MudMan

I am genuinely considering moving away from English language social media altogether. I find my native language media… kind of exhausting, honestly, but it’s still better than what the last Trump term triggered, so… maybe? It has the side advantage of countering some of the whole cultural imperialism, because hey, I’ll suffer it from US coastal elites, but I desperately need an alternative if it’s going to be coming form Elon Musk and Donald Trump, so…

Well, brand and image are relevant, in more ways than direct sales impact (something that “voting with your wallet” often ignores).

But mostly, and this is important, it’s worth remembering that Denuvo’s clients aren’t the people who buy their games, they are the people who sell the games. That’s who Denuvo is selling to. And Denuvo, which is a very big, if not the only, name in town for effective DRM on PC, would like to keep being that.

All else being equal, if Denuvo generates negativity in forums and a similar no-name competitor doesn’t a client (that’s a publisher, not a buyer of the game), may choose to go with the newcomer just to remove the noise, or to prevent an impact on sales they can’t verify.

But also, I imagine people working at Denuvo are kind of over being the random boogeyman of gaming du jour while other DRM providers are actively praised or ignored. I’d consider speaking up, too.

I probably wouldn’t because there’s very little to be gained from that, as this conversation proves, but… you know, I’d consider it.

EDIT: Oh, hey, I hadn’t noticed, but the guy actually responds to this explicitly. Pretty much along these lines, actually:

RPS: A lot of companies seem happy enough with the service Denuvo provides to keep using it. Why are you so concerned about public perception? Why not just let people have their theories and carry on doing your thing?

Andreas Ullmann: Hard to answer. So maybe it’s just… maybe it’s even a personal thing. I’m with the company for such a long time. The guys here are like my family, because a lot of the others here are also here for ages. It just hurts to see what’s posted out there about us, even though it has been claimed wrong for hundreds of times.

On the other hand, I can imagine that this reputation also has some kind of business impact. I can imagine that certain developers, probably more in the indie region or the smaller region, are not contacting us in the first place if they are looking for solutions.

Because currently, there is only two ways to protect a game against piracy, right? Either you don’t, or use our protection. There is no competitor. And I can imagine that there are developers out there who are hesitant to contact us, only because of the reputation. They would probably love to prevent piracy for their game, but they fear the hate and the toxicity of the community if they do so. And maybe they even believe all the claims that are out there - unanswered from us until today - and for this reason don’t contact us in the first place.

If I responded to it, I read it in full.

Also, yes, obviously.

Hollow Knight is from 2017, I don’t think it was out there draining business form this seven years later. Bloodstained is more recent, and that cost the same as PoP. Also the Ori games, which are priced the same.

Plus this launched half off on Steam and nobody bought it despite being cheaper than Bloodstained and Ori.

So… I mean, it could have been that, but it pretty clearly wasn’t that.

No, that’d be the info we have on how Ubi games performed on both Epic and Steam. I have very little to do with it, I’m just pointing at it.

Ah, the vibes.

I mean, there are worse areas to run based on gut checks. Ultimately you buy whatever brands make you feel warm and cozy. But just so we’re clear, Steam is the granddaddy of both PC DRM and digital distribution with no ownership.

I get thinking their implementation is better, but I don’t know that I get “well, this one I actively root for, that one I consider a boycott-worthy deal breaker”.

I don’t and have never worked at Ubisoft, Mr McCarthy.

Multiple people have explained a hypothesis that doesn’t fit the information we have. Them being multiple people doesn’t make it true.

Not to my knowledge, but I bet not being on Steam had more to do with it than Denuvo, by far. There is no indication that DRM software discourages sales, to my knowledge. If it does, at worst it breaks even.

I will buy the DRM-free option every time, but every piece of data out there suggests that “I will never play a game with Denuvo” people vastly overestimate how much of a practical impact that stance has.

Me, I’m just weirded out that people are so mad about some solutions they know but not about Steam DRM or any other solution that isn’t known widely by name. You know, since I’m sharing all my unpopular gaming hot takes here.

Yeah, so I just checked, it brings up a Ubisoft Connect windows and then boots. It has less of a launcher than, say, Baldur’s Gate 3.

I don’t know if it makes you log in the first time or it creates a new thing for you by default, but I can tell you I had more account and launcher trouble running Warframe on a new PC this week than I did playing any recent Ubisoft game.

BTW, you can link up your Steam account to Warframe now and not have to log in each time and man, that only took a decade. Still didn’t piss people off as much as Ubisoft being on Epic, though.

Yeah, I fully agree that they’ve stuck to a template far too closely for far too long. That’s part of why I’m frustrated that this one went as poorly as it did, since it very much isn’t that.

I think the hostility to any non-Steam platform is unwarranted, although annoyance is annoyance. That said, the Ubi launcher on Steam right now is just a pop-up, I don’t think it makes you log in each time if you have everything linked.

That’s fair. I do see how it being nominally a new IP instead of a numbered sequel the ways it overlaps with Persona feel like a bit of treading water.

For me there is way more than enough to separate it, though. The bonkers story alone and the super political spin on it are crazy, plus the gameplay ends up being different enough.

But yeah, it’s pretty much one of those. Still better than going full action RPG like Square has done with its franchises, though.

This doesn’t have anticheat, it has DRM software, though.

But hey, if there is no overlap, then how come this did so much worse than other similarly well liked metroidvanias, right? That’s been my point here. People keep pointing out that it’s not comparable to other Ubi titles. I disagree, because PoP is PoP, but let’s roll with that. It also underperformed compared to other games in the same genre with similar review scores.

So what happened there? Either the Ubi woes are behind this, and then it doesn’t make sense because this did worse than other more Ubisofty Ubisoft games, or they are not because different demos, and that doesn’t make sense because this did much worse than similar games not from Ubisoft.

I think as far as this tells us anything is that the stink of negativity is not very fact-based when it comes to the core gaming community. That and Ubisoft may not have more money to make by going to middle sized, pure and simple high quality experiences like Rayman or this. Which sucks. Those are the best games they’ve made in recent years, as far as I’m concerned.

Well, they’re back on Steam, this game included, so there’s that shift. Does that count or nah?

No, you’re not following me.

The point here isn’t whether this game did poorly. It did. Cool.

The point here is that it did WORSE than other Ubisoft games.

Specifically, worse than Ubisoft games that include all the shitty behavior. More of the shitty behavior, in fact.

So the performance of the game is not correlated to the shitty behavior. Well, maybe more shitty behavior gets you better sales, that would fit, but I’m not going to jump to that.

You’d think if Ubisoft’s shitty behavior is scaring people off this game would have done better than Mirage and Mirage better than Outcasts, but that’s the opposite of what happened.

I get that you want that to be true, but there is really no indication that this is the case. There are a lot of elements in Ubisoft’s recent issues, but there is no good suggestion that any of that train of thought lines up with what we’re seeing here.

More to the point, even if it was, all that suggests for Ubi as a course of action is to keep doing what they’re doing. I mean, maybe launch on Steam day one, but… yeah, if you monetize the big games better and the fans of the small games won’t cut you a break for making them… just don’t make them.

My point stands either way.

Ah, yeah, but the fun bit is that there are a ton of builds that let you get there. HP-based skills are powerful in this, and you can heal for cheap, so you can get there that way, and once you get a bit overlevelled and can kill mobs out of turn-based combat you’re just cruising.

I may see what happens on harder difficulties, but I genuinely don’t care too much, because just the mechanics of figuring out the sequence for each dungeon and enemy type is so fun to do with the brilliant UI that I just… enjoy doing it, kinda like you enjoy clicking things on Diablo or something. Truly smooth design.

I just wish they had figured out antialiasing better, because woof. I ended up injecting better AA through ReShade and never looked back.

Okay, but there was none of that here (except perhaps the launcher), and there was no suggestion in the results that anybody wants to encourage that. So that’s definitely not the lesson being learned here.

Also, and I will keep repeating this forever, companies don’t make games, people make games.

Also, also, good luck with that. Don’t look now, but that’s not how major companies going out of business and fire-selling their IPs tends to go.

Look, I’m not sure why it’s Ubisoft’s turn in the hot seat after EA and Activision, but none of that is a productive outlook or leads to a better outcome, as this one really good, really wholesome game bombing hard goes to show.

Just because you can grind money easily or some other reason?

In any case on Normal I haven’t felt it at all, mostly because I’ve been single-day completing most dungeons and that gets you a bit overleveled.

But it’s still a lot faster and tighter than Persona on that front. And more flexible and nonlinear, too. For what looks like a long game, this thing moves. Much fewer, shorter stretches of just visual novelling with friends (although there’s plenty of that, too).

Metaphor ReFantazio is amazing.

I doesn’t look like it needs my help, because it’s doing pretty well, but damn, it’s good.

Maybe too much anxiety to play a game in which you’re running for office in a fantasy land, at least until November, but… yeah, it’s bonkers and it’s well written and it’s by far the most political game the Persona-adjacent studios have ever done in some really fun ways.

Also a triumph of UI. Not only does it look great, it’s so frictionless. It’s a turn-based JRPG and it plays faster and more smoothly than that abomination of an action game Square tried to pass as a Final Fantasy VII remake by orders of magnitude. Seriously, go play it if you’re at all interested in that corner of gaming.

I don’t know the guy, but all of that sounds reasonable to me.

BG3 can be replicated, if you have a massive dormant IP that is part of a furiously resurgent franchise and have several hundred million dollars to burn in a years-long development cycle by a studio that has already done pretty much the exact same thing without a license successfully twice.

I wouldn’t model my business on aligning that set of circumstances, but I sure am glad Larian did.

To be clear, there’s a bunch of other AAA stuff that is also doing quite well with pretty clean, finished games. But for midsize stuff like PoP… woof, yeah, it’s so hard to break through.

And you’re right, it’s a miserable set of incentives that if you launch broken you kinda have a built-in marketing hit because suddenly you’re doing live support and adding features. No Man’s Sky was a fun one for that. Cyberpunk. But those games did great at launch, so they had the built-in base to keep growing while they fixed the game. PoP launched pretty clean, was small and nobody cared, so it’s no wonder Ubi has decided it can make those super talented devs do stuff on the next massive AssCreed or whatever is left of Beyond Good and Evil 2 or The Division or whatever.