Echoing other users: DRM free scripts. I don’t know how you should implement it, if you are that worried about piracy. Frankly, I think the piracy angle is overblown. Piracy has been around since I was able to tape a song off the radio with my cassette recorder, and media companies have been crying doom about it since, and yet: there is more and better media being created than ever before. Personally, I’m never going to invest in an ecosystem that requires me to be subscribed forever or my downloads are useless - especially when content providers come and go, and remove videos and scripts seemingly at random.
I sub to SLR because they are constantly innovating, they add quality hand-crafted scripts daily, they shoot diverse and technically proficient vids with top stars, and they are responsive to customer feedback. I don’t keep coming back because they limit my downloads, I keep coming back because they keep offering new, quality product. NA/TNGF on the other hand? Old, stale, outdated. Poorly shot with outdated tech. Crap website that a community college coder could implement better. Slow updates, with second-tier talent. Of course people drive-by download a site like that - you could scoop up everything worthwhile in a few hours and be confident that they aren’t going to post much new content to make a long sub worthwhile. AND: they know it. That’s why they are trying to lock people in with DRM nonsense - because they can’t compete on the merits of their content.
If your content is excellent, customers will support. If it isn’t, they won’t - whether you try to handcuff them to it or not. Be an excellent site, and you wont need to.
Many are talking about SLR and DRM free scripts. These are two different things. SLR just have a different technical solution for their DRM since you can only stream their scripts. The difference is that they also allow you to download three scripts per month to keep forever. So what NA should do to match is also allow users to download a few scripts each month to keep forever regardless of subscription status. Preferably this can be done by allowing subscribers to download real funscripts containing all the data, but I guess a trade-off could be a script file with an infinite validity token. The latter will of course restrict the use of the script to TheHandy only and that is a big drawback for people with other devices who want scripts for their favorite NA videos.
Don’t get me wrong. I loathe DRM since I believe it restrict the use of a product more than it should. The worst part is that it’s only paying customers that have to live with all the downsides of DRM, not the pirates. Pirates who download cracked stuff don’t have the burden of DRM. You can all read about performance degrading DRM protections for games for example. I personally found my old genuine Photoshop license go to hell because Adobe decided to switch to subscription based software many years ago and stopped supporting the DRM for their older products that you bought and kept. It’s simply not possible to install the software and run it anymore because the DRM depends on servers/services that have been shutdown.
Regarding script piracy; SLR obviously felt the need to hammer down on a piracy site (should be a thread about that somewhere) that basically sold access to links where SLR scripts could be downloaded “for free” so I guess piracy is an issue, at least according to SLR.
DRM is shit
SLR has nothing to do with it. Please stop putting the two together, it’s just wrong.
If your spotify expires you can’t get music.
If your Washington post expires you can’t read it.
If your Dropbox expires you can’t upload files.
So is the SLR scripts sub. It’s just a typical sub. Not sure why many can’t get it.
@doublevr just to explain the psychology of why people “can’t get it”.
It’s all to do with how porn subscriptions have been traditionally used. Since it became a thing 20 years ago sites have run on the idea that you charge a lot for access but allow customers to download the video’s. The drive by mentality was known and priced into your sub. A recurring automatic subscription was also the norm to catch out people who subbed and forgot to cancel. Big sites hoped that the regular updates kept the subs and smaller sites rely on new or periodic subs.
The Idea of streaming as a service is still relatively recent as internet speeds now have the capacity in many areas to handle this.
The intended SLR usage of streaming, but your given options, is not the norm and so people will rebel against it. Doesn’t matter if it’s better or worse, people don’t like change.
There is also the issue that people like to have a thing not a licence to a thing. In an ideal world we would all like to be perched upon our pile of scripts and video’s like a smutty smaug.
In regards to NA the fact that there first wave of scripts were so bad is why i dont sub for the new ones. $30 - $40 is a lot to lose if the scripts suck.
Although look at all the tube sites everyone is streaming that were fully illegal until recently (still not fully legal though but after porn hub crackdown they are very cooperative). It’s also true that a lot of noise is coming from freeloaders. They would stream it off if it would be free.
What I mean is that subscription based access is a kind of DRM. The purpose of DRM is for the rights holder to control how the digital IP is consumed so that it isn’t illegally used or copied. SLR control the access to the scripts and prevents downloading the raw funscript files for offline use, except for the 3 scripts per month, and the subscription model is the mean for achieving that. Spotify, Adobe Photoshop, Office 365 are all examples of trying to control illegal copying with the help of subscriptions as a business model. You can use it as long as you pay. Stop paying and it won’t work anymore. But I respect that you don’t want to be associated with the word DRM since most people has very bad experiences with DRM, myself included.
You can technically see DeoVR as a form of DRM though, because you can’t use scripts from the subscription without it. I would be happy though if SLR added an option to download the DRM’ed scripts so you can use them with different software/hardware.
You can use scripts you download from SLR on any device that supports funscripts (e.g., scriptplayer with Whirligig, VLC, MPC, Heresphere, etc.). DeoVR is not required. As for streaming scripts, other sites have the same issue (e.g., NA/TNGF need to use crappy browser based player).
While that’s technically correct (the best kind of correct), I don’t think most people associate streaming with DRM.
Because while they have the same goal, DRM implies that you’re restricted on what you can do with something that you own (i.e. you downloaded it, you have the “physical” copy yourself), while with streaming it’s very clear that you never owned it in the first place.
I would say script tokens can have at least these two purposes:
Avoiding piracy
Forcing users to remain subscribed
If the objective is number 1, Handy team can limit usage based on IP addresses or maybe a unique feature of each device. It seems at the moment they trying to address number 2 which automatically also addresses number 1.
I’m not sure saying NA scripts have DRM is accurate. As others mentioned tt’s actually SAAS (software as a service). The scripts are on Handy servers and we never own them. Based on those tokens we are allowed to access them for a limited time.
SLR has a hybrid model. By paying $10 more, we have access to SAAS (I call it Script as a service), but we are allowed to download 3 scripts from their servers each month and actually own them. The last option is not available in NA.
I’m pretty sure that even if you download the content you can’t really think about it as something that you “own” in the legal aspect. It’s actually crazy, but you don’t own anything even if you paid for it.
However I see where you are going, and that’s technically true, once the NA sub dies the downloaded scripts are useless. There are ups and downs of both SLR and NA systems, one require you to use a certain software, one require you to redownload all scripts each month.
I think you’re completely ignoring that you can also buy scripts on SLR, which you then “own” (yes we can argue on what “own” means in this context legally, but it at least means that you can use it after your sub expires, or if the content is removed from the server) and can use it in whatever software you want. And that’s a major advantage of SLR for me.
I’m not denying that in any sense, however the whole point of a script subscription is to make scripts more accessible for the masses. I bought many scripts myself, but I think that you can’t say that most people would buy hundreds of scripts instead of a script sub, just so they use it locally or with different video player, and that’s why in the previous post I stated that I would be totally ok with an option to download DRM’ed scripts instead.
I agree with that, but I vastly prefer a system like SLR where both options are offered, compared to a system like NA that only offers the streaming/DRM option.
And I don’t think that can really be fixed with a DRM with a perpetual license either, because I don’t think that license would really be perpetual (for example if they lose the rights for that video/script, or if the DRM server goes offline).
I already had a NA sub, so I added scripts when they were released, saw it was a pain to use, cancelled that portion, and only botherered with checking back in to them today.
My feedback as a Quest 2 user would be this:
If the scripts themselves destruct after 30 days, the cloud platform needs to be accessible for streaming. NA seemingly added a Connect button to the site for the Handy, where to my knowledge, most, if not all, browsers won’t fully work with NA in VR. FAQs and how tos are pretty much non-existent. Now Heresphere will stream it if you download the file, but then you get no scripting. I mean it is possible, you could download the script first, then stream the video and have it synced up, BUT the scirpts don’t match the video name, so as an actual use case, that won’t work.
It’s gotta be one or the other - local or cloud; there is currently no truly convenient option for either other than Heresphere locally/SMB3. I don’t really see much customer growth if end users have to cycle selfdestructing files on a monthly basis. End users aren’t going to want to jump through specific hoops to get specific content when they already likely have a massive pool of scripts already available. For maximum exposure, It needs to be convenient and hopefully stackable with their existing usage patterns.
As for the scripts themselves, I don’t know, you may have been getting more flak than deserved. I tested out four of them. 1 was good, 2 were ok-ish (strokes that weren’t there) and 1 was just bad. But you know, that can just be a teething pain as the QA team adjusts in and gets feedback. One consistent theme across the four was that intercourse strokes were a bit more exagerated and I felt a bit beat up afterwards, and BJs need to be more nounced; but that is the more difficult area of scripting IMO; that comes with experience.
Anyway, just my opinion but hope it helps somewhat.
EDIT: Scripts are supported in XBVR when played over Heresphere in the 0.5 release.
Your time and input is greatly appreciated and noted. It seems like there should be alternate pricing for longer periods of time on specific scripts you like. In regard to the feedback on scenes, do you happen to know which specific videos were OK and which were bad? Noted on BJs being more nuanced.
I went through a bunch more and there is a commonality across them all. The good news it should be easily corrected.
Strong tendency for full strokes, most noticable in cowgirl and blowjobs scenes, where that is not a typical range. This also can make the stroke seem much faster for the user as compared to what is on the headset which can break immersion.
Added strokes in blowjob scenes and transitions (penis falling out of the vagina, switching hands, etc…) Sometimes multiple full strokes are being registered when a slight movement of the device, or even not acknowledging unintentional strokes would bring quality up massively.
For ease of use, have the script and video filenames match at download, or at least be relatively close to it.
TLDR: An added 5-10 minutes of QA per scene could easily correct these issues. A lot of your negative feedback is probably coming from your blowjob scenes which need more refinement. Your intercourse is generally fine just too much activity.
Alternate pricing as a microtransaction would be fine but it would hopefully be available outside of the $10/month plan as I would view those as an either/or option (similar to how SLR has it today). I just don’t see people being bothered to replace their downloaded scripts monthly. They’ll try to play it, it will fail, they will groan in frustration and then simply move on to a different scene.
Scenes that didn’t drop me from immersion greatly:
melissa moore/riley reid - naughty athletics
abella danger - pse/my daughters hot friend
amia miley - pse
Bad
Mia malkova - after school (tears lol - also possible i messed up the rename but I don’t think so)
moka mora - adult daydreams
britney amber - pse
