...I read the 2023 version of the article. Piracy is on the rise.
What changed?
Fragmentation of the media, amongst multiple services. These services all charging...because it's perceived as their property and thus they deserve the profits. That's fair and all...but it's making streaming as expensive as cable tv for the same reasons. So...the good model where you can make a profit by being the only operator with slightly older media you bought the rights to at a reasonable price disappears, and the new model of becoming a content factory to support the growth of numerous paid services all competing with a fraction of what the consumer truly desires is what replaces it. The streaming wars have created a situation where you now pay and still have to watch advertisements...and to get a lot of what you want you need to pay as much or more than your old cable bill. The bad model of "everyone make their content exclusive" brought us to the point of a streaming war, and the result after a decade is increasing piracy because spending hundreds of dollars a month and not even having a freaking DVD is not sustainable...but the finance departments five years ago thought this was a model that would work because Netflix did it. This is not about evil, good, or greed. It's about stupid people doing stupid things because eight layers of middle management don't have the chutzpah to tell upper management the truth, because studies like this one support bad conclusions that would be obvious if anybody in the management class would spend five minutes talking to anyone at ground level (without the fear of termination...because people no longer have a career...they have a job that is 18-24 months of commitment).
-Edit end-
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