The_Raven on 13/12/2008 at 23:51

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Can't say I was particularly impressed with that article after a quick skim of it. It seems to me in some areas the author is saying "DRM isn't going away, so shut up." I also noticed that the author does appear to base his opinion on conjecture in some areas, which puts me I'll at ease; though, in his defence, there is very little hard data to rely upon in this issue. I found his use of Bioshock and Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory as examples that DRM combats zero-day piracy to be slightly misguided. The main reason, from my understanding, for the delay in the release of cracks for these games was the fact that this was one of the first times that the piracy groups encountered these versions of StarForce and SecuROM, repectively. There's also the possibility, among other things, that just because Ubisoft never encountered problems with StarForce during their testing that it couldn't have been at fault for the issues that were claimed during referenced court case.

Overall, I don't think the article is absolutely terrible; however, there's several things I noticed that came off as biased and appeared to be based solely on conjecture of one form or another.

Zygoptera on 14/12/2008 at 03:29

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The article is rubbish, I'm afraid, and if its aim was to counter propaganda it's a failure because it uses propaganda itself.

Off the top of my head, and collated while watching cricket:

Fallout3 was pirated extensively (100k+) for the x360. Conveniently, that pre-release piracy is excluded in his figures looking at 'the previous month's (November's) downloads' A new PC torrent outstrips an x360 one that's over a month old? I'll alert the press immediately!

Uses Steam (with its region specific prices) as only online distributor for games. Dude, I can like totally get Fallout 3 download at (http://www.gamersgate.com/?page=product&what=view&sku=DD-FALLOUT3US) US prices if I want to, as I am a reasonably informed individual not someone with an axe to grind (sheesh, it isn't that hard to find Steam alternatives).

Counters 'US isn't typical' figures with 'European' (no numnut, that's the UK, where the console penetration is actually higher than the US's and a market which is utterly atypical of Europe's in general) ones

Uses outdated World of Goo piracy figure (not that the updated one is great, but still, research ftw, dude)

Uses Bioshock as an example of 5:1 console sale ratio. Actual ratio is very close to 1:1 (yes, really, check the figures, 2.2 million PC/360 units shipped, more than 1 million PC copies sold gives a maximum 6:5 360:PC ratio). Uses Fallout 3 based on previous garbage figures (in perspective, per the NPD figures from qt3 and bethesda's press, F3 has shipped 4.7 million copies, but sold a maximum of around 575k on 360 in the US). Relies overly on the 'blockbuster' console model for equivocating sales, when PC releases always sell more steadily, as can be seen most clearly with Bioshock.

Cherrypicks examples for user/ critic scores off metacritic. Easy to do to illustrate any point you want: Halo 2 72/52 (PC) 95/79 (xbox) Far Cry2 86/56 (PC) 85/80 (360) and I've just proved that console ports are shitty low quality affairs poorly received by PC players¹.

"..this type of statement demonstrates the deliberate ignorance on piracy that Stude and the PCGA typically demonstrate in their push to mindlessly market and hype PC gaming." Yeah dude, and you've been totally, 100% honest, fair and above board, even handed and equivocal, :picard:

Cites Bioshock as a triumph of DRM, ignores the 100ks of 360 downloads. Ignores that the titles following it and using activation have all been cracked within a few days or even before release.

Apparently lack of DRM causes piracy and activation based stops it. Well, there's as direct a comparison as you could hope for able to be made right there in the table: F3 to Far Cry 2. F3 beat FC2 like a red haired stepchild sales wise on both PC and consoles but has been pirated only slightly more despite the lack of activation based DRM.

Amazingly, recites John Riccitiello's '0.2% of customers have DRM problems' and then links to figures that completely contradict him. In fact, his figures indicate that as much as 1 in 25 legitimately bought copies will have been 'bricked' within a year²

His views on Starforce appear to have been gained by five minutes googling and checking Wikipedia. The potential damage Starforce caused to optical drives was well documented, though so far as I am aware was never proved unequivocally, as was its breaking of legitimate programs and other related problems.

SecuROM, well, the evidence that it is, potentially at least, spyware is to be found on well known anti SecuROM website, er, (http://www.securom.com/solution_pa.asp) Securom.com where it cites the ability to "collect important market information prior allowing them [sic] to use your software". He's right that there is no conclusive evidence that there's ring 0 access in SecuROM, though it is likely, as that would be by far the most efficient and secure way of tackling emulators etc which almost certainly have ring 0 access themselves. Of course, he neatly sidesteps the 'bricking' issue or loss of activations not due to failing to deactivate on uninstall (which is largely a red herring, even with a ludicrously bloated entity such as GTA4 my 2+ year old HDD could install it roughly thirty times before I ran out of space) but due to 'stealth' reactivations from hardware upgrades, or reinstalling windows or similar. And I can say for 100% certainty that there are a number of other non trivial problems with SecuROM- every SecuROM game I have thinks it isn't installed except for whichever one I installed last- so King's Bounty is fine, but NWN2 tries to reinstall itself every time I put the dvd in (which would necessitate multi hundred MB patch downloadings, again) and if I wanted to play Bioshock or Stalker or GTA: SA the only way to do so is to bypass the menu and jump straight to the exe.

"A straw man argument is an informal fallacy based on misrepresentation of an opponent's position". Ah irony thy name is {tweakguides author}

And finally, I actually agree with his Practical Solutions.

So in summary, might scrape a C, if I felt generous and with the concluding page dragging the mark up. Clearly either deliberately biased or at least ill informed for the most part, lacks logic and reads more like an apologia for consumer reaming than an informed and impartial view, plus its typically NA centric in its Yay NPD.

¹Yeah, I haven't of course.
²Yeah, I can use statistics creatively too. Fairer measure using a non-linear progression is around 2% having their DVDs bricked.

I shall start a petition to get :picard: legitimised as a smiley if only to stop me having to edit half my messages to get rid of the :p smiley

Zygoptera on 14/12/2008 at 05:12

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"BioShock®, a wholly owned and internally developed title for Xbox 360 and Games for Windows® shipped over 2.2 million units since its debut in late August." (http://ir.take2games.com/ReleaseDetail.cfm?ReleaseID=314411) Direct from 2k's 2nd quarter 2008 statement.

You will, I hope, forgive me if I go by what the people who produced the game say (edit: and are legally obligated to be accurate on points of fact) rather than what VGChartz says, especially since using an inflated figure would have been in 2k's best interests.

june gloom on 14/12/2008 at 05:56

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For those of you wondering about the veracity of the disc drive failure thing, Starforce does some seriously weird shit with your disc drive. I remember that for a while the only way to crack it involved messing around with your drive that involved actually taking the case off and fiddling with the cables. I've never seen copy protection like that before or since. So while it's a bit difficult to find any official numbers on Starforce actually causing it (anecdotal evidence is all we got) I do have to wonder exactly what Starforce is doing with your drives.

Phatose on 14/12/2008 at 08:12

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First of all, contradict is bullshit. The press release clearly states *over* 2.2 million units. Unless your claim is that the PC version sold under 80k units, they're in perfect agreement.


Secondly, if you're going to claim anything about European sales of 360 versus PC, please provide something to back that up. Like, actual numbers.


Thirdly, I imagine their are some Australians around here who would solidly kick you ass for believe anything that isn't Japan or the USA is Europe.


Fourthly, generally speaking, if you're going to call BS on someone else's numbers, fine. But really, if there's like a goddamned million objects out of 2 or 3 million that you're not sure if they're accounted for or not, you should probably just call bullshit instead of tossing out your own figures.