Postal developer Running With Scissors, creator of some of the most infamous shooters on PC, says the gaming industry deserves “better” than Denuvo and DRM.
Quote from the article: “The inclusion of intrusive DRM softwares [sic] like Denuvo is a choice that yields an unfair punishment on the consumer,” Running With Scissors says. “Respect the consumer, make a game they want to play, and you will never feel the need to fight piracy. The gaming industry deserves a better future, fight for that.”
I think the best way is to just have basic piracy detection, if someone trips it, then have a message that you can get past appearing guilt tripping them for it lmao
Back to OG times in gaming where you would have stupid hats saying pirate or other weird things happening in game like not being able to complete it if it was cracked, good times.
I’ve seen RWS’s take on this a bunch recently. This feels like a feel-good PR move because they don’t have any substantive updates on their actual games.
Theres a definite trend of people elevating the value of opinions of those they agree with. It makes any kind of intelligent discourse very hard to do.
They didn’t release the third game, it was done by a third party (I believe with some licensing shenanigans?), which is why they don’t acknowledge Postal 3. They didn’t make it. Which is why they (somewhat recently) have given the A-OK to pirate that game.
I’d assume that last part is why they say legendary.
While I’m not fond of the company, and perhaps legendary is a bit excessive, they’re still a big name that made remarkable videogames. With Postal 2 they nailed it, can’t say about the other 3 because I’ve never played them.
Glad to know you never grew out of your edgy gamer bro stage. Being able to pee on things is peak gaming, amirite? /s
I’m literally saying this as one of the few people who watched the Postal movie more than once simply because it had David Foley in it and I’m okay with bad movies.
Pretty much, yeah. I don’t feel the need to posture as somehow intellectually superior to a game that is designed to be fucking stupid. I appreciate and recognise all art for exactly what it is.
It’s more that there’s actually games that rise to the level of great art that are designed to be fucking stupid, like Katamari Damacy, which leans hard into absurdism, and is often quite funny, but more importantly the gameplay is original, brilliant, and fun. The art direction in KD is also off the charts quality, especially the music, all of which was written for the game.
Look, I loved Postal 2 back in the day (I always sort of rolled my eyes at Postal, but 2 seemed less serious and more tongue-in-cheek). I might even replay it someday, but it’s not great art. Especially now it’s ugly, it’s clunky, more importantly it continues to be a buggy mess. Not even a Gary Coleman cameo could save it. They were fun games for what they were and for the time they existed in, and it’s okay to remember them for that, but it’s a little absurd to just act like the world hasn’t moved on and that they were great art to begin with. Art direction was bad, level design was bad, there was a lot of bad stuff about the game, beyond even getting into the edgelord shit.
Bad art is okay. I love B-movies, but we don’t have to pretend they’re anything other than what they are: B-movies.
I’m sorry but that is exactly why postal 2 is good. Unpretentious, offensive, provocative, unpolished raw art designed to generate chaos - whilst simultaneously having that certain charm which is impossible to put into words (hence the cult following) - which is exactly what it did. All of that without punching down (OK there was a bit of dodgy stuff, but for the time period it isn’t too bad). Truly one of the greats and you can’t change my mind, so we’ll have to agree to disagree.
I’d label them legends in the sense that they’re probably one of the game studios I know by name the best even though that’s all they have to show for it. Postal 2 for as bugged and edgy as it is, is an extraordinarily famous game.
Ehh… Even putting aside things like Nintendo… Let’s just say I know the names of actual developers on several small studios, including bad games, and I have no idea of a single person who made Postal
Denuvo is the apex of a long history of bad choices.
Maybe actually sell us the games in a way we really own it, without any sort of online activation/account/telemetry/data-gathering like when we could buy a disc and just use it, and it should all be ok.
I feel like a dinosaur every-time I think this nowadays, but what is so problematic with the “own as in physically own” that is so hard to implement? If they want to provide a service, sell a service.
In the past I used pirate versions of games I bought just to be able to play them offline, or because I did not agree with the terms of service. It is so much for our info, it goes beyond just knowing you are the real owner of the software copy: it comes to the point where it looks like it’s to guarantee we are not its’ owner.
Now some DRMs even destroy gaming performance and its just faster to use 'ked versions. I hope it changes somehow.
Is it really possible to own them properly? If in almost all cases we lack the source code and there are even proprietary requirements for both software and hardware, what chance do they have of working halfway well in a few decades?
And the sign said anybody caught trespassing
Would be shot on sight.
So I jumped over the fence and I yelled at the house,
“Hey, what gives you the right
To put up a fence to keep me out
Or to keep mother nature in?”
If God was here he’d tell you to your face
“Man, you’re some kind of sinner!”
Nah the Devs definitely get forced to use Denuvo by corporate… Stockholders and such. Denuvo gets advertised as the best anti piracy method and stockholders see that and say I want that in our game.
What is it with clowns like this digging their heels in and blaming literally anything but the precious MBAs that are plaguing and ruining literally everything about modern society.
In the comment you replied to they meant video game development companies by “developers” not the individual employees at those companies who do the actual work of developing games. Typically the actions of video game development companies are driven by the MBAs who have most of the big picture decision making power rather than the individual employees who develop the games.
Bruh… Developing is a job. Hello? You ever have a job before? The developers don’t just work for there selves? Knock knock who’s there? Oh nobody, just, ya know a BOSS… Ya mighta heard of it? No, I don’t mean the movie Boss Baby
Everyone in this thread is failing to understand that “developers” in this context can mean both “people who develop videogames” and “businesses that develop videogames.” As the people who develop videogames are not always the ones who make decisions like this at businesses that develop videogames those two different things that everyone is using the same word for often have opposing positions on the matter.
so whenever your boss tells you to do something you think is not the correct course of action you just quit right? you just leave your job without having another one lined up and probably risk losing your home, all because your boss told you to this thing you find annoying, you don’t have a choice to work or not work, the choice is to work or starve, which is not a choice.
even if they do hate it and consider it to be the work of the devil, they still don’t really have a choice, game development is a really competitive industry, if devs aren’t leaving their jobs when the studio makes them overwork 80 hour work weeks right before release for a month in order to hit the deadline then they’re definitely not leaving just because they hate having to implement denuvo.
I appreciate Postal 2 because the premise is kinda funny. It’s deliberately designed so you can beat it without doing any violence at all. You’re given tasks like get milk, pick up your paycheck, etc. And it involves standing in lines or people berating you. You’re stuck doing tedious annoying repetitive tasks, or you can get a flamethrower. I think standing in line to get Gary Coleman’s autograph takes 90 minutes if you do it normally.
Otherwise it’s very silly early 2000s edgy white guy dudebro humor
You’re stuck doing tedious annoying repetitive tasks, or you can get a flamethrower.
That premise, while cute, hasn’t aged well for me. The ever-rising number of chanlords shooting up their schools (and elder chanlords murder-suiciding their own families) because no one would blow them behind the bleachers (or because the wife left him or the kids won’t call anymore) sours the premise of “wouldn’t it be funny to murder everyone that mildly annoyed you” white guy dudebro humor for me long ago.
This is my only lemmy account and I made it before reddit killed 3rd party apps as I quit going on there. Going through my post history to try and judge me is something weird to do though
Going through my post history to try and judge me is something weird to do though
Rising from dormancy while otherwise doing nothing with that account, just to announce how mad you are that your edgy game wasn’t to my liking is weirder to me.
It is bad for the consumer… but the alternative is instant cracks, as seen with a lot of games on r/Crackwatch that don’t have the DRM.
Denuvo is the first software in a long time that has been able to successfully stop the supposedly inevitable march to cracking. It’s a miracle that more AAA devs don’t use it, since it works so well. (EMPRESS aside)
You can hate me all you want for saying this, but the war against piracy, for the most part, has been won.
Crackers: We don’t do it for the piracy, we just like the challenge.
Denuvo: Try this one then.
Crackers: Too hard bro, at least give us a chance!
I acknowledge that this isn’t going to be a popular opinion in a piracy sub, but the main reason people hate Denuvo is that it works.
It’s basically killed the entire game hacking scene, because by the time they break it, nobody is interested in the game any more. There’s like one person left that can do it, and they’re more than a little bit odd.
It may be “anti-consumer”, but you know what was worse? All the other shit they tried on PC. Always online bullshit. Single player games that you couldn’t save any more if your connection wobbled. Actual rootkits.
Death to the concept of intellectual property and all but I’ve never actually felt Denuvo making problems for me when I played a game using it, you’re right it seems to be working as advertised.
I’m still hoping someone to crack it in a more reliable and fast manner, fuck large gamedev companies and their profit margins.
I’ve seen Denuvo combined with the always online requirement with the latest Far Cry 6 on steam. The always online requirement makes a cracked version worth it in my use case.
Most bad Denuvo stuff seems to come from any extra DRM they add as well, just in case Denuvo wasn’t enough. Always online sounds like one of those extras, because I don’t think it’s part of Denuvo itself. I think the Denuvo online requirements are when you install, every X days (seems to vary from two weeks to a month, probably configurable per game), and when you change your hardware configuration.
Denuvo alone is enough, because as soon as Denuvo is removed, the rest can be removed by regular mortal hackers.
I haven’t pirated any actual software since the 1990s (too cowardly) but my hatred for Denuvo and the like burns with unsurpassed intensity. I will never knowingly buy a game that includes it. “Anti-tampering” indeed. I’m not sure if that shit should be legally allowed at all, but certainly not in ordinary mass-market PC games.
It does require you be online, and it is essentially a “rootkit.” Its malware features are more polite and better hidden than some of the worst of what has been tried before, but that just adds to the danger that it might be seen as acceptable by people who don’t know any better.
People hate Denuvo because it requires a regular connection to the Internet and has a big impact on the performance of games.
I’m not buying these games not because I can’t pirate games with Denuvo (I don’t really pirate games at all anymore) but because they tend to run like shit.
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⚓ Dedicated to the discussion of digital piracy, including ethical problems and legal advancements.
Release a DEMO, like the old days. So we can DECIDE FOR OURSELVES!!
Its a simple fucking technique. We only pirate to try, if its shit - then fuck you. If its good - then you have a purchase.
I mean I just pirate it and play the pirated version lmfao.
No sense in paying money at that point
Actually yes.
In my childhood it wasn’t very easy to find a licensed copy (TBF, even pirate copy sometimes), but demos would be distributed with magazines etc.
And after playing a demo which you like a licensed honestly bought copy becomes emotionally much better than piracy.
It was a working mechanism. For games which are not crap anyway.
You can return games on Steam tbh, enough of a demo for me if you’re a Steam user.
I think you can also return physical copies? Depends.
Two hours really isn’t enough for a lot of games. Some games you can’t even get through the tutorial in two hours.
That’s the problem though. They want you to commit to a purchase and hope that you forget about your 2h grace window
Basically lit the fuse to keep people pirating…
Do I need to repeat the Gabe Newell line again?
“Cash rules everything around me, C.R.E.A.M., get the money”
“Piracy is a service problem?”
“These things… they take time” -Gabe Newell
I have always wanted to be a giant space crab?
I think the best way is to just have basic piracy detection, if someone trips it, then have a message that you can get past appearing guilt tripping them for it lmao
Back to OG times in gaming where you would have stupid hats saying pirate or other weird things happening in game like not being able to complete it if it was cracked, good times.
I’ve seen RWS’s take on this a bunch recently. This feels like a feel-good PR move because they don’t have any substantive updates on their actual games.
Running With Scissors is a “legendary” developer?
Postal was a violent mess that didn’t age well.
Postal 2 was a buggy mess that also didn’t age well.
After that, it was just legitimately bad games on top of the humor not aging well. (They literally don’t even acknowledge Postal 3)
Seriously, who the fuck would label them legendary? They’ve been a broken mess for over a decade.
People who agree with their stance on DRM.
Theres a definite trend of people elevating the value of opinions of those they agree with. It makes any kind of intelligent discourse very hard to do.
For clicks and to bait comments exactly like this one.
They didn’t release the third game, it was done by a third party (I believe with some licensing shenanigans?), which is why they don’t acknowledge Postal 3. They didn’t make it. Which is why they (somewhat recently) have given the A-OK to pirate that game.
I’d assume that last part is why they say legendary.
While I’m not fond of the company, and perhaps legendary is a bit excessive, they’re still a big name that made remarkable videogames. With Postal 2 they nailed it, can’t say about the other 3 because I’ve never played them.
All this serves to prove is that you have fucking god awful taste
I’m thinking that’s gonna be a bit of projection on your part.
I’m honestly disappointed to see people disrespecting two absolute classics in such a way.
I can understand not liking the first postal, but postal 2? I’m afraid there is no hope for you
I piss on people who talk shit about Postal 2 and then I throw a cow head over their fence. If they dare to continue I get the cat …
Poor cat, his hole can only take so much
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Glad to know you never grew out of your edgy gamer bro stage. Being able to pee on things is peak gaming, amirite? /s
I’m literally saying this as one of the few people who watched the Postal movie more than once simply because it had David Foley in it and I’m okay with bad movies.
Pretty much, yeah. I don’t feel the need to posture as somehow intellectually superior to a game that is designed to be fucking stupid. I appreciate and recognise all art for exactly what it is.
It’s more that there’s actually games that rise to the level of great art that are designed to be fucking stupid, like Katamari Damacy, which leans hard into absurdism, and is often quite funny, but more importantly the gameplay is original, brilliant, and fun. The art direction in KD is also off the charts quality, especially the music, all of which was written for the game.
Look, I loved Postal 2 back in the day (I always sort of rolled my eyes at Postal, but 2 seemed less serious and more tongue-in-cheek). I might even replay it someday, but it’s not great art. Especially now it’s ugly, it’s clunky, more importantly it continues to be a buggy mess. Not even a Gary Coleman cameo could save it. They were fun games for what they were and for the time they existed in, and it’s okay to remember them for that, but it’s a little absurd to just act like the world hasn’t moved on and that they were great art to begin with. Art direction was bad, level design was bad, there was a lot of bad stuff about the game, beyond even getting into the edgelord shit.
Bad art is okay. I love B-movies, but we don’t have to pretend they’re anything other than what they are: B-movies.
I’m sorry but that is exactly why postal 2 is good. Unpretentious, offensive, provocative, unpolished raw art designed to generate chaos - whilst simultaneously having that certain charm which is impossible to put into words (hence the cult following) - which is exactly what it did. All of that without punching down (OK there was a bit of dodgy stuff, but for the time period it isn’t too bad). Truly one of the greats and you can’t change my mind, so we’ll have to agree to disagree.
You’re not the target audience, the target audience is edgy teenage boys. Postal 2 was the perfect game for 13 year old me.
You’re right labeling them as “legendary” is just weird tho.
The Titanic is a legendary ship, but it wasn’t a very good ship
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But everybody has heard about the Titanic.
I’d label them legends in the sense that they’re probably one of the game studios I know by name the best even though that’s all they have to show for it. Postal 2 for as bugged and edgy as it is, is an extraordinarily famous game.
Sure
Ehh… Even putting aside things like Nintendo… Let’s just say I know the names of actual developers on several small studios, including bad games, and I have no idea of a single person who made Postal
No one said the legends were good.
Denuvo is the apex of a long history of bad choices.
Maybe actually sell us the games in a way we really own it, without any sort of online activation/account/telemetry/data-gathering like when we could buy a disc and just use it, and it should all be ok.
I feel like a dinosaur every-time I think this nowadays, but what is so problematic with the “own as in physically own” that is so hard to implement? If they want to provide a service, sell a service.
In the past I used pirate versions of games I bought just to be able to play them offline, or because I did not agree with the terms of service. It is so much for our info, it goes beyond just knowing you are the real owner of the software copy: it comes to the point where it looks like it’s to guarantee we are not its’ owner.
Now some DRMs even destroy gaming performance and its just faster to use 'ked versions. I hope it changes somehow.
Is it really possible to own them properly? If in almost all cases we lack the source code and there are even proprietary requirements for both software and hardware, what chance do they have of working halfway well in a few decades?
And with stuff like SecuRom, even owning a legit physical copy of the game does not help you when the service vanishes
Abolish intellectual property (and private property in general)
Even the devs hate denuvo. It slows down the build times and makes it hard to debug.
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Nah the Devs definitely get forced to use Denuvo by corporate… Stockholders and such. Denuvo gets advertised as the best anti piracy method and stockholders see that and say I want that in our game.
Not if you work for a massive publisher.
edit: or if you publish under one. It’s likely in your contract. Devs really don’t want to use it, but they are required to do so.
So why would anyone hate Denuvo? Nobody is forcing you to play Denuvo-using games. It was your choice.
The publisher? The business types?
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What is it with clowns like this digging their heels in and blaming literally anything but the precious MBAs that are plaguing and ruining literally everything about modern society.
In the comment you replied to they meant video game development companies by “developers” not the individual employees at those companies who do the actual work of developing games. Typically the actions of video game development companies are driven by the MBAs who have most of the big picture decision making power rather than the individual employees who develop the games.
have you ever been employed anywhere in your life? have you ever had to pay bills, rent?
Yes, of course. But what has that anything to do with employees? Developers are not employees, they are the developing company.
what? that’s just false, developers are people, they are employed to develop the game, usually their employer is the game studio.
i think what he means is that the “developer” has the power because he “develops” the games and without him the games can’t be “developed”
it’s a silly way of mistaking a role for the individual that fulfills it. the role is necessary… not that particular individual
What kind of paradise are you living in?
The developer company has a choice. They rather maybe not prefer it, but that’s what it is. But saying the word “hate” is wrong.
Bruh… Developing is a job. Hello? You ever have a job before? The developers don’t just work for there selves? Knock knock who’s there? Oh nobody, just, ya know a BOSS… Ya mighta heard of it? No, I don’t mean the movie Boss Baby
Everyone in this thread is failing to understand that “developers” in this context can mean both “people who develop videogames” and “businesses that develop videogames.” As the people who develop videogames are not always the ones who make decisions like this at businesses that develop videogames those two different things that everyone is using the same word for often have opposing positions on the matter.
Lol what
In most cases, the studios that can afford denuvo are also owned by the publisher. Like Sega, ea, and Activision.
so whenever your boss tells you to do something you think is not the correct course of action you just quit right? you just leave your job without having another one lined up and probably risk losing your home, all because your boss told you to this thing you find annoying, you don’t have a choice to work or not work, the choice is to work or starve, which is not a choice.
Hating is a strong word. Dislike, maybe.
even if they do hate it and consider it to be the work of the devil, they still don’t really have a choice, game development is a really competitive industry, if devs aren’t leaving their jobs when the studio makes them overwork 80 hour work weeks right before release for a month in order to hit the deadline then they’re definitely not leaving just because they hate having to implement denuvo.
they do have a metaphorical gun in the form of bills that need to be paid…
It’s still a choice. I have been on the bad end of these deals and I just said no. I was fired and all.
I don’t think they hate it, they just not prefer it. But saying the word “hate” means that it is their line that they won’t cross, which is false.
“Postal” is such a steaming pile of edgelord shit that even Civvie11 doing videos on the franchise doesn’t make it any more bearable for me.
Critical support for this developer’s message here, that said.
I appreciate Postal 2 because the premise is kinda funny. It’s deliberately designed so you can beat it without doing any violence at all. You’re given tasks like get milk, pick up your paycheck, etc. And it involves standing in lines or people berating you. You’re stuck doing tedious annoying repetitive tasks, or you can get a flamethrower. I think standing in line to get Gary Coleman’s autograph takes 90 minutes if you do it normally.
Otherwise it’s very silly early 2000s edgy white guy dudebro humor
That premise, while cute, hasn’t aged well for me. The ever-rising number of chanlords shooting up their schools (and elder chanlords murder-suiciding their own families) because no one would blow them behind the bleachers (or because the wife left him or the kids won’t call anymore) sours the premise of “wouldn’t it be funny to murder everyone that mildly annoyed you” white guy dudebro humor for me long ago.
Yo its a video game
“Yo its a video game”
Yeah, and that changes nothing about why I don’t like it. You’re giving a lazy thought terminating cliche here.
EDIT: Christ, you activated a long dormant alt account just to stan for your edgy video game? That’s just sad.
This is my only lemmy account and I made it before reddit killed 3rd party apps as I quit going on there. Going through my post history to try and judge me is something weird to do though
Rising from dormancy while otherwise doing nothing with that account, just to announce how mad you are that your edgy game wasn’t to my liking is weirder to me.
“Yo its just an opinion”
I comment when I have something relevant to say and typically delete mean shit after typing it out cause morons like you aren’t worth my time.
Have a nice life man. Hope you find something you can enjoy your time at instead of whatever it is you’re doing.
It is bad for the consumer… but the alternative is instant cracks, as seen with a lot of games on r/Crackwatch that don’t have the DRM.
Denuvo is the first software in a long time that has been able to successfully stop the supposedly inevitable march to cracking. It’s a miracle that more AAA devs don’t use it, since it works so well. (EMPRESS aside)
You can hate me all you want for saying this, but the war against piracy, for the most part, has been won.
Crackers: We don’t do it for the piracy, we just like the challenge.
Denuvo: Try this one then.
Crackers: Too hard bro, at least give us a chance!
I acknowledge that this isn’t going to be a popular opinion in a piracy sub, but the main reason people hate Denuvo is that it works.
It’s basically killed the entire game hacking scene, because by the time they break it, nobody is interested in the game any more. There’s like one person left that can do it, and they’re more than a little bit odd.
It may be “anti-consumer”, but you know what was worse? All the other shit they tried on PC. Always online bullshit. Single player games that you couldn’t save any more if your connection wobbled. Actual rootkits.
Death to the concept of intellectual property and all but I’ve never actually felt Denuvo making problems for me when I played a game using it, you’re right it seems to be working as advertised.
I’m still hoping someone to crack it in a more reliable and fast manner, fuck large gamedev companies and their profit margins.
I’ve definitely played games that used it, and I wouldn’t even have known without the handful of negative steam reviews shouting about it.
“I’m too stupid to notice the difference so it must not exist”
I’ve seen Denuvo combined with the always online requirement with the latest Far Cry 6 on steam. The always online requirement makes a cracked version worth it in my use case.
Most bad Denuvo stuff seems to come from any extra DRM they add as well, just in case Denuvo wasn’t enough. Always online sounds like one of those extras, because I don’t think it’s part of Denuvo itself. I think the Denuvo online requirements are when you install, every X days (seems to vary from two weeks to a month, probably configurable per game), and when you change your hardware configuration.
Denuvo alone is enough, because as soon as Denuvo is removed, the rest can be removed by regular mortal hackers.
I haven’t pirated any actual software since the 1990s (too cowardly) but my hatred for Denuvo and the like burns with unsurpassed intensity. I will never knowingly buy a game that includes it. “Anti-tampering” indeed. I’m not sure if that shit should be legally allowed at all, but certainly not in ordinary mass-market PC games.
It does require you be online, and it is essentially a “rootkit.” Its malware features are more polite and better hidden than some of the worst of what has been tried before, but that just adds to the danger that it might be seen as acceptable by people who don’t know any better.
You act like this is some hidden secret lmao. You should change your name to Captain OBVIOUS.
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People hate Denuvo because it requires a regular connection to the Internet and has a big impact on the performance of games.
I’m not buying these games not because I can’t pirate games with Denuvo (I don’t really pirate games at all anymore) but because they tend to run like shit.
I pirate because the original runs like shit.