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As Gabe Newell said, piracy is a service issue.
I’ve selected this text as I think it’s the heart of your post, if you disagree then let me know. I don’t agree with this statement, I think that it is a rights issue, and I think I can prove that with a thought experiment.
Suppose for example, game companies took this idea to heart and did not do anything to stop piracy, they only focused on providing the most seamless storefront and gaming experiences possible. They create a store that works perfectly, has all the features you’d want, and has no DRM of any kind - this includes no log in needed, they go by the honor system. They expect people to only download a game that they’ve paid for. Here’s the question: will people pay for the games or not? I have a view of human nature that people generally go along the path of least resistance, and I think this is born out by evidence (but I could be wrong about this). Some people will pay for the games on moral grounds, the vast majority will not. If a developer wants to get paid, they have to make sure people pay for it. And now we have DRM. The goal of DRM is to make piracy annoying enough that the path of least resistance is to just buy the game.
This, to me at least, proves that piracy is only a service issue in a world where DRM exists. Because DRM makes piracy annoying. If people find the DRM more annoying than piracy, it has failed to be effective DRM.
So to get to the heart of things, I agree with you that when DRM is more annoying than piracy something has gone terribly wrong. Denuvo, in my life, for the way I play games, is not and never has even gotten close to being more annoying than piracy.
But at the end of the day, I don’t think it is morally or ethically wrong to put DRM on a game or storefront. I just see it as something to work out on a practical level, case by case. But I made my original comment in the first place because it seems to me like a lot of people have issues with it on a moral level, which I think is silly.
Because you didn’t make it. I’ll grant that western ideas about intellectual property are weird and inconsistent, but I’m taking it as a given that we hold that idea in common. If a writer writes something, that sequence of words in the order they wrote is their “property” and they get to determine who gets to see it.
I am cognizant that in this kind of space a lot of people probably won’t hold this view of intellectual property and there are good arguments as to why it shouldn’t exist at all. I suppose at this moment I’m not really in the mood to go down this rabbit hole, so forgive me if that is where you want to go.
You know these are valid concerns, and I have two thoughts about this. The first is that I don’t understand how this doesn’t also apply to Steam or Epic Games or any other basic storefront (except GOG of course). I see a lot of headlines about Denuvo but none about Steam. People seem to selectively apply their hate in this matter.
The second thought that I have is that I agree that this is a problem, but I don’t see any other way around it. This is just the trade off of getting AAA games. These are big, complex pieces of IP that require millions to hundreds of millions of dollars of investment that the company making them has to recoup. To ensure that you actually get paid, you have to have DRM. Companies wouldn’t shell out the millions of dollars on DRM unless it was proven to actually work. As I see it, if you like AAA games you just gotta weigh the cost on a game by game basis.
Malicious software that harms your computer’s performance and security, and prevents you from inspecting and modifying the application, is evil.
This is fearmongering. What is always left out of these conversations is exactly how Denuvo is a security risk, which is a tech question of this particular software and not a philosophical one. And I’ll be frank with you, I think people vastly overstate how much of a problem Denuvo is as a piece of software.
But the way performance is framed by anti-Denuvo folks is that it is linearly correlated with enjoyment. This is not so. What I care about (and I will definitely give that this is subjective and depends on the individual) is that a game runs at 4k/60 on my computer at low/mid settings. If it runs faster than that, my enjoyment of the game isn’t increased. If it runs worse than that, my enjoyment is decreased.
So if the game passes that bar with DRM, it doesn’t matter to me if it would be faster without DRM. If DRM is the thing that causes the game to go below that bar, then I have a problem with DRM. But that is almost never the case.
Yes, and you have to weigh the loss of performance and/or privacy on a case by case basis. What bothers me is that people take cases where DRM strongly impacts the experience of the thing, and apply it as a general argument against DRM, when that is not an argument against DRM, but an argument against using that particular piece of software.
I’m kind of tired of DRM headlines in my feed. Whether a game has Denuvo or not doesn’t actually matter when purchasing a game. What matters is this: is the game fun? Does the game pass the bar of acceptable performance? Discussions around DRM are mostly a distraction and a diversion from things that actually matter.
It’s not evil. DRM as a concept is not evil. There is actually no real philosophical justification for why it is wrong to use DRM to protect your software. Because if you made it, it is yours and you get to decide how other people use it.
The paranoia that surrounds things like DRM show just how laughably selfish and entitled some gamers are.
So what I’m hearing you say here is: “If smart people believe in magic sky fairy, magic sky fairy must be logical to believe in,” which is about the level of discourse I’d expect from someone unfamiliar with the concept of critical thinking. Thanks for being an object lesson.
This is such a bad reading of the comment that I can only imagine you’re acting in bad faith. You have made the assumption that reason will inevitably lead people to the same conclusions about the world, but that is not true, and that is what the OP is bringing up. How is it that many people, when presented with the same sets of facts, and using the same reasonable principles, can come to differing conclusions? This question should keep you up at night, but instead it seems you’re only interested in saying “those other people are dumb, I am smart.”
As someone who’s been there done that, this is the worst time to try and get into academics in the humanities. English departments are downsizing everywhere. There’s an incoming “demographic collapse” coming to higher ed by 2026 - i.e. birth rates went down between 2008-2011 by a large degree and that cohort is 25-30% smaller than previous years. A lot of small, tuition dependent colleges are going to fold. In preparation, non-essential departments are cutting people like crazy. STEM and business are money makers, English and History aren’t.
Best thing you can do with a creative writing degree is go into corporate communications/marketing. Find a gig at an agency and do creative writing on the side.
Technology isn’t an end in itself, it is subordinate to the need to solve problems. I don’t see how we can have relevant technical progress if tech groups don’t consider “social issues” (in quotes because I’m abusing that label to include a lot of things in my head). Although maybe we’re thinking about this at different levels of scale.
Twitter isn’t and never was useful as an organizing tool. Arab spring was a failure. Twitter is actually more useful to the ruling class than not because it gives a way for the masses to expend it’s restless energy without changing anything.