One look at the Winny/Share/Perfect Dark network and you’ll see just about every single Japanese product known to man from 1980-2008 available for download. Part of what makes that network so popular is because it’s not like BitTorrent where 3 years after something is released, the torrent dies. In this case, it’s always available, it also hides your identity and hides what you’re downloading. It’s a pirate’s paradise. I am rather distressed the Japanese companies view us foreigners as a bunch of thieves and pirates.
The Japanese have overlooked their own piracy because they’ve done a good job of hiding it, much like they don’t pay attention to their crime rates and blame foreigners as the #1 cause of crime. But seriously, when the #1 piracy medium for Japanese internet users hides your identity and encrypts your uploads/downloads the only reasonable amount of data you could ascertain is quantity of users and existence of files. How many said files are being downloaded by how many users is likely unknown unless I overlooked something.
Finally Japan has always been more of a control oriented society, even if there might be a bit of a double standard on DRM, I don’t believe free-market forces dictate demand there, otherwise Wal-Mart as a company wouldn’t have failed there. This is a society that passively accepts any decision made by those in power, from the shaken test conspiracy between government and automakers, to the legal system that guarantees a guilty sentence if the police press charges. When the Plutocrats ask Mr. Ken Nihonjin to jump, he’ll bow and respond with “How High?”. In the Japanese corporations’ minds the customers don’t dictate how they do business, the corporations tell the customers what they want, and how they will buy it.
For me DRM is just one of those inevitable hoops we’re going to have to jump through to get access to something Japanese as foreigners, because we jump through similar hoops when it comes to buying property in Japan, renting apartments, obtaining visas, selling something there, starting a business there etc. They just don’t like sharing anything no matter how much money we throw at them. Not unless you count office products, machinery and vehicles; however even then they still keep the good stuff for themselves.
MG is taking a terrible risk here, I wouldn’t be surprised if the straight arrows that hang out in this forum take to piracy just because of the DRM. We’ll just never know about it because no one would admit to such a thing. I believe that rampant piracy of a product is a failure of the company to make one worth paying for, not a problem of the users and their morality. There’s no guarantee locking up games in an elaborate clusterfuck DRM scheme that fries your hard drive when tampered with will ensure people stop pirating. If the figures say that 80,000 copies of game X were downloaded in the past year, does that really constitute 80,000 potential customers that turned to piracy? There is NO guarantee that those 80,000 downloaders would have bought the game if the piracy alternative didn’t exist. Adding DRM to arrest that piracy statistic only causes the unskilled to simply abandon the product because now not only are they paying 80 dollars for a gimped product, but they have no piracy alternative to either. In the end, it’s a lose-lose situation for the company.
This industry needs to embrace Stardock’s system of simply not bothering with copy protection at all. Think about how much money they save not even having to invest in that DRM crap? Think about how much lower the prices are as a result? Unfortunately, H-games don’t have a long life. Stardock wins on having no DRM because the people who buy their games spend a lot of their time playing it online and downloading regular updates that their serial key enables them to obtain.
Finally to Olf:
If you think that people installing and re-installing their games constitutes a myth, you’re sorely mistaken.
I have a 270gb and 120 gb hard drive. On BOTH drives I’m CONSTANTLY shuffling the remaining 8-16 gigs of space I have left as I uninstall and reinstall various games and programs. You’re stacking theory only works so long as there is space, but eventually people start doing the shuffle until they either buy a new machine with larger disks or just upgrade their existing drives. I for one refuse to spend money on another computer. I spent over 3000 on this one 4 years ago and I have no intention of spending another 3000 just to keep up with the specs. Racing with the hardware manufacturers is destroying my money that is better spent on other things, like a PS3 and the games to go with it.
Just got through my first h-scene and I must say I was impressed… that’s possibly the first h-scene in a game that I didn’t frantically skip through rolling my eyes at its awfulness. It was actually well-written.