Spoiler-free Sonic Mania discussion thread

The problems with CD keys on games were that people would share them with one another when they weren't supposed to. People started coding key generators and games with certain kinds of cracks began to emerge. Irresponsible people would lose them and be locked out of their product. Companies would sometimes fail to print them on their products sometimes locking you out of a product you just bought, although sometimes you could fix the matter by contacting them.

 

Your answer is right there in your inquiry.
Don't use DRM.
Piracy cannot be stopped. The next best thing is making the experience as convenient and comfortable as possible for your customers. The more stressful you make it for legitimate customers, the more appealing piracy becomes as the alternative. Piracy is free and your product is not, the odds are already stacked against the you, and somehow worsening the customer experience will improve those odds? That's nothing but lunacy.
Ever hear of a fable about the wind and the sun? It's a lesson that some companies today very badly need to learn.

 

The minimum wage here in Bulgaria is 250 USD (210 EUR) a month and even I managed to shell out 18EUR. Its not that expensive, just a day's worth.

 

@ICEknight @lange good points well made and I'm kind of torn on the subject.

Maybe it's a good time to move on from this topic

 

DRM is not a necessary evil. I cannot share research because it's not for public consumption, but valve has statistics indicating that aggressive pricing, not DRM, is the best combatant against piracy. The closest I can give is this lecture they gave about that topic (among others) at Steam Dev Days years ago:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRyUpR4qOxU

The long short of it is, the very people who would know how effective DRM is with sales data to back it up, claim DRM is not effective. And they have entire regions of the world where they experimented with solutions to prove it (namely Russia).

 

Honestly, as a now "casual gamer" I didn't even notice the DRM. Since I'm new to Steam, it all looks foreign to me. I found that big picture mode is pretty cool as it looks like a modern console menu.

 

That is completely legitimate as well. No solution is perfect. I simply used the CD codes as an example of a form of copy-protection I was okay with.

I personally still stand by the old adage of catching more flies with honey. If you make your game a better deal than pirating (like adding in official mod support, or any of Steams other perks like the cards) then you will combat pirates much easier. Making the pirated version look better (i.e. running better, running offline, no risk of not being playable in the future) is just counter-productive and upsets the more informed members of your audience. It can also drive people to pirate that otherwise might not have.

 

If you think about it, CD keys have the same problems as DRM. If pirates aren't cracking activations for server-based DRM, they're making keygens to get around systems for legitimate user registration. One way or another, they're hacking a program to work without paying for it, so wouldn't it be better in the long run to stick to a solution that doesn't hurt the customer?

Which makes me wonder, would registration keys of longer character lengths, like modern encryption, have presented pirates a decent challenge with each "generation" of games on PC? (2048 characters instead of say, 16 or 32.) Nearly everything we purchase now is digital, might as well just give the consumer a plain-text file they can copy/paste into Steam or a Windows installer. Some people I know are too lazy to manually type in a 16 character key anyway, so I have to do it for them. :specialed:

Adding that to my Watch Later list. This is interesting.

 

I don't think the length of the key has anything to do with CD Key reverse engineering.
Lets say it takes 1 CPU Hertz to iterate and check 1 combination(and it probably takes orders of magnitude more, like 10 000 times), then checking all numbers with 15 digits would take them 10 years.
If you make the 15 digits be letters and digits, then the combinations grow 60 million times. So if you have 60 million valid keys in those 15 alphanumerals it'll take 10 years to find just one.

 

That's a fair point. I had forgotten about the importance of mixing letters and numbers into keys/passwords. Can pirates look for a pattern, for key generation, instead of brute-forcing it? (Like in this article.)

I think I might be asking the question entirely wrong and don't know what I'm asking for. I might Google around a bit longer on that one.

This is something I thankfully don't encounter very often with older retail PC games. Although I was slightly annoyed that the PC copy of Halo 2 my uncle let me borrow needed online activation. While I'm relieved that its activation servers still work somehow, it's only a matter of time until his key for the game is rendered completely useless.

 

Just wanted to humbly say this, as someone who loves the game but is against additional DRM like Denuvo being in the PC version, since it seemingly needs to be stated in unequivocal terms:

If you have access to the PS4 or Switch versions of "Sonic Mania," absolutely buy one or both. Yes there are some bugs (which will be fixed), but they're both quality versions.

If you *only* have access to the Xbox One version, I'd say go for it if you have an Xbox One S, but if you're on original Xbox One hardware, maybe consider waiting for a patch. I've seen enough reports to and conversations with folks at Digital Foundry that indicate there can be performance issues with the game if played on original Xbox One hardware. (The Digital Foundry folks haven't seemed to completely nail down as to why, but it's clearly an issue more on Microsoft's end then the game itself--should be relatively easy to get fixed.)

If you *only* have access to the PC version: If you do not care about additional DRM/Denuvo, then absolutely buy the game on that platform. If you do care about additional DRM/Denuvo, then it's your choice whether to buy or not. If you decide not to for now, my humble suggestion would be to either play it at a friend's place on another platform or watch a longplay of it on Youtube (both of which are perfectly legal to do), and wait and hope that Denuvo is removed from the PC version--if it is, buy it then.

The fact it needs to be explicitly stated that yes, in any and all scenarios people should buy the game on one or multiple platforms, simply because some folks (like me) are currently boycotting the PC version since it uses Denuvo, is beyond silly. Support/buy the game. It's great.

I really hope the dev team is given much more money, time, and resources to make a great sequel. We'll all be there day one, as well.

In summation, as a wise man recently said: "Buy 'Sonic Mania' with money."

 

I would have refunded if I had the chance, but, even if I hadn't it pre-ordered, I had the game on 6 hours before knowing a thing about Denuvo or its presence in the game. I think Steam should have made an exception and allow to refund after this illegal practice showed up, as they didn't say a thing about it, so, even if it wasn't Denuvo, and was the best DRM possible with no interference or online verification, there would still be a reason tu sue Sega for this cheap trick.

I don't buy many games these days, and I can't say I always play legal, but I usually buy the games I really want to play, so developers don't have to ask me for a password or an online activation, they already have my trust in their product. And this is true for many people, so true that, usually, people that can't play a pirate version of a game won't buy it either, while real customers will buy even if this kind of DRM shit comes in, so there's no real advantage in adding shit to the games when it comes down to the customer/pirate status quo, they just damage sales.

For the record, downloading pirate games has sometimes made me buy them because I had the chance to try them before deciding, and I found something I wanted this way, even if I already had beaten the game and never used the bought copy. had i the money to do that, I'd probably bought on Steam games I already have and can still play (for example, I keep a win98 PC to play games like the first Tomb Raider), just because I like them and Steam is an easy way to have everything at the same place. So, for me, at the very least, there's no reason to do this all. I never knew about GoG until I entered this forum, but that sound even better to keep my plans intact and add extra DRM avoiding.

 

For what it's worth, I'm playing on original Xbox One and haven't had any performance issues, although it seems to crash every time as Tails in Press Garden.

 

The DRM part is just a tiny part of that video, but it's a really good watch. It feels like a lot of it is a "well duh, yeah" lecture... but it's surprising as fuck to hear this coming from a huge corporation. Especially at a conference that wasn't intended for the public, but rather for publishers and developers exclusively. Sega should listen to every single word of that lecture, because it's prescient. Particularly the bit where they say "your audience will know your game better than you will, and will build better tools to mod your games than you can."

 

Good to hear! Yeah it clearly is not affecting all original Xbox One owners--here's the most recent discussion about it with one of the DF folks. His theory at the time was perhaps background OS activity can cause slowdown in the game. (Even some Xbox One S users are reporting this briefly happening--definitely seems to be happening much less often on the S than original hardware, though.) John was at Gamescom and is now on vacation, so I don't think he's had any time to dig into the issue further. I'm sure the dev team is aware of it and that a fix will come at some point, for the users affected by it.

 

I have noticed some slowdowns in Special Stage 1 on my original Xbox One, and sometimes if I pick up where I left off the game will crash or freeze. (Oddly enough it tends to do this when I try and check the leaderboards on Time Attack mode if I resume the game...) Other than that I was able to beat the game just fine as Sonic, Tails and Knuckles and I'm currently working on my Sonic and Tails save with no issues.

 

Does any one know if the Nintendo version of Sonic Mania's causes any problems with the Nintendo Switch Home menu?

I just got a Switch and it was working fine on the first day. But now if I press the home button, the home menu either wont appear or it will appear but won't respond to any other button presses. The same happens with the power menu. So the only way I can turn if off, is by doing a forced shutdown.

I am not sure if it is an issue with the Switch or an issue to Mania (and it's a bit hard to Google without seeing Mania spoilers). I am downloading some demos of other games to see if it is an issue specific to Mania, but if anyone knows anything about it, it would be a big help! (I've tried powering off the Switch but when I turn it back on the issue returns).

 

It's a known issue with Sonic Mania. Sometimes the home button will take several seconds to activate, other times it won't work right at all.

Hopefully the eventual patch will fix it.

 

Thanks! I assume there's known issues with the power menu and the sleep menu as well?

Oddly enough, the issues only happened when I got to the 5th Zone.