Tim Willits supports always-on DRM

[caco_killer]

hervoheebo said:

I only buy from companies I like. Oppressive DRM is over the line. Sorry, id.

Rage does not have "always on" DRM, though. I wouldn't consider one man's opinion representative of the entire company.

[hardcore_gamer]

Xeros612 said:

Story here.


You've gotta be fucking kidding.

I would like to remind you that Tim (unless I am wrong) is a level designer and thus has precisely zero say in what DRM is put (if any) on Id Software games.

I see no reason to feel worried because some level designer at Id says he likes DRM.

[Enjay]

True, but if Tim has an opinion on it, then chances are that it has been discussed around the office and, perhaps, his opinion is representative of the general feeling at id.

Or perhaps not.

[Bloodshedder]

Okay, so, misleading thread title edited. "Question mark" is a dreadful tactic, I'm afraid.

[scalliano]

And so another name is added to the ever-growing list of industry wankstains I don't like. Take your juggernaut and cram it up your arse, Tim. I'm saving my £40 and spending it on SNES games. Up yours.

As for lease-gaming, you can count me out on that score, too.

[deathbringer]

From the opinions in this thread I'd be laying money on a "20th anniversary special" re-make of the video game crash coming up.

BUT this is Doomworld and I imagine on most other game sites always-on DRM is met with the attitude of "WEL IT STOPZ HAX AND VIRUSEZ SO IT MUST BE GOOD LOL"

[hardcore_gamer]

deathbringer said:

BUT this is Doomworld and I imagine on most other game sites always-on DRM is met with the attitude of "WEL IT STOPZ HAX AND VIRUSEZ SO IT MUST BE GOOD LOL"

What do you mean by saying "BUT this is Doomworld"?

It comes of as being really elitist. DRM is pretty much universally hated in the gaming community. I have yet to find a single gaming community where most of the forum populace sees it as a good thing.

The only people who seem to like it are the greedy industry people who want to control how people play their games and out of touch with reality types like this Tim guy appears to be.

[MudBlaster_Ex]

To be honest, I don't see what's so bad about always online DRM. As long as you have a good connection, it won't affect your gameplay, and helps to stop pirates.

[Sharessa]

scalliano said:

And so another name is added to the ever-growing list of industry wankstains I don't like. Take your juggernaut and cram it up your arse, Tim. I'm saving my £40 and spending it on SNES games. Up yours

I've never really liked him myself. He's said a lot of stupid shit in the past, too. I wouldn't be surprised if he was at least partially responsible for the firings of the founders.

deathbringer said:

From the opinions in this thread I'd be laying money on a "20th anniversary special" re-make of the video game crash coming up.

Don't you mean 30th? The video game crash happened before I was born.

[TheDarkArchon]

MudBlaster_Ex said:

To be honest, I don't see what's so bad about always online DRM. As long as you have a good connection, it won't affect your gameplay, and helps to stop pirates.

The problem is that the first two things aren't a sure thing and ultimately it isn't worth the legitimate player to put up with that shit for pirates who will, at the end of the day, get a version with all of it cut out and thus have a better version.

[DuckReconMajor]

Though this doesn't apply to Doomworld because everyone here has shitty internet.

[The Ultimate DooMer]

GreyGhost said:

In any case, what happens to "your" game when the publisher decides to shut down the authentication servers?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence

And this is exactly how it will be with all forms of electronic entertainment/software...all about control, nothing more/less.

[Maes]

So I take that there will be no "connectionless" videogames or that they will be considered a niche product/sold at a premium?

[scalliano]

MudBlaster_Ex said:

To be honest, I don't see what's so bad about always online DRM. As long as you have a good connection, it won't affect your gameplay, and helps to stop pirates.

This statement is fallacious on a number of levels:

1. Not everyone has a stable connection. Basically you're saying "if they're on dial-up, fuck 'em". I am saying this as someone with a decent fibreoptic connection, but even then sometimes my router fucks out. It happens. Even then, I live in an area where vandalism is rife, and the other week they actually dug up a section of cable and set it alight and my TV, phone and internet were out for almost two days, along with the rest of the street. What then?

2. It does not help to stop piracy. It might slow them down for a couple of weeks, but that's it. A number of Ubisoft's online-only games have been cracked already. The difference this kind of DRM makes is ultimately negligible at best, regardless of what Ubisoft may claim.

@deathbringer: Personally, I would LOVE to see another 1983-style crash (OK, I was only 5 when the first one occurred, but hear me out). That event was caused by a number of factors though - not just the shitty ET and Pac-Man 2600 games and their associated mismanagement, but also a lack of innovation, an overblown market and absolutely NO quality control. But what was born of that disaster was a new age of innovation in gaming with Nintendo and Sega leading the charge. That is what we need now, but as terrible as the industry is at the moment, it's unlikely to happen. Today's gamers aren't sufficiently disillusioned to say no when confronted with such an obstacle as the aggressive DRM we're seeing now. At the risk of sounding like an old fart, I'm happy to be stuck in the past.

[Nems]

Tim Willits also loves punishing those who buy games used, as indicated by new purchase incentive for Rage.

EDIT: I was a bit on the hasty side of things when I posted this. Still, it doesn't stop the fact that I'm disappointed with the full retard direction Tim has taken and that I'm still going to watch this closely as it may very well affect my purchasing decisions in the future.

[Technician]

Nems said:

Tim Willits also loves punishing those who buy games used, as indicated by new purchase incentive for Rage.

[Snakes]

What with the arch-vile/revenant mix-up, I'm beginning to think that Tim Willits isn't actually talking from his heart so much as he is trying to troll Doomworld... and he's doing a damn-good job, too.

[Xeros612]

Tim Pants-On-Head said:
I think that's fair. It's cool. It's outside the main path. We're not detracting from anything.

YES YOU ARE YOU FUCKING GIT. You can't rope off content and then turn around and say nothing was lost. If that were even remotely true and the removal of it from used copies was really that miniscule then WHY EVEN BOTHER PUTTING THAT SYSTEM INTO PLACE. Fuck off. Go cry in a fucking corner with a pistol to your head over used game sales. I don't hear car manufacturers or movie companies or any other industry in the world throwing a hissy fit over fucking used purchases. Congratu-fucking-lations Willits, you've just contributed to the continuing survival of software piracy. Hallelujah! Holy shit! Where's the Tylenol?

[chungy]

Nems said:

Tim Willits also loves punishing those who buy games used, as indicated by new purchase incentive for Rage.

Meh. Rage will require Steam on the PC anyway, so essentially it's impossible to get a used copy on the platform i'll buy it on. I'm not that concerned, honestly.

Also as to "stopping piracy": they might as well give up. a heavily-pirated game is a popular game. It gets people to recommend the game to their friends, and legitimate-game-bonuses might actually provide an incentive for many pirates to buy the game down the line (say, Steam leaderboard or Steam multiplayer (often, you cannot play pirated Steam-mandatory games online with the vast majority of players, only on likewise cracked servers) support, or even simply just saving games to Steam cloud). Piracy is free advertisement from a viewpoint. There are always going to be the people that pirate everything for the sake of getting everything for free, but there's a whole lot more pirates who do it because they're too poor or because the pirated version is superior (often the case with UbiDRM, SecuROM, or GFWL games).

[lupinx-Kassman]

When I buy something, I want to completely own the thing I bought. I don't want a developer to suddenly be able to pull the plug and make my product obsolete. Imagine in a cute fantasy world where all computers had great internet access at day 1, and doom was a game that required a constant net connection to play. It may have still been a great success, but by say 1999, id shuts off the servers and goodbye doom community.

[hex11]

I've been through times where I had no connectivity for many months. Actually that lasted over a year. I had to use the occasional open wifi spot, with varying signal strength, etc. Those days may return if I decide to hit the road again. Heck, at that point I may be completely off grid, relying on solar panels and a couple 6V deep cycle batteries for just basic power needs (supplemented by propane for stove, furnace and fridge).

In the coming months and years, a lot of people may also end up with periods of no connectivity if the local political situation destabilizes. If I were a modern gamer (I'm not, last commercial software I purchased was in 1995), I'd be passing on this DRM bullshit, no matter how good the game sounds.

[Technician]

Xeros612 said:

Congratu-fucking-lations Willits, you've just contributed to the continuing survival of software piracy. Hallelujah! Holy shit! Where's the Tylenol?

Actually, I think his whole rant should be directed at ol' Timmy-boy.

hardcore_gamer said:

If John Cormack steps forward and repeats Tim's claims then yes, I will be fucking pissed off. Until then, you people are basically just raging over almost nothing.

What, you think Tim just makes shit up? Why would Carmack's word garner more weight than Willits?

[Nems]

caco_killer said:

Steam has had an offline mode for years. All it wants to do is make sure your game is fully updated first, so its not a really hassle to deal with.

I know. I was saying the last time I had tried Steam's offline mode (back when Steam was first out) that it was a piece of shit. :P It's improved well beyond the last time I used it.

chungy said:

Meh. Rage will require Steam on the PC anyway, so essentially it's impossible to get a used copy on the platform i'll buy it on. I'm not that concerned, honestly.

At the moment I'm still torn on if my purchase of Rage will be for the PC or the console, which is why I brought that up. Of course if I get it for the PC (dunno what kind of specs are required to run it, that and I'd like to see what kind of mod support Rage has, if any, before buying it) it's going to be brand new. However, if it's a console purchase for me, that's where things get iffy.

On the one hand, my experiences with second-hand purchases have been mixed with leanings toward shitty. The GameStops in my area are notorious for not even checking the discs to see if they even work so for all I know, I could be going into a used purchase that doesn't work. While they do have a return policy, my experiences with those hasn't exactly been equitable or satisfactory.

On the other hand, I don't exactly have the money to buy new games, so it's either wait until there's a price drop or buy used. On top of that, I'd like to try out a game in some way before deciding to buy or not. Maybe I'm not just looking in the right places, but I haven't seen many demos for upcoming games where I can see if I even want the game. I don't like blowing $60 on a game I thought I would like only to find out at the end of the day it's, to me, nothing more than an expensive skeet target. :v

I do understand where you're coming from when it comes to PC purchases. However, Rage may not be a PC purchase for me or for others, so for me/others it's kind of a 'damned if I/they do, damned if I/they don't' situation if it's a console purchase.

[Ultraboy94]

Well, my copy of Half-Life 2 seems to have always on-DRM.
Steam won't let me play it if I'm offline. I can still play Half-Life 1 offline, though...

The idea that this will stop piracy is stupid, anyway. Piracy has always been there even when everyone was offline using tapes or cartridges to play games. Piracy adapts just as fast as anti-piracy does to stop it, if not faster. It still hasnt stopped the majority of people paying for the game and the companies making a profit before, so why worry?
All this anti-piracy is counter-productive as A. things like always on DRM piss enough people off for them to lose sales and B. it INTRODUCES more people to piracy as its basically free publicity for it.

This would seem more of a publisher's push than a developers, however. I'm suprised Activision hasn't done this sort of thing yet.

[deference]

advocating ubisoft-styled drm? piracy? this is new and exciting and has never been discussed before.

oh well. fuck you, willits. moving on...

[GreyGhost]

Nems said:

Tim Willits also loves punishing those who buy games used, as indicated by new purchase incentive for Rage.

Heh - one advantage of being a retro gamer is not having to put up with shit like that, or at least not until the current generation of games become retro. Should I live long enough to witness that and still care, I'll probably have to re-classify myself as a video game antiquarian. Stuff DRM!

[DeathevokatioN]

Never knew Tim Willits was such a smug prick.

[hervoheebo]

caco_killer said:

Rage does not have "always on" DRM, though. I wouldn't consider one man's opinion representative of the entire company.

Sure sounds like it. He's being too bold again.

[Vesperas_]

The official statistic, IIRC, is gaming companies lose around 1% of their revenue due to piracy. As a general rule of thumb, a pirated copy of a game would not have been a sale for a company anyway, as most people who pirate games wouldn't be able to afford it. Gaming is an extremely expensive hobby and since so many games these days are essentially rehashed yearly releases with only a handful of valuable changes from the last iteration, people simply don't want to spend money on something that they don't feel is worth its asking price.

This is also why used video game sales are so high. People purchase games because they look interesting or whatever and resell them to bring their paying price back to what they feel the game was essentially worth (usually around $20-30). If someone enjoys a game tremendously, there is little chance they'll sell it. Companies do end up in the red over piracy however, I believe, since they spend so much time and money developing strategies to deter pirates, when well over 90% of the people that pirate the game wouldn't have paid for it anyway. They are not going to force that sale or increase their revenue no matter what kind of anti-piracy measure they put in place.

I remember when Doom 3 was released and id Software claiming they lost sales due to piracy, which I found misguided. id Software lost sales because Doom 3 was nothing like the original Doom really, was over-hyped, was a mixed-bag for gameplay and most people weren't even sure how well it would run on the PC. I remember purchasing an Xbox because I knew my PC wouldn't run it and while I personally did enjoy Doom 3 more or less, if I could go back in time, I wouldn't have done it again.

Tim Willits needs to get with the program. This bad PR with DRM and whatever alone is probably costing them as much as what the pirates truly would have. His example even, Diablo 3... I know a few people that already refuse to buy it simply because of all of the crap Blizzard is (or isn't) doing with it, like lack of LAN support or other features that were standard for Diablo 2. It just smacks of laziness and cutting corners, really. That doesn't exactly spark consumer buying confidence.

Placing unlockable content in place and enforcing always-on simply won't change any of this. Again and again, as many people here and elsewhere have said hundreds if not thousands of times, it only hurts the people who support the company. If companies made compelling games, people would buy it. If you look at Bethesda's Fallout: New Vegas, I'm sure they'd love to say it's pirates that are causing it to have such sluggish sales but the reality is, it's a bug-infested POS with half-assed DLC. I understand the programmers, designers and artists still put in the time to create it, but it simply isn't very compelling or fun, so it really doesn't matter.

[Enjay]

scalliano said:

1. Not everyone has a stable connection. Basically you're saying "if they're on dial-up, fuck 'em".

Indeed, or

If they have a slow broadband connection fuck 'em.
If they want to play on their laptop away from their connection fuck 'em.
If they live in a country with patchy internet cover fuck 'em.
If their connection goes down fuck 'em.
If our servers go down fuck 'em.
...