or a system that checks if a player purchased that game, otherwise, it can't be played. What do you think about this solutions?
Of course, it requires that a user is connected to the server, to run the game,
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or a system that checks if a player purchased that game
That's what drm is. But yeah, it changed a little when being online became widely spread, so they would verify at every game start, if you bought the game or not, making accessing games even more risky. Some internet outage or the company ceasing to exist will make the game unplayable or even brick it.
If we look at how often Itch was unavailable the last few months, that's just not a user friendly solution. As I said, it is the legitimate users suffering from drm. The non legitimate users do not care, as they are not using the normal game version.
The bestest Denuvo gives a game maybe a window of time of 2 months after release. After that, the game is available on shady sites without all that drm.
I think you might want to ask, if having copy protection will increase sales. I say, it lowers sales, because there are people that do not buy certain games on purpose, because those games have certain drm. Of course I might be wrong here, but sites like GoG seem to be doing fine. And of course, in the sector of Indie games the situation is a bit different. Why even bother with drm. For one that risk of the company disappearing and the drm server with it, is a lot higher. And the target audience is less likely to pirate the game or even give the developer money, after playing a pirated version.
What you might consider is offering added value. That does not even need added drm, but implicitly would only give the added value by having an account with a purchased version. Like cloud saves. Achievements. Online friends and multiplayer matching. It goes without saying that you would need an account and a purchased game to participate.
Is this a translation issue?
drm free is what it says on the tin, or else it would be a lie.
And of course GoG has a launcher. Even Itch has one. And the same as Itch, you are not required to use the launcher.
You do not need to look so far away for drm free paid games, just look at Itch top sellers. https://itch.io/games/top-sellers/store
Problem is, those publisher are unlikely to share their experiences here. So you will get mostly answers from the usual people that post regularly in the community message boards.
Maybe you find interviews or something from some publishers about the topic. Or something like that. Some very few games on Itch even do have drm. It's not forbidden, there is just no plug and play solution to it.
My opinion is basically this: people with a budget are willing to pay for games and services, even for "free" games, like the pay what you want games on Itch. And people without a budget simply cannot pay for games. This whole notion of drm is just bad as a concept in general for many reasons. I think the better concept is to upsell by having additional services, like cloud save games. Who cares if there is drm in it or not*.
* People that cannot play their games, because yet another ddos attack or another incompetent or disappearing developer, that's the people who care.