I always wonder if the resources spent on Denuvo would be better spent on the game itself, or marketing the game, allowing the so-inclined to pirate it more easily at launch, but offsetting that with better sales overall driven by better reception, more word of mouth, etc.
"The European Commission paid €360,000 (about $428,000) for a study on how piracy impacts the sales of copyrighted music, books, video games, and movies. But the EU never shared the report—possibly because it determined that there is no evidence that piracy is a major problem."
TLDR: https://gizmodo.com/the-eu-suppressed-a-300-page-study-that-...
Study: https://cdn.netzpolitik.org/wp-upload/2017/09/displacement_s...
> The report found that illegal downloads and streams can actually boost legal sales of games, according to the report. The only negative link the report found was with major blockbuster films:“The results show a displacement rate of 40 percent which means that for every ten recent top films watched illegally, four fewer films are consumed legally.”
(Emphasis added.)
So, if anything, game companies should literally be putting their stuff up on torrent sites themselves!
I remember the day it was published, it hit some news, I made a backup of that PDF from EC domain (still have it!), 2 or 3 hours later the PDF was 404.
I don't pirate games anymore, but that's only because I stopped playing computer games entirely and stick to consoles, to avoid DRM screwing with my stuff.
Just a personal anecdote. I have pirated a shitton amount of video games when I was young and didn't have money. You know what was one of the first thing I did after getting my salary ? I bought burnout paradise. I now own almost 1/2 of all the video games which I played as a pirate on steam and epic.
And also people who generally take the pirate route to play video games, never ever generally pay for it. So expecting a pirate would give in to buy a video game which he thinks will definitely get cracked in the near future is not really a good idea.
Denuvo seems to be extremely effective at delaying piracy for a few months, during which the publishers of the game make most of their sales.
Indie games often don't need it (and don't do it). AAA games are a different story. Including DRM is a significant expense in a low budget game, these games are usually cheaper, and people are often more sympathetic to small studios. Also, indie games need exposure first, and they get at least that from pirate copies, AAA games rely on advertising for that and run close to market saturation so pirate copies are more of an opportunity cost.
Ubisoft admitting that Denuvo ( idk why they used the term third party lol ) causes PC stuttering.
https://gamerant.com/ubisoft-third-party-software-pc-stutter...
Resident evil 8 runs better when it is stripped off its denuvo protection. As confirmed by Digital foundry's video.
https://www.pcgamer.com/resident-evil-village-drm-denuvo-stu...
You will now see a huge influx of video games being stripped of denuvo because it literally shits itself in 12th gen Intel chips and games become unplayable with denuvo.
> And generally, it only serves to protect the first few months of sales, it is not uncommon to strip out DRM after that.
Nope, disagree. The only time they strip Denuvo out is when the game is cracked by warez scenes or if the cost of paying denuvo gets bigger than the people actually paying for it.
Some video games which are out for well over an year but just got denuvo removed in the last 2-3 months out of the blue. It is because of denuvos incompatibility with win11.
1.Shadow of Tomb Raider (3 years)
2.Rise of tomb raider (6 years )
3.Injustice 2 (4years)
4.Jedi fallen order (2years )
5.Nier replicant.
6. Tekken 7 (6years).
> AAA games rely on advertising for that and run close to market saturation so pirate copies are more of an opportunity cost.
Trust me when I say people who pirate are usually the ones who never ever buy video games. Pirates can never be considered an opportunity cost. Not trying to glorify pirates, but people waited patiently for over an year to play RDR2 till it got cracked, so that they don't have to pay outta their pockets.
I would suspect that it probably offers some reduction in casual piracy around release time (as compared to a game with no DRM that you can install anywhere you want as many times as you want with no need to work around anything), though that's probably hard to measure since there's no control group for AAA titles - most of them have some sort of DRM.
The downside is it probably causes significant damage to customer goodwill and willingness to buy future titles, but from the companies' perspective, that's both really hard to measure and it applies to financial results for future quarters, not this quarter, so it might as well not exist.
I agree that it's overwhelmingly likely that someone ran the numbers about using DRM at these companies. But it's not unlikely that they over- or under-estimated certain factors. They will have more information than we do, but certainly not perfect information (see also above).
Fundamentally, they're spending other people's money as insurance to avoid losing their job following a flop that can be spun as due to piracy.
1. It costs money
2. It makes the product worse(slower, less portable,etc...) for your _ paying _ customers.
3. It doesn't work if the game is good.
Ideally it should just automatically expired after x amount of time.
> Updated Date: 2021-11-08T14:45:58Z
> Creation Date: 2014-09-24T14:45:19Z
> Registry Expiry Date: 2022-09-24T14:45:19Z
> (17)(i) Video games in the form of computer programs embodied in physical or downloaded formats that have been lawfully acquired as complete games, when the copyright owner or its authorized representative has ceased to provide access to an external computer server necessary to facilitate an authentication process to enable gameplay, solely for the purpose of: (A) Permitting access to the video game to allow copying and modification of the computer program to restore access to the game for personal, local gameplay on a personal computer or video game console;
However, these rules are currently renewed every three years, instead of being permanent, so it could not be the case in the future.
[0] https://public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2021-23311.pdf
That's a lovely meta-commentary on this situation. Not just the DRM domains expire, so do the laws that allow their circumvention when they do!
If it has a buy button for game xyz you should assume you’re buying the game, not a license, even if the fine print says otherwise. For multiplayer games it would probably be ok to not perpetually run the servers, for single player the server isn’t an aspect that is crucial to the functioning. There may be an issue with how long ago the purchase was though.
Wtf? What ever happened to journalistic principles like protecting your sources?!