You know they’ll just get hacked in that scenario, and the DRM crack will be widely distributed among the eroge masses… even the most hardcore purists. 
- I prefer to be as legit as possible. Besides, saying “oh, well, just crack it” a) won’t be true forever, and b) dodges the issue - a proper resolution would be better (say, laws requiring official patches to be released in the event of bankruptcy).
And furthermore, this IS an official company BBS.
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The first rule of Fight Club is – you do not talk about Fight Club.
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The second rule of Fight Club is … you do not talk about Fight Club.
Then why don’t you just ask them what they intend to do with their games in the event that they go out of business? You know, whether they intend to release a patch that allows existing customers to play their games after they’re gone (like with VMate games)?
Wasn’t that already asked? Didn’t they dance hard to avoid giving a real answer?
No, I haven’t even seen anyone post their response here to begin with.
I’m pointing out the obvious: ignoring it is rather silly. Fight Club does not apply, because people talked about Fight Club: so its own rules were obviously broken. When MG goes out of business, people will find means to play the games, even if the DRM servers are taken offline. This is a fact, pure and simple. Claiming otherwise is as hogwash as saying North Korea has no racism, because the government of North Korea says there’s no racism in North Korea. Its lines of poorly written code: not the Secret of the Universe (which is twincest naturally).
I’m not advocating piracy: I’m just stating if you’re that worried, it’s not the end of the world. Furthermore no company that has abandoned software that required DRM activation, has ever brought up a challenge when someone reactivated the abandoned DRM. No company one will touch that with a ten foot pole, because if a company has the money to pursue legal action in that scenario, they obviously have money to keep a server running for DRM activation (I can do it for $6.99 a month). The entire abandoning customer vibe will not work to their favor in court, and while the person who used alternative activation is on gray territory, the company is also on gray territory for business ethics and integrity for pushing such a lawsuit.
If you don’t like DRM, then fine, I can see many a reason why. But don’t go claiming that once MG goes out of business, all their games will be unplayable, because that’s bold falsehood. Did you know you’re not allowed to replace the save batteries in a NES cart? Says so right in customer agreement warranty and license. That means when the battery dies in your gold cart Zelda game: you’re screwed? Please. Give me a 3.8mm security screwdriver and a 2032 lithium battery. Problem solved. When all the 8-bit Nintendo consoles break - and they WILL all break - that won’t stop people from playing 8-bit Nintendo games.
There’s a tremendous difference between software piracy and complete customer abandonment. The court systems know that. Common sense knows that. Personally I look at DRM like I look at MMO games - you take a gamble they’ll be around for a long time. I spent over $300 for Tabula Rasa: the total of a $40 game and $300 for nearly two years of $15 monthly fees. That game is gone now. Sucks to be me. Arguing that there should have been a standalone version of Tabula Rasa is moot.
I have to agree with Nargrakhan here. The “it won’t be true forever” argument doesn’t really apply because the crack WILL be available soon after the company goes under. At that point, it’s up to you if you want to download it and save it forever on a burned CD or such, or gamble that it’ll still be circulating 20 years later. A law would be nice, but it’s not likely to happen because designing and distributing cracks takes time and money. An imploding company has neither. Also, the government has more important items on their agenda such as banning obscene fictional depictions of children.
If MG goes out of business, I honestly can’t see them not releasing a final patch that disables the DRM. You have to be operated by a group of very vindictive people to do something like that. Even Walmart and Microsoft aren’t that greed driven. MG knows people would figure a way to bypass the DRM, so why promote more piracy and leave a group of angry customers you might want to target again when the economy or interest improves? MG has shown themselves to be rather friendly. They won’t budge on the DRM issue, but they’ve otherwise been doing their best to do what the customer base wants. I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt.
When I see an MG game I want: I get it. DRM is really the least of my concerns. I’ll get to that bridge, if and when I have to cross it.
It’s not really about being vindictive or greedy, at least not necessarily. In the general case, you have to secure the developer’s permission for each game you disable the protection on. Developers might refuse (feeling, rightly or wrongly, that compromising their protection might endanger Japanese sales), or just be too busy to deal with the issue in the limited timeframe the sinking localization company has. And of course, employees in the sinking company might have more pressing matters on their minds. Such as finding another job.
Of course, this is just the general case. Mangagamer has its own special circumstances. With the company structure still shrouded in mystery it’s hard to even speculate, but the employees do seem to have existing jobs outside of Mangagamer, meaning at least their jobs probably wouldn’t be in danger should MG suddenly collapse.
I’m skeptical such patches would be released - there is the matter of having to get the rightsholders on board, and also the fact that if they go broke … they go broke. If they can test and release patches to remove the DRM, they could be testing and releasing another game in a last ditch effort to save their hides. (Which might even work; after all, we all know Square shut down after Final Fantasy was the flop they were expecting … right?)
This is why I believe it will take a law in such situations to force official patches to be released. Precisely because MS and Apple and Yahoo and so forth are so big, they could not abandon the DRM by just turning it off, and telling people “sorry, we have no more money for this”. They tried, and the only reason they were forced to reverse course, is that they had other business still existing that would have been threatened by any government action (which the gov’t started rumbling immediately they would start looking into).
But a company like MangaGamer? Nobody will notice, nobody will care. And even if they did, the company’s broke - even if some official action was begun to try to force them to provide the patches, getting blood from a stone is always hard. Especially if you’re trying to do it by beating a dead horse.
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That said, the other arguments in this thread here are pretty good – the DRM isn’t the end-all be-all issue I was railing against a year ago when MG first popped up. I will admit, I did overreact to that a bit. I honestly thought they would have already been dead for six months by now.
Then, installing and activating it on a virtual machine after you bought it should be your obvious solution!
Some interesting news: http://forums.akiba-ch.com/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=560
MG is planning on localizing Soul Link, and hopes for a localization of Shin Koihime Musou have been renewed. An unverified email says SKM will be released next year.
By the looks of the email, it doesn’t seem they’ll be doing the fan disks for Edelweiss and KiraKira after all… That’s a shame, but can’t say I didn’t see it coming. I also don’t see them doing DCPC either. Who knows, maybe the person replying to the email doesn’t have a firm enough grasp of the English language and it’s simply a communication error.
From the wording in the email, I think being skeptical is justified, however, it’s not really good enough English to actually be taken at face value. The author might have meant to say “we have no announcements at this time” (which isn’t a denial of anything).
Considering they already announced them earlier, I don’t think they’d hide the fact now. It sounds more like they were cancelled.
…Not to mention I heard MG has an ungodly amount of games planned for next year.
Which is not a bad thing but I’d really like to them to realease those fan discs…
From EvoSpace in the same thread (he’s worked on MG projects before and has insider information–thus his posts are semi-official):
Personally I don’t see much point in releasing fan discs separately. I don’t think there’s much demand for that sort of thing in the Western market (unless a game were to become outrageously popular). But who cares what I think.
Well, fan disks are a good way to see more of a game you liked. There have been times where, reading a book or playing a game (or watching an anime) I’ve got to the end and said “you know what? I wish there were more of this”.
Problem is, market size. Fandisks are usually full-price, yes? And typically aren’t full games, yes? MG would have to change this structure significantly.
Edit: I suppose there is also the fact that fandisks are only worth soething to people who bought the original game, meaning their sales are virtually guaranteed to be significantly lower than sales of other things. In the Japanese market, not a problem, but for the English market …
Fandisks are very rarely full price - most of the time they are in the 4000-8000 yen range. Market size is definitely an issue, but the biggest problem is that fandisks are with very few exceptions (mostly when the original game has had flaws that are rectified by the fandisk) inferior to the originals.
Well TBH they are stating by their nature who they are marketed for, fans. As the market is generally smaller to begin with, the sales less, the content itself will be less. Think of them like expansions. Only fans of the game are going to shell out the money for an expansion and even then mostly just the more hardcore fans.