The customer is king.
Back when DVDs were the thing, and the market for DivX1 exploded, I was quite shocked that DVDs forced you to go through some mandatory anti-piracy messages, and even commercials2. Why force me to look at how piracy is bad when I paid for the product? But the thing that got me – the people who only used DivX never saw the nagging! Thousands of free movies, and not an ad in sight, just pure freedom. Pirates got a significantly better product by virtue of their piracy.
As a long time fan of Arc System Works (in particular of Daisuke Ishiwatari, main creator of Guilty Gear), I was pretty excited to see them getting a big opportunity to work on Marvel Tōkon with Sony. I had been listening on repeat to rips of the soundtrack that were live-streamed to hype the release. Best gym music ever, gets your blood pumping.
I was hesitating, since I have little time for video games, so its 110$ asking price for the full package made it a hard sell. Until someone close got excited for it…
Shortly before release, they announced an open beta – no questions remaining then! Yet excitement died quickly enough, as the game wouldn’t launch on Linux. Checking online, not only did it not run on Linux, it basically did not run properly at all. They promised to improve that, but what sort of miracle can you do in 2 weeks?
Then came release, and all hell broke loose, but not in the way anybody wanted. It was the same technical mess, and thus a total disaster on PC that led to mass refunds. This killed a lot of the general interest; the appeal of crossplay and the promise of a healthy community shattered as the online play was punishing players willing to persist.
Unexpectedly, a few days later and the game is cracked.
And guess what? The game runs like a charm, on low spec computers, and even on Linux.
The main culprit is the pile of crap in Sony’s anti-cheat and DRM stack.
Once again, you are punished if you had the bad idea to give up your hard-earned money for their premium product permission to use a license.
If it can be of any satisfaction to Sony and other rights holders, I don’t think the game will be pirated a lot. The crack removes a barrier, but it cannot restore the enthusiasm the release burned through. The locks made even the pirated product unattractive.
The only game left is the online debate about who is to blame. The reason people are so happy to mock it is that they perceive this disaster to be caused by greed and stupidity. And not only are these the cause, but the company behind it, Sony, apparently can only learn the hard way. Why can’t they help but sabotage themselves?
Competition means companies want to serve the best product. Yet, the market never3 seems to find a way around this problem4. This is a sad state of affairs.
In school, it is very common to have the teacher punish the whole class for the actions of the absent delinquents. Again, punishing the ones who aren’t to blame, while the rule-breakers go free. The goal is obviously to create terror so that students would also enforce rules on themselves. This is a very communist way of thinking. The problem, though, is that it is totally useless if terror is not achieved, it only reinforces the injustice that good students have to endure. Especially as they are often victimized by the delinquents… I guess school really teaches you life, in the end.
in general parlance DivX meant the market for home-burned CDs of movies. Since access to computers and broadband was still expensive, most people bought them from other pirates. ↩
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_operation_prohibition ↩
There are quite a few times I bailed out of getting a game after seeing that DRM impacted performance drastically, or put unjustified online requirements. ↩
Except for Valve’s Gabe Newell’s famous quote: “We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem”. ↩