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Cake day: March 8th, 2024

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  • 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…


  • Right. So Trump and Musk actively advocating for eradicating income tax and dismantling the government is the same thing as Harris winning and not doing that because the framework of the system is capitalistic and them not blowing up the US economy enables rich people to keep being rich.

    That’s the argument.

    That is the least serious argument I believe I’ve ever heard. It is a magnificent crystal of disingenuousness. If you could compress unserious, fallacious political arguments into diamonds, they would be that train of thought.

    I mean, don’t get me wrong, this is absurd whenever it pops up. Like, it was absurd on the spectrum of relative centrist Obama against relative centrist McCain. But Trump vs Harris? The degree of detachment is cosmic.

    Anyway, adults have an actual real political system to worry about, so you do you. We can always pick this one up after the election if some semblance of liberal democracy remains to worry about.



  • 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.







  • 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.




  • 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.




  • 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.



  • 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.