General News - Denuvo DRM on the Rise

Sorry, I can't confirm what you're saying about those two games.
I had absolutely no problems with DX:MD (note that I didn't use antialiasing and other options ment for future hardware which others did although developer specified such hardware still doesn't exist) nor with ME:A. Now I do install games on SSD so that might be the reason for no problems on my side, but possible performance issues definetly don't come from CPU as I still use good old i5 4670K on it's base clock, so far didn't have a reason to overclock it except AC4 but in case of that onecore hammering garbage port I decided not to.

Not sure what is to discuss more about piracy. It existed, exists and will exist. (Certain) CEOs insult us by stating 99% of us are pirates, well, if you expect me to support those CEOs after such bullshit you're wrong, cmon Vivendi buy that damned company already.
Did Denuvo or any DRM stop piracy? No it did not, every DRM is smoke and mirrors, if someone is so eager to pirate something, they'll do it one way or another. So instead of bugging buyers with messed up DRMs, publishers can use other ways to "sour the milk" in illicit copy cases (for example IIRC Serious Sam had an unkillable trashmob that plagued only pirated copies).

I've posted another thing in other threads a few times. The only way to beat stupid censorship goverments force onto their citizens is sadly - pirating games. I will never support piracy in general, but sorry, neither would judge those who had to pirate a game because their "morality police" forbid buying games in normal stores. Meanwhile, those same censoring organs allow scams like gambling falsely advertised as videogame, season passes and other DLC/microtransactions milking schemes.

In my case obviously, it's not all black and white. A thief is always a thief, sure. But sorry, I do not want to be called a thief by some CEO just because he felt like it, and I will not put a thief who had no option to buy something in the same basket with one who had an option to buy and also could buy a product later for cheap on evergoing sales.

As I said in previous post, if this new Denuvo iteration hurts performance as was suggested in articles, it should die miserably ASAP. Not sure what was supposedly wrong with it's previous versions so they suddenly needed to change it in a way it kills performance.

Early birthday present for rpgfool:

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1384833

So they fight piracy with piracy LOL.

HaHaHa

Honestly I've got no axe to grind here, except I do object to paying for games putting crap on my system, lowering game performance, and pushing a need for system upgrade…

Still, this is an incredible irony…

And btw take a look at denuvo's latest game sales success story -- PREY 2017, released May 5 (nearly a month ago), achieving measly pc sales of 262,000, with "peak daily concurrent players" steadily dropping from a high of 15,000 to current value of 3,200… another game on another denuvo death spiral...

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Prey is not as stellar game as some claim it to be.
Sales (players) decline in that case is because of it being a bit above average product, not because of DRM. It's perhaps so far the worst game that came from Arcane.

Maybe it's not true that a dance with Denuvo is invariably the start of a death wish coming true. Maybe it's just that creation of a non-stellar game is causation (wholly or partially) for adding Denuvo, rather than adding Denuvo is causation (wholly or partially) for non-stellar game sales.

At any rate even if Denuvo isn't the killer app it seems to be, it sure doesn't seem to be a sales generating app.

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It's not meant to increase sales. They use it to reduce piracy around release date. Security measures are always meant to buy time, nothing more, nothing less. And in this area, Denuvo is quite effective. That's imho the main reason why many complainers hate it.

Avantenor said:

It's not meant to increase sales. They use it to reduce piracy around release date. Security measures are always meant to buy time, nothing more, nothing less. And in this area, Denuvo is quite effective. That's imho the main reason why many complainers hate it.

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And why do you suppose game publishers want to reduce piracy?? It's because some game publishers believe that 'piracy' harms the game publisher by causing 'lost sales'. So less piracy means less 'lost sales' which translates to increased sales compared to the alleged 'lost sales' scenario.

Should be obvious. But don't take my word for it. Take a look at what what Denuovo’s marketing director, Thomas Goebl says on the subject,



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That's a positive and welcome effect. But the main goal is to minimize potential risks. You can't measure the positive effects of DRM on sales, especially regarding long term sale (even a delayed budget sale instead of a cracked copy is one more sale). You can only estimate immediate negative effects. You also can't schedule success. But you can schedule steps and tasks on the road to success and reduce risks as best as possible. DRM like Denuvo is only one component in an overall business strategy. For this, sometimes even the psychological element alone is sufficient, because you give proof that you try to protect your business. If you can exclude piracy from your analysis afterwards, it is one more metric you can evaluate regarding success or failure.

Avantenor said:

That's a positive and welcome effect. But the main goal is to minimize potential risks. You can't measure the positive effects of DRM on sales, especially regarding long term sale (even a delayed budget sale instead of a cracked copy is one more sale). You can only estimate immediate negative effects. You also can't schedule success. But you can schedule steps and tasks on the road to success and reduce risks as best as possible. DRM like Denuvo is only one component in an overall business strategy. For this, sometimes even the psychological element alone is sufficient, because you give proof that you try to protect your business. If you can exclude piracy from your analysis afterwards, it is one more metric you can evaluate regarding success or failure.

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The evidence to date is not good. Denuvo either decreases game performance or leads the gamer to expect same (your so called "psychological element"). Games with Denuvo essentially have a sales "guarantee" of poor sales. Wholly coincidental or not, the typical death spiral of games adopting Denuvo isn't something that should sit well with owners and investors of game companies.

Denuvo's marketplace performance suggests that game company executives who invest in Denuvo are wasting company funds and/or worse, sabotaging sales of company's products.

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BoboTheMighty said:

Early birthday present for rpgfool:

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1384833

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hahaha

RPGFool said:

The evidence to date is not good. Denuvo either decreases game performance or leads the gamer to expect same (your so called "psychological element"). Games with Denuvo essentially have a sales "guarantee" of poor sales. Wholly coincidental or not, the typical death spiral of games adopting Denuvo isn't something that should sit well with owners and investors of game companies.

Denuvo's marketplace performance suggests that game company executives who invest in Denuvo are wasting company funds and/or worse, sabotaging sales of company's products.

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That's your customer perspective and wishful thinking. It doesn't matter from a business perspective. And I would call FIFA, Star Wars Battlefront, Total War: Warhammer, Battlefield 1 widely successful and several others at least successful.

btw, even Witcher 3 tried to establish DRM without calling it DRM. You had to register your game to GOG in order to get the release update and free DLCs.

Avantenor said:

That's your customer perspective and wishful thinking. It doesn't matter from a business perspective. And I would call FIFA, Star Wars Battlefront, Total War: Warhammer, Battlefield 1 widely successful and several others at least successful.

btw, even Witcher 3 tried to establish DRM without calling it DRM. You had to register your game to GOG in order to get the release update and free DLCs.

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No question but that customer perspective doesn't matter to some companies. Nevertheless it's quite clear that ignoring the views (perspective) of a business's customers isn't a recommended course of action for businesses that actually care about keeping, or increasing, customers.

Your claim that Witcher 3 (with sales exceeding 10 million units) had DRM is plainly ridiculous. Witcher 3 didn't waste a penny of investor's funds on Denuvo; and didn't incur the killer app sales losses typical of Denuvo games

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Avantenor said:

It's not meant to increase sales. They use it to reduce piracy around release date. Security measures are always meant to buy time, nothing more, nothing less. And in this area, Denuvo is quite effective. That's imho the main reason why many complainers hate it.

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That's also the main reason I like it.
Before Denuvo, usually it happened pirates already finished a game while I was still installing it. Ain't that nice, right? Actual customers being punished.

Okay, I admit, acidifying while others play still happens because while we have Denuvo on PC, console stores in some countries start selling a game weeks before it's official release date. For example No Man's Sky case where thankfully in the end it had a positive effect and turned many people off buying the game.
But that's a problem caused by consoles, not by Denuvo.

Necro because DSOG not sure how, compared Denuvo and nonDenuvo versions of Assassin Creed Origins:
https://www.dsogaming.com/articles/...significantly-less-stuttering-faster-loading/

even if Ubisoft removes Denuvo and VMProtect from AC:O, you won’t receive any framerate boost. What you will get, however, is faster loading times and less stuttering. Those that will greatly benefit from such a thing are owners of weaker PC systems. On the other hand, owners of high-end CPUs will not see any performance difference at all.

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When it comes to Ubi games, this test above proves they use unoptimized trash of a code hammering your CPU that runs almost everything else without sweating. One might think they were paid by Intel to make more i9 sales.

Now why Denuvo makes loading longer beats me. It's supposed to encrypt only the executable to protect mmos from hacks (yes, that was it's initial purpose but was then used to DRM singleplayer games too), not gigabytes of game data.
Supposed to. Maybe it does more than that.

No the big takeaway is scene groups have finally found a way to remove Denuvo. Before this was done it was usually a bypass that took weeks or months to create.