So they have a great reputation with people who aren’t gamers?
Denuvo blames its low reputation on anyone who has experienced its product
Uh huh. Speaking as someone who (stupidly) bought Star Wars Jedi Survivor at launch and expected a 12900KF and a 4090 to be able to play it stably – the game ran like absolute shit until the patch where they announced they removed Denuvo. They’d done all manner of patching to that point which made absolutely no difference for the majority of people, but miraculously, when they removed Denuvo the performance across the board was exponentially higher. Traversal stutter is still there, but it’s extremely minor and is aligned now with every other UE4 game’s traversal stutter.
But yeah, I guess that was just a surprising coincidence that the performance issues almost entirely resolved themselves the moment Denuvo was removed, and that they didn’t in the previous 8 patches.
Fuck Denuvo.
These things are like door locks. The point is to make it harder to pirate than to pay. This doesn’t mean people won’t pirate. Just like a door lock doesn’t mean people won’t burgle.
If it took a long time to open the door because the lock is too complex, it is the lock maker’s fault not the burglar’s fault. The solution is to buy a new lock.
That’s a bad analogy. A door lock protects the user. A door lock can be left unlocked. DRM does nothing to improve the user experience and it frequently punishes paying customers. Even the best, least hated DRM will negatively affect legitimate users by its very nature. And Denuvo is one of the worst.
If you want to use the door analogy, it’s like every time you want to open the door you need to call the door company and give them the serial number that’s on the door to show that you bought an authentic door. And any one else trying to open your door can also give the number written on the door because the company only cares that it was a legally purchased door and not about protecting the user.
Except this lock fills the secured room with molasses. The paying individual now suffers through wading in molasses.
If only they were just locks.
I think it’s a better metaphor that they removed all windows, made the walls 2m thick cement and replaced the door with a 10 inch thick heavy steel door.
Absolutelly, it makes it very well protected from unauthorized outsiders just coming in … at the cost of living in a bunker with no natural sunlight, stale air, mold and having to push a 2 ton door to get in or out.
Now, some people might be ok with living in such a bunker for their own personal protection, but very few are ok with living in a bunker to protect the software in the computer they have in their bunker from being copied.
People are pissed because Denuvo makes their life harder whilst having literally zero upsides for them personally.
Ultimately locks are just suggestions. If someone is determined to get in, they will.
Exactly, they keep honest people honest, just like piracy protection.
Imagine stating you are unable to get third parties to agree to release metrics on game performance, then turning around and saying that when third parties give metrics that they’re wrong.
Pirates & gamers
Lets blame 100% of the demographic we are fucking over. No wonder they get along so well with big devs.
I mean they aren’t wrong, due to piracy we know how awful the performance impact of Denuvo on games is (^:
Isn’t collective punishment against the Geneva Convention?
I saw a thread last week of PC gamers saying red dead for PC is gonna cost too much so they will just pirate it.
Honestly as a dev I would avoid PC as a platform, the fanbase is unpleasable and no matter how much they argue that it’s not true, 1 third of PC gamers openly admit to pirating instead of buying.
I also find PC gamers are becoming a toxic group, they hate everyone
I also find PC gamers are becoming a toxic group, they hate everyone
User Nuke_the_whales doesn’t like how toxic PC gamers are.
As a PC gamer, I only pirate games I don’t know whether I’m going to like or not. And even then, most of the time I’ll probably end up buying the game later if it’s available on Steam or GoG if I actually like the game, so I can support the devs. I personally don’t have the time to buy a game on Steam, play for less than 2 hours to find out whether I like it, and get a refund if I don’t.
Honest explanation of perspective from a PC gamer deciding weather or not to buy a game I think a dev should know:
According to the game’s Epic Games Store listing, Red Dead Redemption will cost $49.99/ £39.99 on PC, despite first being released in 2010.
I don’t think a game I played over 10 years ago is worth paying $40 again without some good value added to it. What makes this worth $40 to me as a consumer who enjoyed the original? I don’t see enough value to justify it.
It’s also a coin flip if the port is good, functional, or will have arbitrary technical limitations like no modding. I also don’t want to get screwed over and inconvenienced like the last time I gave them money. They are removing value from an over priced product by slowing it down and treating you like.
If I think a game is worth pirating, I am most likely willing to buy it or a future product from that dev if the situation was different or the product was better. Hell, I pirate games I intend to buy to make sure there not absolute dog shit and technically functional. I personally don’t thing its worth pirating Red Dead even without DRM, I already played it years back and I suspect Rockstar will make this version worse than the original knowing how they done things in the past.
I’m assuming I’m going to have to create an account, consent to spying, not own anything, install additional software to allow me to login and launch the game since they don’t like the one I choose, figure out compatibility, be exposed to predatory monetization, install a root kit to make sure I’m not bypassing monetization or cheating, worse performance, wave legal rights to contracts, deal with too little or too much moderation, and it still may be a turd that disappears 5 years alter after all of that. None of this is fun and removes value form the fun I would expect to purchase. I’m offended they think any of this shit is good. This is what will get PC players to hate your business. If you do this crap and you can only justify it to share holders and not customers, I want you to fail.
Corporate developers make games as an investment product and not a creative product. Denuvo is in the business as a designated ball squeezer that takes the reputational heat for a greedy dev that needs 0.3% on profit chart. We are not Denuvos customers. Denuvos customers are soulless board members creating investor profit by betting their reputation is still good enough to start enshitifying without immediately getting customers to jump ship.
Having a talking head come out once a week to make an offical statement calling people literally every insult in the book for saying “Game looks like shit and this dev has a track record of being shitty, save your money” is going to start a fight.
Nah, they should ditch consoles, the money is in PC anyways…
Sounds stupid, doesn’t it?
Is this saying the most money is in vr? That’s the only part of this that is surprising to me.
Edit: Wait no, I think it’s just a confusing graph. It’s definitely all in mobile
No, majority of the money is in Mobile is how I read it… size of the spreads and all.
This is depressing.
Isn’t it though?
Especially knowing mobile revenue is all just pay to win whale hunting and gambling addiction. There’s no reason games like Pokémon can’t exist on mobile. But they’ll never do it. And if they do it’s gonna have in game currency.
I mean, they are right.
Just not in the way they think.Ullman’s argumentation is very wiggly when it comes to impact on performance. On one hand, he claims there’s very little proof, on the other hand he claims there is no point producing proof because they wouldn’t be believed. Furthermore he says their hands are tied as they’d need their client’s approval to publish such numbers, conveniently ignoring the possibility of anonymizing and grouping data. Remember they state to being included in 70-80 games yearly.
Finally, and this is an old song, but anyways: preventing loss in sales due to piracy is an exercise in wishful thinking. The amount of pirate players who would have paid in an alternate universe with no cracked version can’t be reliably estimated.
“Gamers”? Who else do they think is even going to encounter their shit? If the people that are forced to endure your shit aren’t happy, seems like a you problem.
The problem are Customers, who don’t just accept things that bring zero benefits for them whilst making their life worse.
But worry not, Denuvo does a great job at getting rid of those.
Denuvo’s customers are corporations, not consumers. “We had a poor reputation because of gamers. CEOs who aren’t gamers love us!”
deleted by creator
That’s funny bc it seems their entire job is to steal data and slow down game cracks by a small amount.
Stupid fuckin gamers and their “standards” and all of their complaining about “poor performance” because we’re basically requiring they run the game in a virtual machine that constantly stops to check if it’s pirated
So basically their whole thing boils down to “The people who don’t like us are the people we’re trying to stop anyway, and everyone else is just wrong when they don’t like us.” When challenged on things like performance impacts they insist that they can’t provide metrics, because it would be difficult to get permission, and even if they did nobody would believe them anyway. Any time a third party provides those metrics, though, those are lies because those third parties are all pirates. So again, everyone who doesn’t like Denuvo is actually just wrong, at least according to Denuvo.
This effort at defending themselves is just so hilariously bad. Not only did they utterly fail to make themselves look any better in any way, the absolute shallowness of their answers makes them look so much worse.
Fuck Denuvo, absolute bunch of clowns, the lot of them.
This is such BS. They claim there are challenges with testing whether or not Denuvo causes performance issues but aren’t there 100s of games with Denuvo that have been cracked that clearly perform better than the legitimate versions? They talk about either the devs doing it or they themselves doing it but people don’t want to publish the results. If the results are that there is no performance hit, then surely that’s something everyone would want to show. It obviously does hit performance which is why they won’t publish it.
They also say Denuvo helps developers save up to 20% of revenue that they would not have otherwise received due to piracy. How do they even know that? You can’t compare two different games and you can’t release the same game twice for people to buy twice. The fact that they also say “up to” suggests this is also bollocks!
Those metrics are bollocks.
For Denuvo, you don’t need their data. Plenty of games let you play a week before release, then add Denuvo, wait a few months, then remove. During Denuvo days, there is a flood of poor reviews associated with performance.
For the 20%, they just invented a number, there is no real base for that, at least not a solid one. I wonder if Denuvo takes in account the number of games returned because of them.
A long time ago, a game distributor was a guest lecturer to a class I was taking, and I learned a bunch there. For piracy, it seems that their company navigate the seven seas to count downloads and estimate black market sales, multiply by the game price, and assume that was lost revenue caused by piracy. It was very weird, as some games piracy numbers were 100 times bigger than the amount sold and sounded like they were losing billions of dollars in revenue per game because of that. I asked if they really think they would sell that number of games if there was no piracy, if the people pirating games would buy/could afford the full price they took in account - they went from a well-formed teacher to straight red face mouth foaming dogma discourse. There is a lot of money in DRM, and it seems they want to keep that way with doctrine and/or bribery.
For the class, we (students) had to do a market research, and of our small reach (local game forums, malls and where people buy pirated CDs - this was a long time ago), we did not meet a single person self identified as pirate, who would buy a game they want to play if the pirated version was not available, either free from web or street vendors, they would just play something else they could find and afford. That did not bode well with the guest lecturer, but a lot of our findings about piracy narrowed it down to availability, price and convenience - well, there was a minor percentage of people that would always and only pirate for the most diverse reasons even if they could afford the game.
Afaik most Denuvo cracks are actually just bypasses, as in Denuvo is still there and running, it’s just tricked into thinking everything is fine. However there are plenty of games that launched with Denuvo but had it removed through updates some time after launch that allow us to compare: https://youtu.be/07NMuobVVwQ
Wild Hearts comes to mind. Koei Tecmo PC ports are bad at the best of times, but many of the performance problems present in the Steam version mysteriously don’t exist on the EA app version which released a few months later without Denuvo. Just like, buy the game again if you want your product to work I guess.
Up to 20% or more!!!
Die mad about it. ☠️
