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Video games to up their prices, consumers rejoice

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Codex Year of the Donut
The implication that it simply costs more to develop games now is interesting considering rapid advances in technology and maturation of development tools.
e.g., Final Fantasy 7's development cost is still one of the highest.

I'm not going to claim this is an exhaustive list, but Wikipedia does have a sourced list of highest development costs:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_video_games_to_develop

Only 2 were made in the past 5 years. One of which is Mass Effect: Andromeda, btw.
 

TemplarGR

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The implication that it simply costs more to develop games now is interesting considering rapid advances in technology and maturation of development tools.
e.g., Final Fantasy 7's development cost is still one of the highest.

I'm not going to claim this is an exhaustive list, but Wikipedia does have a sourced list of highest development costs:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_video_games_to_develop

Only 2 were made in the past 5 years. One of which is Mass Effect: Andromeda, btw.

Exactly. I didn't want to get into details about development costs in my previous post because i am frankly not that autistic, but anyone with a brain and some knowledge about software development knows this "rising development costs" excuse is a load of bullshit. I would argue that today in some ways it is even cheaper to develop games than 20 years ago. For many reasons.

People confuse better graphics with more labor from the developer. This is stupid. If you are an artist creating a texture, it doesn't matter what resolution the texture is in the game, it is still one texture. If you made a texture in the PS1 era, and one in the PS5 era, all that changed is that modern hardware is more powerful than it was back then, so it can handle your texture designs without you having to downscale them through a filter first. That's about it. For models the same rule applies. Shaders are even less work most of the time. Most shaders are reusable between projects. You don't need a gazillion of water shaders for each generation of consoles. Yes each gen sees better quality shaders because the hardware gets more powerful so the developers get more bold in their algorithms without fear of leading to a slide show. End so on and so on, the point is, improved graphics don't mean more work/hours. It means more powerful hardware to run the game, essentially.

Yes in 2 decades we are using more stuff, for example more textures for more variety, but we are also re-using more stuff between projects, so it evens out. For example New Vegas reused almost everything from Fallout 3, so even if let's say Fallout 3 was expensive to make, the fact that the assets were used for 2 games + DLC more than made up for the cost....

I think the video game industry will crash. This is no joke. We are in a global recession, which could turn into a depression real fast. If those morons think we are made of money, they will soon find out that piratebay, rarbg and 1337x need new servers. And if they somehow manage to destroy piracy with DRM and destruction of file sharing, people will just find another hobby to enjoy, perhaps even find a girlfriend and have sex after all these years.

PS: Mass Effect Andromeda was expensive because of development hell, the scrap of the project mid-development, and other shit. It was not really an expensive game to make, and it showed in the final product. It was just mismanaged. Does EA want the players to pay for it? Fuck them.
 

J1M

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OP, please delete that Extra Credits video. It is a lie by an awful content creator.

Games are cheaper to produce now than they used to be. Engine costs are MUCH lower, tools are better, outsourcing more refined, studios are located in regions with wage subsidies, there are no physical copies to print, the retail store no longer gets half of the sale price, and none of that touches the size of the market or loot boxes.
 
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TemplarGR

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Yeah, i mean it is not like we can look at the public financial data of gaming corporations like EA, Activision, or Ubisoft, and figure out they kept making record profits this decade.... Oooooohhhhh pooooor AAA developers can't find food no more cause dev costs up and filthy gamers don't wanna pay more than 60$ for gamez.....
 

Morpheus Kitami

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I feel like this changes absolutely nothing. Most people who buy games on release aren't going to care if its 10$ more, and the smart people were never going to buy them at full price to begin with. It will be interesting to see if this affects the used game market, but my money's on not.
 

DeepOcean

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I wouldnt mind pay 70 dollars for a quality product, I pay more for other stuff, but most AAA games are hot garbage. If the rise in prices reflected a rise in quality, but it doesnt.

Most AAA games these days:
1 - Garbage story written by people that would be rejected for a screenwriter position at a Netflix comic book adaptation.
2 - Have recycled mechanics, all shooters are the same, all Ubsisoft open worlds are the same.
3 - Have bullshit exploitative stuff like microtransactions, loot boxes, time gated content, grind walls to force paying for over inflated bullshit currency
4 - Released on Early Access state with no content and full of bugs.

It was already easy to ignore AAA games, now it will be even easier, most of them I will buy at 75% , when I was younger, I used to pirate alot but then I came to the realization that paying a few bucks for a free HD was more worthy of my time than messing with PirateBay. Indies I will keep buying but AAA games, most arent worthy.
 

Bad Sector

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Exactly. I didn't want to get into details about development costs in my previous post because i am frankly not that autistic, but anyone with a brain and some knowledge about software development knows this "rising development costs" excuse is a load of bullshit. I would argue that today in some ways it is even cheaper to develop games than 20 years ago. For many reasons.

While this might be the case for smaller indie games (depends on the game), this is certainly not the case when it comes to "AAA" games with state of the art graphics (which is where the largest part of the development budget goes).

People confuse better graphics with more labor from the developer. This is stupid. If you are an artist creating a texture, it doesn't matter what resolution the texture is in the game, it is still one texture.

Textures are made in a variety of ways, often more resolution means you need to bring in more detail that needs to be sourced. For a low resolution texture you can use your cheap ass mobile phone camera to source materials, but for a higher resolution texture this wont fly - you need more advanced tools and you may need to purchase a texture library (which you'll use for sourcing, not as a final texture).

If you made a texture in the PS1 era, and one in the PS5 era, all that changed is that modern hardware is more powerful than it was back then, so it can handle your texture designs without you having to downscale them through a filter first. That's about it.

Far from it. Textures made during the PS1 era were made in a much different way than PS5 era. During the PS1 era and up until around early 2000s, textures were a base texture drawn or sourced from a photo with some 2D shading effects applied over them. Nowadays you can't do that, at the minimum you need to remove any lighting (which comes in direct contrast with the workflows during the 90s/early 2000s where you *wanted* lighting as part of the texture), generate normal maps and roughtness maps - these add extra work for the artists and if you want to do it properly often you actually need to create a 3D mesh over the de-lit diffuse/albedo texture so that you get the normal maps correctly (back in mid/late 2000s many artists would try to generate normal maps and specular maps from from the diffuse map by treating it as a height map and generating normals from there, but this produces flat and often wrong results and is rarely used nowadays outside of base materials that are to be used for adding fine details - manually - to an existing texture). By the way this is just the minimum - artists often have to create additional textures, like ambient occlusion textures for better lighting and shadows. These are done with dedicated tools that need their own time to work with.

Moreover the way textures are being made nowadays is different, at the past artists would work with tools like photoshop but nowadays they use tools like substance painter that take into consideration the full set of textures (albedo, normal, etc) as well as surface and material properties (that doesn't completely invalidate photoshop use, but it is minimized to specific uses - artists need to know both to be good at their job).

For models the same rule applies.

No, there are *way* different approaches when it comes to the very low poly (PS1 era) graphics vs the high poly (PS5 era) graphics, especially since the introduction of digital sculpting around late 2000s which added a whole new set of steps for making models. The only common aspect between these two are the part where you push vertices around, nothing else is the same. Even the part where you create the mesh has a different way of thinking - at the past a lot of the models' features were put into the texture and you had to pretty much know how the final model with the textures applied to it will look like while making the texture, whereas nowadays almost everything, down the eyeballs, is done on the model as geometry and textures are used to add the very fine details, act as bake targets (e.g. for ambient occlusion maps), etc that didn't even exist as a concept back in PS1 days.

Shaders are even less work most of the time. Most shaders are reusable between projects. You don't need a gazillion of water shaders for each generation of consoles. Yes each gen sees better quality shaders because the hardware gets more powerful so the developers get more bold in their algorithms without fear of leading to a slide show.

Shaders are almost never made by artists, though they do take more time to create than they did back when they were first introduced and often there are dedicated programmers for some of them. However the difference in work for shader use in modern games vs. back when they were introduced in early 2000s is dwarfed by the difference in work for art.

Note that *materials* might be made by artists and there is even a specialized subcategory of artists called "technical artists" that work with those. This subcategory didn't really exist until late 2000s, let alone PS1 days - and guess what, it is a subcategory exactly because there are multiple specialists working on it.

End so on and so on, the point is, improved graphics don't mean more work/hours.

This is absolutely and completely wrong, nowadays "AAA" games use way more art assets than they ever did and those assets take time to be made and they are made by increasingly larger teams of artists. Back in late 90s, a state of the art game like Quake would use a few repeating textures slapped all over the place but this will never happen today since artists will try to hide (=time) any repeating textures by creating many more of them (=time) as well as relying on environment artists to create models to both spice up the environments (=time) and cover the repeating. In fact, level design in the 90s was largely the work of a single person doing the layout, placement, lighting, 3D art, etc for a map whereas nowadays there are dedicated jobs (ie. more people, meaning more money are spent) for level design (layout), lighting, environment art (often with separate artists working on reusable texture art and 3D assets), etc as well as people whose entire job is to keep everything consistent now that there are way more people involved in the process.

It means more powerful hardware to run the game, essentially.

Yes, it also means that but this doesn't affect the number of people needed to make a game, all it affects is the ceiling of what a game can do.

Yes in 2 decades we are using more stuff, for example more textures for more variety, but we are also re-using more stuff between projects, so it evens out.

No, very few things that actually affect the number of people who'd work on a game are shared between projects as often the time between these projects is large enough for the production and quality standards to have increased to the point where you can't use the vast majority of the existing assets.

For example New Vegas reused almost everything from Fallout 3, so even if let's say Fallout 3 was expensive to make, the fact that the assets were used for 2 games + DLC more than made up for the cost....

New Vegas reusing assets from Fallout 3 is something that rarely happens in the vast majority of "AAA" games - and New Vegas still had about the same number of artists working on it as Fallout 3 did. Though using Bethesda as some sort of indicator for team sizes (or development practices in general) in AAA games is misleading, their team size of 100 up until they worked on Skyrim was considered an anomaly for a AAA budget game - and that was 8 years ago.

I think the video game industry will crash. This is no joke.

This will not happen, there are way too many developers around and located all over the world for any "crash" to happen - even the supposedly "video game crash" of the 80s (which happened in a *significantly* smaller industry) only affected consoles and was limited to the US while computer games and other countries were not affected.

At most some big publishers will decide to stop making big expensive games (e.g. what Konami decided to do, but to a larger scale) and some developers will close shop (something that already happens with less profitable developers anyway). A natural ceiling might be hit, but nothing that will affect the entire industry at large.

Now don't take all this as me agreeing with the increasing game prices or anything like that or even that i agree or like those huge development costs (IMO the sweet spot is around the level/size of Spiders or Piranha Bytes, though i'm not sure how much crunch they have to endure to make their games as good looking as they are), but when it comes to "AAA" games with state of the art graphics (ie. what all big publishers and developers are striving for) there is absolutely an increase in development costs driven largely by the need for more and more detailed assets.

I mean, check the credits for The Last of Us Part II as an example of a recent "AAA" game (i guess there might a spoiler at the first minute or so, i didn't played the game nor listened to the video with audio so i don't know, skip to ~1:40 to be sure). By far the most roles were about the game's assets - artists, animators, level designers, voice actors, etc, even the outsourced work was primarily about assets. All these are people who needed to be paid over the entire game's development (outside the outsourcing, but those had a lot of cost as well, it isn't like they were free) and the more people means the higher the cost.
 

Butter

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I'm personally in favour of companies hiking the price of games. Anyone with half a brain is waiting for the 90% sale before buying this crap, so it only affects dipshits.
 

karoliner

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I don't think anyone on the Codex understands how these guys make money, I know I don't. Back in the day, you paid for a product at a store, and that was that.

Now there are DLCs, microtransactions, pay-2-win schemes, cosmetics, subscriptions, advertising...not to mention the entire crowdfunding phenomenon. Price points like $60 are nothing compared to the thousands of dollars some whales have dropped on games like Star Citizen, and they don't even have a game to show for it. I remember 6 years ago, my clan leader was drunk and told me he spent $12,000 on World of Tanks alone.

These days, you don't make money by appealing to poorfags and pirates (us). You make money by attracting whales and milking them. A $60 price point might be a good way of gatekeeping the riffraff.

We need to kill all the whales.
 
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Codex Year of the Donut
I mean, check the credits for The Last of Us Part II as an example of a recent "AAA" game (i guess there might a spoiler at the first minute or so, i didn't played the game nor listened to the video with audio so i don't know, skip to ~1:40 to be sure). By far the most roles were about the game's assets - artists, animators, level designers, voice actors, etc, even the outsourced work was primarily about assets. All these are people who needed to be paid over the entire game's development (outside the outsourcing, but those had a lot of cost as well, it isn't like they were free) and the more people means the higher the cost.
What does a 3D movie have to do with video games though?
 

Bad Sector

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Insert Title Here RPG Wokedex Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Imagine writing 6 pages about how expensive textures are to make and not being aware of something like the quixel megascans being free to use.

https://quixel.com/blog/2019/11/12/quixel-joins-forces-with-epic-games

Unlike low res painted textures, once you have a library of ultra high res reference photos, you can just keep using them. Drastically cutting future costs.

Right, but those high res reference photos aren't usable directly, artists still need to edit them to make them fit for the game and that is assuming that what the artists want to make is even scannable. These scans are at the same level as the base textures you can source using a photo or a site like cgtextures.com, not something usable directly, but something that needs processing (which needs time) and is used to be merged with other work.

Finally note that those scans are free for users of Unreal Engine 4 but many games, especially those high end "AAA" games we're discussing here, use other - often custom - engines, so these scans are still something that becomes part of the game's cost (though that cost by itself is a droplet in the ocean for big studios). And some studios have their own 3D scan solutions so they do not need quixel anyway.

3D scanning isn't panacea nor something really new, it is a technology available for years now and available to small developers too (in fact one of the very first games to use it was The Astronauts' The Vanishing of Ethan Carter from 2014 - and that is a team of a handful of people). But it has its limitations and doesn't free you from needing artists.
 
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The return on investment for "AAA" games seems complete shit to be honest, and the risk is too high. If you make one bad title your studio is done -- no speculation is needed here, I can just point to Mass Effect Andromeda as a recent example of this happening. Bioware itself is likely on the verge of being shitcanned after the dumpster fire that was Anthem.

Outside of companies like Sony and Microsoft funding AAA games to boost their console sales, I'm not convinced they have much of a future.
Is there even any evidence that AAA games when not being boosted by a console manufacturer are more profitable than games with medium-sized budgets? Steam's annual platinum seller lists would indicate "No" sans a few mega-hits like GTA5.
 

racofer

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Quoting the wise words of Gaben: "Piracy is a service problem."

The only reason to pay for games these days is having easy access to updates, and even that can become a problem (e.g., Prison Architect after it was acquired by Paradox). Nowadays most AAA shitware on Steam is bundled with Denuvo and requires the publisher's own launcher to run alongside Steam's own DRM. We are back at where Gaben aimed to diverge from by offering a unified gaming platform with accessible prices (somewhat true, although even DLCs have DLCs these days), easy installs and updates (still true), hassle-free interaction (no longer true due to the aforementioned launchers and DRM schemes) and the possibility to play your shit offline if necessary (no longer true due to shit like Denuvo phoning home every 7 days to verify your activation status).

All this considered, I now only purchase games on GOG for quite some time because they still offer a service which surpasses pirate versions. You get access to updates (if you want), complete offline installations and access to your games, real backups, and not need to install third-party launchers. Games outside of GOG are, most of the time, easier to pirate and not having to deal with all the crap I mentioned above.
 

DarKPenguiN

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It may cost more to develop games these days but that cost should be more than offset by the savings they reap via 'digital distribution'-

Back in the day the game had to be created, transferred to physical media, shipped across the country/world and stocked on store shelves where a person would eventually ring up the product for the cosumer-

In other words, the games indirectly employed tons of people from truck drivers to cashiers to factory workers and the overhead included fuel, utilities and shelf space, plastics etc-

That alone should balance out the cost-
 

DarKPenguiN

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I don't think anyone on the Codex understands how these guys make money, I know I don't. Back in the day, you paid for a product at a store, and that was that.

Now there are DLCs, microtransactions, pay-2-win schemes, cosmetics, subscriptions, advertising...not to mention the entire crowdfunding phenomenon. Price points like $60 are nothing compared to the thousands of dollars some whales have dropped on games like Star Citizen, and they don't even have a game to show for it. I remember 6 years ago, my clan leader was drunk and told me he spent $12,000 on World of Tanks alone.

These days, you don't make money by appealing to poorfags and pirates (us). You make money by attracting whales and milking them. A $60 price point might be a good way of gatekeeping the riffraff.

We need to kill all the whales.
I think the dolphins need to be genocided as well-
 
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Codex Year of the Donut
It may cost more to develop games these days but that cost should be more than offset by the savings they reap via 'digital distribution'-

Back in the day the game had to be created, transferred to physical media, shipped across the country/world and stocked on store shelves where a person would eventually ring up the product for the cosumer-

In other words, the games indirectly employed tons of people from truck drivers to cashiers to factory workers and the overhead included fuel, utilities and shelf space, plastics etc-

That alone should balance out the cost-
You mean sort of like how we were repeatedly told that reducing the storefront cut was supposed to give more money to developers then a year later we're told developers need to charge more for games now?
 

DalekFlay

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The only reason to pay for games these days is having easy access to updates, and even that can become a problem (e.g., Prison Architect after it was acquired by Paradox).

Morality arguments aside, which I know mean fuck all on the internet, supporting good developers and franchises so they continue is definitely another reason. I wish more people ponied up for Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, for example.
 

Morpheus Kitami

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If there's ever a crash, its not going to be all big and scary like the one Atari had, its going to be small like the end of the New Hollywood era, a few companies will close, others will realize their follies and move unto new prospects. The only reason why it'd be a bigger crash is if there are bigger problems than games being bad.
 

markec

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Codex 2012 Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Dead State Project: Eternity Codex USB, 2014 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath
Hot take: Codexers should welcome this news. Why? Because it could mean that the audience for video games isn't expanding as quickly as it used to, so publishers need to compensate by raising prices to make more money from their existing audience. Fewer new gamers entering the hobby means less casualization.

Or it just means that it is expanding steadily and that publishers believe that there are enough people who will pay more on day 1 for a game and in order to get even more customers more casualization is required.
 

Ol' Willy

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Nowadays most AAA shitware on Steam is bundled with Denuvo and requires the publisher's own launcher to run alongside Steam's own DRM
I don't use steamed hams and I'm out of touch with modern client scamming practices, but why don't you just:

- buy a game somewhere
- download crack
- ???
- play without constant assrape

I still have my old CD of STALKER, and it was packaged with state of the art glorious Starforce DRM. Like, yeah, I'm not gonna pollute my PC with this crap, just lemme put this NoDVD in the game folder.
 

abija

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The return on investment for "AAA" games seems complete shit to be honest, and the risk is too high. If you make one bad title your studio is done -- no speculation is needed here, I can just point to Mass Effect Andromeda as a recent example of this happening. Bioware itself is likely on the verge of being shitcanned after the dumpster fire that was Anthem.
ME:A was a massive failure though. AAA done right: know your audience, deliver what they expect, milk for all it's worth, abuse creative accounting and tax havens.

Yeah, smaller games are more profitable, but what's your guarantee they will be? The tons of assets needed for AAA games are just work, predictable, quantifiable. Smaller games need creativity to succeed.
 

TemplarGR

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While this might be the case for smaller indie games (depends on the game), this is certainly not the case when it comes to "AAA" games with state of the art graphics (which is where the largest part of the development budget goes).

Oh look, we found the corporate shill guys. No seriously, he is a shill.

1) Yes, we need better tools to make better textures, guess what Sherlock, those tools have gone DOWN in price per decade. It used to be you needed a whole mainframe for 3D work in the early 90s, now a 500$ laptop has far more power. Same with cameras and all other tools. 1MPixel camera was extremely expensive in 90s. Now you can get 16MPixel camera on your shitty 50$ mobile phone. All those things are way cheaper AND better than they were back then.

2) Textures can be more complex today, true, but again, the difference in workload is not that extreme as you make it out to be. I never said you can make Assassin Creed Odyssey with the same number of people you can make a tiny PS1-era game, by the way. But you don't need 100x the people either. And given that most PS1-era games sold 100k-500k copies each, at best, and were considered a success, vs AC selling millions and tens of millions, and DLCs, i think it evens out....

3) You whole argument is that modern engines are more advanced, they need more people to work on them, and they don't re-use assets. This is patently false. Models are getting reused all the time, for example. Have you ever wondered why for example in the UT3 engine era, almost all the games per dev had the same bulky/beefy human models? Ever wondered why? What, they couldn't design slimmer human models in UT3? Firaxis did, they designed "thin man" in XCOM, for example... Why most models looked the same type of meatsack? Does the word "reusable" say anything to you? This is what happens in the video game industry, they reuse as many models and as many textures and as many animations as they can, with minor alterations. They don't build all the assets from scratch per game, this is a myth you are peddling. In Assassin Creed, they reused the vast majority of assets. The Ezio trilogy reused a lot of models, textures, and animations, between the three games, and Altair's game, with minor alterations/improvements. They didn't create new models/textures/animations from scratch for each game and then scrapped it. You are delusional or a filthy liar if you claim otherwise. All companies do this, and Fallout 3/New Vegas is the rule, not the exception. It is just than in the F3-->NV situation, it was far more obvious, while in most cases they alter the assets more, especially when the game has a different story/location.

I am sorry, all you did was to say "modern engines more advanced, therefore they need more people". The only difference between the various game journalists shills and you, is that you attempted to write some more specialized info to give authority to your argument based on hot air. As for the credit screens per game, when you re-use assets, you put the name of the people on the credit screen. Credit screens are a sham. They are not meant to give credit to people, rarely anyone watches them or cares. They are meant to give the illusion, like in the film industry, that the product was expensive to make. I mean how else could Hollywood justify their prices if they couldn't convince you that shooting films is so expensive and you have to throw them shekels? They put every single name in the credit screen, even the name of the person who bought them hot dogs, give me a break.
 

TemplarGR

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I don't use steamed hams and I'm out of touch with modern client scamming practices, but why don't you just:

- buy a game somewhere
- download crack
- ???
- play without constant assrape

I still have my old CD of STALKER, and it was packaged with state of the art glorious Starforce DRM. Like, yeah, I'm not gonna pollute my PC with this crap, just lemme put this NoDVD in the game folder.

The problem with denuvo is that pirates rarely offer updates for the game. Denuvo is harder to crack so it is a lot of work per exe version, and pirates rarely bother. Given that all video games these days are released in an alpha state, or beta state at best, you need to always have the latest patch, and with Denuvo this rarely happens. You have no option other than to buy the shit, if you want to keep your sanity. Early versions of games these days are VERY buggy. Perhaps intentionally.
 

Riddler

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You have no fucking clue what you talk about. That graphic quality wasted in most AAA titles costs A LOT. It's not just a couple more texture artists and they even outsource a shitload of assets to where labor is cheaper.

My impression was that it was stuff like motion capture and facial motion capture (and animation in general) that costs a shitton, not a few extra textures, a new shader or particle simulator.
 

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