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When people try to defend denuvo because at best ‘doesn’t change anything’ but what does it add? That company is spending money and dev time to implement something that has 0 value to paying customers and you think that is good?
I still remember AC: Origins. Crackers completely removed Denuvo from the executable and saw a significant boost in performance.
the latest i heard about this was atomic hearts.
a denuvo free version leaked and it performed much better, like upgrade better.
Except that it does change stuff: It can have massive performance impacts on some games, which really sucks, considering these games are 70 bucks
I did say ‘at best’, some rare cases of good implementation benchmarks show almost no performance degradation but those are the best cases and somewhat rare
True.
I could maybe see an argument being made in favor of having these kinds of security measures for the first month after release to protect sales, since it’s usually the period in which most sales are secured; devs do need a sustainable income after all. But that would also necessitate ignoring the potential performance degradation resulting in a poor first experience for players, and many publishers just leave it in for the lifetime of a game, which is a disaster waiting to happen (as seen here).
Overall, I think piracy is mostly a pricing issue above all else. With AAA titles getting increasingly more expensive and being released in broken states, it’s not surprising that people don’t want to spend $70 on a game that they might end up hating and opt to “demo” the game first. Refund policies can help alleviate the issue, but are hardly a silver bullet, with games inserting tons of fluff at the beginning to ensure you exceed the playtime threshold.
Either deliver the games you promise, or price them according to what’s actually there, and I’m sure the majority of gamers would be content in paying full price. DRM only serves to increase friction for the honest people paying for your games.
The only devs who could maybe benefit from sales protection are precisely the devs who can’t afford to utilize it. Namely indie developers who actually see all the profit directly, instead of having been paid up front.
I get what you’re saying about devs needing income but devs already got paid for making the game. All revenue after goes to executives who had little to nothing to do with making the game and I know some people could argue that if the company doesn’t make money then the devs will be out of a job but that’s a BS propaganda argument. Even when games make record profits teams get let go. Fuck blizzard.
Classic Denuvo.
What is the point of Denuvo? Seeing it takes a day or two, games with Denuvo getting cracked.
It gives a warm fuzzy feeling to executives and investors!
A day or two? I thought Denuvo was still very tricky to crack and only a couple insane people were able to do it.
It’s not necessarily that it’s tricky to crack (it’s certainly not easy, don’t get me wrong), but that there’s no point for a couple reasons that combine:
- To crack a game you have to redo it any time there’s a major release of the game, such as DLC/expansion/major bug fix. The reasons for this are numerous and outside scope. But it takes time.
- Most crackers can only do so many games, so they often wait until most or all major additions are out.
- Denuvo is expensive and operates on a yearly license
- Most game studios only license Denuvo for those first few update cycles when they get the most sales and then remove it themselves because of the cost
That means many don’t even bother trying to crack Denuvo because they just can wait it out. It’s a resource balancing game on both sides.
Yes, and the word going around is that the biggest cracker of Denuvo has been out of the game for a while. So Denuvo games aren’t being cracked at all.
There are many forms of DRM, but as much as Denuvo sucks, it’s probably the most effective nowadays.
I think the logic is
That day or 2 is where the biggest sales numbers come from because people are too impatent to wait that long to throw money at a broken buggy microtransaction shit show.
And tbh it doesn’t look like they are particularly wrong
Denuvo is a lot more effective than that.
But also? That kind of makes a huge difference. Story time (so obviously anecdotal and grain of salt and…)!
Way back when there was this series called Mass Effect. All us PC gamers were pissed off that Bioware were traitors who had abandoned us and never wanted to play that xbox shit. Until there was a port of the game to PC and we all needed it in our veins.
Mass Effect PC was one of the first (?) games with activation model securom as a DRM model. And the Scene Group who cracked it first did a piss poor job and the game would crash once you finished the tutorial and got to the starmap. But, because it was the era of multiple Scene Groups vying for power, nobody wanted to be “second” to crack a game.
So the various message boards were full of people complaining and eventually a good many of us pirates just drove down to Best Buy and bought the game because we needed it NOW!!!
I want to say it was properly cracked within a week? But that was still, likely, very significant sales. Largely for the same reason that publishers/devs pay for day one influencer streams and the like. That is the peak of marketing and when you get all the impulse buys who didn’t pre-order.
There were some pretty strong rumours the starmap crash was intentionally built into the game, specifically to create this effect. If that’s true, it’s genius, but it seems rather unlikely.
That is pretty normal. Operation Flashpoint cranked up bot accuracy to full aimbot levels if it detected the DRM check was bypassed. Serious Sam 3 added an unkillable scorpion enemy. One of the Ghostbusters made ghosts unkillable. And so forth
That said: My understanding is more that the way the DRM check was bypassed meant the secondary check (whenever a starmap was loaded) errored out because the function was missing.
Divinity 2: Ego Draconis had terrible DRM check bypass effects, but they ended up plaguing the game for legitimate players moreso than pirates. Larian ended up releasing a DRM removed version of the game months after release because of how bad it was.
There have been a few famous (or infamous) cases of game devs adding crack checks into their games. Basically, the devs recognize that cracking is inevitable. So instead of trying to make harder and harder DRM methods, they simply started including checks to see if the player was using a cracked copy. If they did, they could change the game in some way. This can actually be fairly effective for the reasons you mentioned: A cracker gets the game to boot, and maybe plays the first five minutes or so. Then they send it out the door without actually verifying anything further. Because they’re rushing to be the first, so they won’t bother doing a full playthrough to ensure everything works. So when the player gets ahold of it, they’re the ones who experience all the issues.
Spyro 2: Ripto’s Rage, for instance, made the game increasingly frustrating to play. It would start removing treasure you had already collected, so you had to recollect it. And in a game where your progress is tracked via collections, that means it’s a huge time-sink. And if you somehow managed to get all the way to the final boss, the game would crash and delete your save so you had to completely start over.
Game Dev Tycoon is another example. The devs themselves actually posted a “cracked” version of their game on day 1. So all the various sites grabbed it and started seeding their torrents. It’s a game where you spend time and money developing games. And the cracked version also includes a piracy feature, where as you gain popularity you also see your profits getting eaten by piracy. And the game will slowly ratchet up the amount that you lose to piracy, until it’s eventually impossible to make a profit. Notably, there was no in-game way to combat the piracy or stop it from eating into your profits.
That latter example was used to great effect, because it sent all of the pirates to the steam message boards, to complain about piracy in their games and ask if there was a way to develop DRM to combat it. In essence, they were tricked into ratting on themselves. Because if you were playing a legit copy, you wouldn’t have any issues with piracy.
My favorite one is the Alan Wake eyepatch. Hackers quickly fixed it, but I think it made the game better!
I recall way back when, Black and White (2?) had childred who never grew up if you used the cracked version, it was hilarious.
Not any more. No Denuvo game has been cracked since June last year (Etrian Odyssey HD).
Until critical mass starts voting with their fucking money, nothing will change.
Unfortunately most people don’t have a spine or straight up don’t care about things like this.
Far, far more in the “don’t care” category, I think.
🏴☠️🦜
The Switch version is the only way to play P5R pirated currently as far as I’m aware.
Holy shit you’re right, that doesn’t bode well for conservation in the future. Hopefully by then the anti piracy will all be a bad memory.
Thankfully Denuvo has a shelf life, so once the contracts expire it will be removed and they’ll be available in the usual places.
Unless Sega pulls a Capcom and adds Denuvo way after the release of the game
Then the latest version before the Denuvo was added will still be available.
Persona 5 was unplayable for a short time
Thanks, hate headlines like this
