Quoting: Whitewolfe80Yes but i can tell you immediately why DRM exists, Companies like money staff are fond of being paid too. If you release a game drm free on gog i can tell you for a fact it is up on torrent sites day and date and yes even the linux version have been going up lately too. I know this as one of the parts of my job is to monitor several torrenting severs to see what has been uploaded and how often and when gog launch a new game it typically gets uped exactly 5 hours after being avilable for purchase.

Surprise, even if you release it with DRM, it will be still on torrent trackers, with that DRM removed. So pirates aren't affected by it and DRM only hurts legitimate users. It's one of the stupidest ideas ever (to treat your own customers like that), but it's not done for business reasons. It's a crooked control scheme which has nothing to do with piracy.

Quoting: adamhmThe real question though is: does DRM actually help sales? Because from all of the information I've seen, even when it's effective at stopping piracy for long periods like Denuvo has been this does not translate into an improvement in sales figures.

Nope, DRM directly translates into lost sales.

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Quoting: johndoeBut this will stop at some point of time.

Linux is FOSS, so in the worst case you can take older distros and run them in virtual machine or container for this purpose.

Quoting: johndoeEvery software/game has EOL/Support.
It makes more sense to play games when they are new and active.

Tell it to ScummVM or DosBox developers, and they'll have a laugh.

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Quoting: Guestor if there are features they need that Metal simply doesn't support.

MoltenVK is missing tessellation support and some other features: https://github.com/KhronosGroup/MoltenVK/blob/master/Docs/MoltenVK_Runtime_UserGuide.md#limitations [External Link]

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Regarding rights, most common violation of DRM is fair use, which DRM prevents. Other problems range from violating privacy and security to free speech. If the later sounds unexpected to you, consider that DRM is accompanied by anti-circumvention provisions (which in turn can violate civil rights).

Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Speech_Flag [External Link]

DRM proponents built a whole corrupt legal system, which has DRM at its core. Many forget about that when they accept such practice.

See https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/03/ustr-secret-copyright-agreements-worldwide [External Link]

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Quoting: BeamboomWhere do you get this from? Do you use Steam yourself? You can take as many backups of your game binaries as you like, just copy the data directories to an external disk.

Did you read the thread above? Feral games won't work if you do that. How is that not aimed at preventing back ups? Your option is only to find a game with DRM removed, or remove it yourself if you intend to back it up.

Quoting: BeamboomWhy do you write this? This it just fanatic gibberish that only works when you preach to the choir! DRM is an anti PIRACY feature

Nope, it isn't. It's anti-user feature. Think it through yourself, it's not a hard use case. Pirate will go and get the game from torrents with DRM removed (by some other more expert pirates). So DRM has no relevance to that pirate. Normal customer will buy the game with DRM, and will be bugged by not being able to back it up. So who is affected by it? You guessed, the paying user. Ergo, DRM is anti-user feature.

What's gibberish is claiming that DRM is there to prevent piracy.

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Quoting: Beamboomhttps://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/user-friendly

If something, especially something related to a computer, is user-friendly, it is simple for people to use:

DRM is aimed at making backups impossible or a hindrance (you need to break DRM first). So DRM isn't user friendly. It's kind of self explanatory, since DRM is an anti-user feature.

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Quoting: GuestWhat reasons might they be? If you're unwilling to discuss that, or put forward any ideas,

I find it futile to put out ideas for a stone wall. Again, who do you propose to discuss it with? Feral show zero interest in it. You only suggested what the problems could be (Steamworks lock-in and the like). Sure, these are solvable, but it's pointless if those who have those problems don't want to solve them.

May be Feral read these discussions, may be not - we get zero feedback and only answers like "ask us". We did, but that didn't do anything. Since they don't explain what their exact issues are, suggesting them how to solve them is going to be wasting their time as well as ours, indirectly it also shows that they don't want such suggestions or don't want to solve it to begin with.

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Quoting: GuestThey've stated GOG wasn't viable for them. And no, just because they want something on GOG doesn't mean GOG will accept it, so it quite literally cannot be entirely up to Feral.

GOG said as much, that it wasn't a problem on their end. GOG "isn't viable", but I don't see anything else that's viable (no DRM-free releases anywhere). Without all the euphemistic wording, it means they don't want to release in DRM-free fashion, because reasons.

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Quoting: GuestThese are the sorts of the questions that should be asked, should be discussed.

With whom exactly? Feral don't care to discuss it, they dodge this topic with "ask us if you want it" kind of stonewalling. It makes sense to discuss it with developers who actually have practical difficulties and are looking for ways to solve them. Feral isn't the case.

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Quoting: GuestYou are also stating it to be an issue with Feral, which is also bogus, as has been repeated before.

Whose issue is it then? The excuse of original publishers is not applicable in this case. And no need to pull it out of thin air, when Feral explicitly communicated more than once, that it's up to them to decide such things.

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