After three months (and a helpful push from pirates) Capcom finally fixes game broken by DRM

[beschizza]

Originally published at: After three months (and a helpful push from pirates) Capcom finally fixes game broken by DRM | Boing Boing

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[SarahARoyce]

@beschizza

Capcom introduced a new generation of kiddies to the culture and infrastructure of game piracy with this farce, and it did it with DRM

So something good came out of it. The secret forbidden knowledge of how it feels to actually own local copies of some work will get known by more people.

[sarc]

Eradicate DRM within a decade! | Boing Boing

[joed]

The patch notes confirm that the anti-piracy technology is to blame, but does not explain how the problems made their way into user-facing code when they are so obvious and plain to see.

Explanation: Their testers (assuming they have testers) don’t use a DRM’d version of the game.

[Shuck]

the patched rendition of Resident Evil Village now runs identically to the cracked version – Capcom’s adjustments to “optimise the anti-piracy technology” do work. However, it’s still unclear as to why the issues were never addressed before the DRM fiasco was brought to light.

Which for me raises the question of whether the patched version even has the DRM, still. (It would explain why the patched version suddenly, miraculously has the performance of the DRM-free version.) Sometimes problematic DRM is quietly dropped after initial sales and the cracked version is already being passed around by pirates.

[phuzz]

From what what I’ve read, the game actually had two layers of DRM. One from Capcom themselves, with Denuvo on top.
Removing DRM after a few months is pretty common, companies assume that they’ll be making most of their full-price sales as soon as the game comes out, so they buy in DRM from Denuvo, avoid pirate copies for the first few weeks/months, and then remove the DRM around the same time they start discounting the price.

Given how most games get significantly better after the first few weeks/months of bugfixes and patching, (and also get discounted), I’m not sure why anyone buys them on the day they come out, but I guess I have more patience (and a huge backlog). I’d still rather buy the game (and reward the creators) than play a pirate copy though, but I’ll just wait until I can pay a price I feel is fair.