Month: October 2024

Throughout the game industry's short history, there's been ample debate about how much piracy actually impacts a game's legitimate sales. On one side, some publishers try to argue that every single pirated download should count as a "lost sale" that they would have logged in a theoretical piracy-free world. On the other side, some crackers argue that most pirates would never consider paying for a legitimate version of the game in the first place or that piracy can actually be useful as a word-of-mouth promotional tool.

While the true effect of piracy on sales revenue is likely somewhere between those two extremes, piracy's precise financial impact on a game has always been hard to nail down. Now, though, a recently published study uses post-release cracks of Denuvo's DRM protections as a sort of natural experiment on games sales in pre- and post-piracy worlds. The results "imply an average proportionate loss of revenue of around 19 percent in each week of release if a crack is available," according to the study, suggesting that effective DRM can actually have a significant impact on a publisher's bottom line.

The data dance

In "The Revenue Effects of Denuvo Digital Rights Management on PC Video Games," published in the peer-reviewed journal Entertainment Computing, UNC research associate William Volckmann examines 86 different Denuvo-protected games initially released on Steam between Sept. 2014 and the end of 2022. That sample includes many games where Denuvo protection endured for at least 12 weeks (when new sales tend to drop off to "negligible" amounts for most games) and many others where earlier cracks allowed for widespread piracy at some point.

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Die Telekom bereitet sich eventuell auf eine Übernahme vor. Man habe nun die dafür notwendige Liquidität. (Telekom, Wirtschaft)

Bluebrixx verkauft die U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701 aus 2.888 Klemmbausteinen überraschend günstig. Lego Star Wars wäre sehr viel teurer. (Lego, Star Trek)

When Apple’s laptop and desktop computers were shipping with Intel processors, it was relatively easy to port GNU/Linux distributions to run on Apple hardware. Things got trickier when the company switched to designing its own chips in-house. But the folks behind the Asahi Linux team have been busy reverse engineering Apple’s M series processors for […]

The post Asahi Linux brings support for AAA gaming to Apple Silicon Macs running Linux appeared first on Liliputing.

Die Dominanz von AMD beim Thema Energieeffizienz dürfte mit den Intel-Core-Ultra-200S-CPUs auch in Desktop-PCs beendet sein. (Intel, Prozessor)

Intel’s new Core Ultra 200S series processors, also known by the code-name Arrow Lake-S, are designed to do two things: offer significant gains in CPU, graphics, and AI performance and also reduce power consumption. The chip maker says that the new chips can deliver 15 percent better multithreaded CPU performance than previous-gen Raptor Lake Refresh […]

The post Intel Arrow Lake-S desktop chips can match Raptor Lake-R performance using half as much power appeared first on Liliputing.

Captain Nemo is one of 19th-century French novelist Jules Verne's most captivating fictional characters, appearing in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870) and The Mysterious Island (1875). Prime Video is bringing us a 10-episode series exploring Nemo's origin story, loosely based on the former, called Nautilus, premiering in a couple of weeks. The official trailer just dropped, and it has all the swashbuckling, deep sea diving adventures, and exotic sea creatures one would expect from a classic Verne tale—including that infamous giant squid and a plucky romantic interest for good measure.

(Minor spoilers for the novels below.)

In Verne's novels, Nemo is a mysterious figure also known as Prince Dakkar, who lost his kingdom and his family in the Indian Rebellion of 1857. He devotes himself to science and builds an electrically powered submersible ship called the Nautilus, salvaging gold bullion from shipwrecks to fund his travels, occasionally coming to the aid of people in need (a pearl diver under a shark attack or castaways in need of rescue). He is well-read, has a Western education, and is fluent in several languages, as well as being a gifted engineer. And he appreciates the fine arts.

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Das geht aus einer aktuellen Studie hervor. Die astronomische Fachwelt ist besorgt, da die Helligkeit der Satelliten über dem empfohlenen Schwellenwert liegt. (Satelliten, Raumfahrt)

Tabletop board games and video games typically offer ways to reduce their difficulty. But getting and keeping a group together for a semi-regular game night or impromptu session across different schedules and experience levels? That can be fiendishly hard.

That, more than anything, is what Sunderfolk wants to make easier. At its core, it’s a turn-based tactical RPG with well-worn hero classes and mechanics familiar to fans of crunchy tabletop games and CRPGs. But this upcoming game from Secret Door, led by Blizzard veteran and tabletop aficionado Chris Sigaty, wants to bring more people into the game-night fold. By fusing Jackbox-like accessibility with tabletop mechanics and letting the game do all the hard work, Sunderfolk aims to reduce learning curves, eliminate setup, and encourage game nights with friends.

Also, you use your phone as a controller. But it makes sense, and it worked, at least in the two hours I got to play Sunderfolk. The phone is both a controller and a replacement for all the cards, tokens, and other ephemera a tabletop player would have in front of them. And it allows for both TV-based couch co-op or remote play on monitors. Sunderfolk is a game that can make use of the QR-code-scanning, Discord-arranging skills many of us learned during the pandemic.

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Tabletop board games and video games typically offer ways to reduce their difficulty. But getting and keeping a group together for a semi-regular game night or impromptu session across different schedules and experience levels? That can be fiendishly hard.

That, more than anything, is what Sunderfolk wants to make easier. At its core, it’s a turn-based tactical RPG with well-worn hero classes and mechanics familiar to fans of crunchy tabletop games and CRPGs. But this upcoming game from Secret Door, led by Blizzard veteran and tabletop aficionado Chris Sigaty, wants to bring more people into the game-night fold. By fusing Jackbox-like accessibility with tabletop mechanics and letting the game do all the hard work, Sunderfolk aims to reduce learning curves, eliminate setup, and encourage game nights with friends.

Also, you use your phone as a controller. But it makes sense, and it worked, at least in the two hours I got to play Sunderfolk. The phone is both a controller and a replacement for all the cards, tokens, and other ephemera a tabletop player would have in front of them. And it allows for both TV-based couch co-op or remote play on monitors. Sunderfolk is a game that can make use of the QR-code-scanning, Discord-arranging skills many of us learned during the pandemic.

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