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It’s not always about the performance impact…DRM has been known to restrict and prevent legitimate gamers from playing the games meanwhile those that sail the high seas ignore the useless DRM and continue to play.
I had a CD-burner that was wrecked by DRM, back when they were expensive.
preventing legitimate gamers from playing a game they bought in anyway is inexcusable to me. I dont even want to sign into your “social club” or download another launcher. If i have to put in one more address and password than necessary I’m much more likely to get an illegitimate copy.
There’s so many games I haven’t bought simply because they used/ implemented Denuvo. I see Denuvo and it’s an instant lost sale/nonbuy.
Worse. Paradoxically, it encourages piracy.
If it has Denuvo it’s basically asking “please, get a pirated version if you want this, because the official version sucks”.
Yup, I was going to grab Like a Dragon last week but saw Denuvo on the sidebar & quickly changed my mind.
Denuvo is at least understandable when it’s added to a game on launch to curb pirates for that crucial moment. But like a dragon has been cracked for over two years now, it has no business still having Denuvo.
In our chat, Huin implied that this kind of public analysis was not very useful because “gamers [almost] never get access to the same version of [a game] protected and unprotected. There might be over the lifetime of the game a protected and unprotected version, but these are not comparable because these are different builds over six months, many bug fixes, etc., which could make it better or worse.”
So they are literally trying to say that Denuvo isn’t the cause of performance slowdowns, because patches to the game since the version that got cracked made the game that much slower?
Not to mention that time Bethesda messed up with Doom
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Denuvo is a cancer on the gaming world, full stop.
If a game I think I’m interested in has Denuvo attached to it, it’s an immediate pass. It just reminds me that there is is a back-catalog of games I could play on emulators, too. No sign ups. No always-online. No tracking me. So I end up reaching for one of those. It’s almost quaint to think something can be enjoyed privately.
The last game I bought with Denuvo was Doom Eternal, and as a separate matter it still harasses me to this day to create a Bethesda account (I have to switch Steam to offline mode to bypass that). It still has that stupid DRM on it after all these years. What a waste.
I pirated it. No microtransactions, no online content, no accounts. Just start & play. <3
If such features are available on Steam, I would probably buy it because it would be easier than pirating.
I see Denuvo, I don’t buy.
Simple.
I wouldn’t say that it’s evil, but rather it doesn’t exist for the benefit of players, it exists for the benefit of corporations. They know that it hurts performance in games and prevents a lot of people from playing games that they’ve legitimately purchased, but so long as it’s preventing some piracy they do not care.
Except it doesn’t prevent any piracy. Pirates strip the DRM away within hours or days, and then the game runs better for the pirates than the paying customers.
So, you have a small window of the game being “protected” but that’s the same window that people on the fence ab out the game wouldn’t have bought it anyway.
Denovo isnt getting cracked in days. Sure Empress cracks it, but they are doing a handful of games per year. Most games with Denovo are years to never cracked.
I agree on the point that Denuvo DRM negatively impacts performance but I’m not sure where you got the idea it can get stripped away. Very few games using Denuvo have been cracked, unfortunately it’s very good at its job.
It is a difficult problem, but there have been a lot of cracked Denuvo games, even in this article, it mentions that about half of the released Denuvo games have been cracked out of a total of 127, that’s not a small amount.
It is true though that Denuvo is complex and there’s currently only one person who has been doing them for a bit and that person is presenting as very very mentally ill and may also be on a break… it’s amazing reading, but it’s hard to tell conclusively what’s up with Empress.
The overall goal seems to be to slow down piracy in the initial launch period where they’re trying to get critical mass for sales. Eventually it looks like a good number of them get cracked, but by that time it’ll probably also be discounted on steam sales
I admit to being a bit out of the loop on new games/cracks. The last time I look was a couple of years back, when Denuvo was being cracked with zero day exploits.
So, looking it up now, there’s just one cracker left working Denuvo, and the company downloads the cracks themselves and reverse engineers them to make future cracking harder…
Quite the change in three years.
Anyone sane with the skillset has been hired to do similar work for an actual paycheck and no fear of jail
IT doesn’t need to be good at stopping piracy as long as it stops some piracy, or at least as long as they can sweet talk executives into believing it makes a difference.
Meanwhile, 162 days and counting for dead space.
Doesn’t make me want to buy it, without trying it out first, but saying hours to days for denuvo is…a joke really. Sure there were a couple of games that were cracked in a couple of days, but that’s a handful of them in the last 6 years or so. Most take a long, long time.
Did you read the article?
It’s not hours to a few days.
The article is a puff piece about how the company behind Denuvo totally has data that says their root kit doesn’t negatively impact performance.
They assert this with the same sort of confidence that I had back in 3rd grade when I claimed to have a girlfriend, just one that went to a different school and no, you wouldn’t know her.
The interviewer completely ignores the massive amounts of 3rd party data that says, yes, Denuvo is cancer that makes games run like shit while also making it easier to hack people’s computers. Doesn’t bring it up at all.
Now for my part, I had to actually look to other sources to see what the current crack speed was, because I’m not going to trust a puff piece to be honest. I remember plenty of stories about how Denuvo was “uncrackable” and then cracked in literal hours.
Sadly, current crack speeds are much slower than they were just a couple years ago when I had last looked. Only one person is still bothering to crack Denuvo, and the company is constantly downloading the cracks and patching around them.
It’s not a puff piece, it’s an interview that clearly prefaced his comments with background info about Denuvos performance impact. You can disagree with it (I do) without discrediting the article. Also, as far as I know Denuvo games have always been slower to crack.
Been a while since I pirated games so idk just how out of the loop I am, but It looks to me that Denuvo games took longer because not a lot of people work on them. I could be wrong, of course, but Empress seems to crack them quickly.
Yeah but I believe people have to pay her and she’s kind of unstable too.
Scatter shot approach, they DGAF who gets caught up in the crossfire so long as it makes life harder for pirates
They don’t really care about the effect on pirates, it’s all about being able to sell the illusion of stopping piracy to suit wearing idiots.
Yeah, tough luck. Every implementation of it that Ive seen always seems to introduce a noticeable performance hit. Meanwhile, you can just liberate the game and not deal with any of that.
I would hope that’s the case, but as I mentioned in another comment, I’ve actually seen a case where a Denuvo-addled game was cracked, then the cracked version stopped working at some point (seemingly after a certain calendar date or a certain time after installation, because it definitely wasn’t based on in-game progress), necessitating an updated crack.
The game is Shining Resonance Refrain, if you’re curious.
Maybe the new crack actually succeeds at really defeating the DRM? Who knows. (Though I also remember it saying something like you gotta skip a certain cutscene or else it’ll crash. But, let’s say we excuse that.)
Where I’m from, it’s legal to download cracked games so long as you’ve bought it legitimately. Paying for games isn’t a problem, it’s treating everyone as suspects that bugs me.
If a game I want to purchase has Denuvo, I just move on. It shows me that the game publisher doesn’t care as much about their users as they do their own profit. Plus, I also could just play another game that I already have.
You can’t. Don’t touch my kernal, scary man.
What happens if a publisher never releases a non-denuvo build, just withdraws it from the store after the denuvo contract ends? If their patent is to be believed, there is no way to run a game without information from the server, since tiny parts of the exe are removed and only sent when the ticket is requested, and no way to crack it after the fact. Does the game just disappear if it was never cracked? How can somebody live with the fact that part of culture just disappeared, with the fact that a work of art just got lost forever because a corporation decided that profits were more important than maintaining a work of art? The existence of DRM is reprehensible, it only facilitates the restriction of works of art for monetary gain. The growth of human civilization can be attributed in no small part to the free flow of information. Now that information is restricted, not to protect anybody, simply because corporations decided that preventing a tiny group of people from accessing that media without a paying the bridge troll was more important than allowing art to flow freely.
Does the game just disappear if it was never cracked?
Considering there are tons of games that are no longer supported, the answer is yes, the game customer is left to the elements when the publisher decides they’re done. And with the current DMCA, we’re not even legally allowed to break DRM for legal purposes (such as to play games we bought when the DRM is no longer supported.)
Curiously, it does send a message for the determined end user that legality is only for suckers (or for companies who have to operate within the constraints of licensing). Curiously, Windows 10 and 11 depend on the ignorance of upper management regarding the degree to which Microsoft has surveillance access, since companies don’t get to medium-sized without having a few skeletons in the accounting closet. I’m surprised so few companies haven’t switched to Linux Red Hat (which has a similar support package) but then Red Hat is going through its own scandals right now.
Anyway, if your game is popular, you can expect the old version to be supported until the redux comes out. If it’s a niche game produced by a company that the publisher bought a while ago and would like to forget, yes, it’ll disappear into the aether as you watch.
Empress will read this and it will grind her gears. I am looking forward for her new NFO.
Well, they’re going to have to try a lot harder to convince me. In fact I don’t think it’s possible for me to see Denuvo as anything but malware.
