How about an open hardware industry that would employ millions of people? Not to mention the questionable premise that we should have enough work to employ almost everyone. I mean, we're mostly programmers in here. Our primary task is to destroy jobs. Shouldn't free time be a good thing?
People seem to not understand this was a tongue in cheek reference to the NES and the recovery from the 1983 crash...
That being said, I don’t have major qualms about closed hardware. It creates the incentives that have allowed for massive investment in what is now cutting edge technology, and over time it is trickling down to more open hardware.
The number of proprietary technologies in a modern high-end GPU is staggering. Maybe one could say in an alternate timeline open hardware could have beaten companies creating GPUs with proprietary IPs, but it didn’t really happen. So I’ll take 1080tis with binary blobs over the open alternative.
1/3rd of the units sold? Or 1/3rd of the types of consoles? I know several consoles of the era also had DRM, so I’d be curious which ones youre referring to and the time period if referring to 1/3rd sold.
And if Denuovo actually helps sales is not an easy question to answer since no publisher has come out and said it (that I’ve seen).
The premise seems sound enough, sales follow an “inverse hockey stick”, so design DRM meant to delay cracking instead of stop it and you can get more time with maximum interest and sales, with no easy piracy options.
A few times it’s fallen in hours, and pirates started to write it off, but just recently Far Cry 5's implementation lasted weeks, which seems to be what they’re going for (some versions even lasted months on end).
One could argue no pirates would buy instead of wait, and one could argue all pirates would buy instead of wait, but both would be wrong and the truth is somewhere in the middle, publishers have evaluated that question and apparently the answer is something they like enough to keep shaving margins for
If I remember right, DOOM and the latest Tomb Raider used Denuvo and they weren't cracked until a few weeks after release, but they did not report sales above the norm.
Are those digital sales? Usually I see numbers quoted as tracking physical sales, which don’t tell the whole story.
And I still feel only publishers would be able to tell what the “norm” is. They have better insight into what their “norm” is in terms of returns for development and marketing based on game type, release date, and tons of other factors that can’t be correlated casually
>1/3rd of the units sold? Or 1/3rd of the types of consoles? I know several consoles of the era also had DRM, so I’d be curious which ones youre referring to and the time period if referring to 1/3rd sold.
The Famicom did not have the DRM, and accounts for about a third of the total Nintendo sales. That market did not suffer because of the presence of piracy.
As for Denuovo, why would publishers hide data showing it works? And the base capitalism answer doesn't work,continuing to use aggressive DRM gives them information and a power over users that may not directly show a profit.
The rest of your arguments ignore the sales piracy brings because more people talking about it, an effective advertising, and the people who use piracy as a true demo.