All around me are familiar faces

>All around me are familiar faces
>worn out places
>worn out faces

Thanks chinks.

>best-in-class service
Clearly not?

it's still best in class since everything else has already been decimated

What other third party DRM services even matter these days?
Denuvo and Uplay? There's not a lot of competition left.

JUST

I remember the days when you had SafeDisc, SecuROM, StarForce, TAGES, and others, all in the market at one time. Fucking years they tried to shove them down our throats, and crackers broke them like twigs.

Then there was a relatively long period where there was basically zero DRM besides Steam, which really doesn't count worth a shit.

Then Denuvo came along, and now its with the other fucking broken protection schemes.

There's some other DRM software out there, some of it quite good like Locklizard, but they are generally not used for videogames. Uplay, Denuvo and to a lesser extent in-house SecuRom derivatives are what are most commonly used.

I work at a company that deals with this type of software and I can tell you this has been a pretty impactful event since Denuvo is considered top of the line.

There are some innovative types of DRM being worked on that are expected to be nearly impossible to crack but they are running into end-user limitations so they're definitely not ready yet. I can't discuss too much about them but if you guys remember the OnLive system where most of the game was running via the cloud and only video was streamed to the actual player, that is a method that is being looked at. Unfortunately it is heavily reliant on internet speed and nobody wants their high-definition textures compressed into an easily streamable size.

that deadzone, and the current preference, is always-online authentication

still largely circumventable, but more and more publishers are putting more and more single-player content behind the online accessibility gate

I think that's where it's all going to go.

Eventually the question becomes "is this steaming AAA load actually worth the hassle of circumventing its protection so I can play it?"

Always online makes people drop games even harder than Denuvo does.
If corperations go for that kind of DRM they better be ready to lose loads and loads of sales from every place with bad connections on Earth.

>Our magical future DRM solution is to just keep the games for ourselves and let people access them as a service

Your "industry" is full of retards.

It doesn't even matter what type of connection a person has or have you forgotten how well that announcement went over for Microsoft and their Xbox One reveal? Several things they said that pissed off their user base and look at how much they've struggled because of it.

The next step is to store your games in the cloud instead of on your drive. You just rent it like netflix, normies will accept this readily because they find it convenient. AAA is a sinking ship, but it's going down in flames and taking your games with them.

This is true and the stigma of always online is probably permanant, but normalfags will buy anything regardless so long as they can actually play it.
If they can't play it even the casul normie bux aren't going anywhere near the game.

And yet the new South Park game remains uncacked.

>hey guys here's a preload uhhmm yeah that's all you get

it was just a matter of how they made the announcement, not the content of it.

the fact is that anyone will buy anything if it's sold to them properly. Always online is an inevitability, and we will absolutely eventually get there. Always remember digital-only-distribution was an anathema to the vast majority of the game-purchasing public before it became the near-universally accepted delivery method it is today.

Also worth remembering the universal pushback against paying twice for your own internet. Now it's a completely accepted price-of-admission for console gaming on literally every platform, and honestly I see it as only a matter of time before it appears in some form or another on PC as well. Humble Monthly and EA Access Pass both test the waters for subscription based services for PC gaming.

I know Gary Jules is basically only known for his cover of that song, but has anyone ever listened to his other stuff?
I've always really liked it,
Heroes and Heroin and Ghosts are my two favorite tracks.

>And yet the new South Park game remains uncacked.

This is correct, in the sense that while online activation such as Uplay was poorly received and ended up being cracked, online is still the only control a publisher has over their software once installed on a user's system.

This is of course the big hurdle. Always-Online is not the biggest issue, since games like Diablo III, Starcraft II, Hitman and so on are actually quite succesfull. But they can be cracked (Diablo III is a special semi-exception even if there is a crack). Streaming content in video format rather than handing users actual model and texture information would make it nearly impossible to crack the game, but as you rightly pointed out, internet speeds are a major hurdle.

Don't be fooled though, while there is vocal backlash against always-on DRM the actual sales numbers don't take that big of a hit. People don't seem to care too much.

You might call it retarded, but this does work.

A very prominent example of this is Diablo III, which actually handles damage rolls and loot rolls server-side. It also saves your character and gear online. What this means is that cracking the game took far longer as all this had to be reverse-engineers into a crack that did these calculations client-side including character saves and spoofed them to the game as if coming from Blizzard's servers (the latter being the easy part).

It's not so much storing the game in the cloud as this still means users will have to download textures and models. The real innovation looked at is an OnLive system where the game is ran on a server and you are simply transmitting your control inputs via the internet and receiving what is essentially just a video feed back. Once latency issues are solved this would be the ideal form of DRM as far as publishers are concerned, with the only drawback being the cost of servers (so only expect this for the big AAA games).

it protects the games BEFORE they're released, protecting the valuable pre-order sales window

I can't say I remember any dislike to digital distribution, but I was still playing on consoles and barely used a pc. Shit, my first games on windows 98 were Diablo and Starcraft, and then Diablo 2 and the expansion on XP. You're right about it being an inevitability, but I disagree that they can sell it properly. I think it's going to be forced. There will be enormous backlash to this, but most people who don't think about this the way you, others, and myself do will inevitably accept it. The pay twice for your own internet thing is also valid, and the users who don't pay for it are always overshadowed by the ones who don't care to pay for it. Slowly but surely, people such as you and I that don't agree with these practices are becoming less and less the target audience, aka the paying customer. Damn glad I kept all my old consoles instead of selling them after all, then again who knows, maybe I'll be happily dead before this shit comes to be?

Post YFW you're not Denuvo.

What happened with denuvofags?

Correct. Sales numbers show that even relatively invasive DRM such as always-online don't stop most people from buying these games.

>You might call it retarded, but this does work.
>
>A very prominent example of this is Diablo III, which actually handles damage rolls and loot rolls server-side. It also saves your character and gear online. What this means is that cracking the game took far longer as all this had to be reverse-engineers into a crack that did these calculations client-side including character saves and spoofed them to the game as if coming from Blizzard's servers (the latter being the easy part).
I really hate this.
This is an extremely niche complaint, and I expect absolutely no sympathy, but I like being able to cheat in my SP games. I miss the days when devs would put cheats into their games, I think cheating in SP is fun and underused, and I like using CE to fuck around in my SP games when I please.

>people think that this is a good thing
sure, we can all have a laugh at Denuvo and the companies that use them.
but remember that this also means greedy companies are more likely to turn to other bullshit like always-online or lobbying for stronger laws against pirating. these fucking greedy faggots have serious capital to throw around.

Denuvo actually wishes it was Anthony Burch.

kek

Rekt.

It was cracked in the first 24 hours, shill.

I for one am much more pragmatic. I want to be able to play SO whenever wherever. I don't always have the wifi (traveling a lot), nor do I have a perfect wifi 24/7. It only takes a 3 seconds cut to fuck your game and make you have to reconnect and shit. I don't want that.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA GET FUCKED NIGGERS

BRING BACK DONGLES

Australia on suicide watch.

Still no PS4 hacks , what went wrong ?