Currently not a single Denuvo game released during 2024 has been cracked, and more games released during 2023 remain uncracked than those that were. It's actually pretty effective unlike most other PC DRM schemes.
I wonder how much that has to do with the actual technical merits of this DRM scheme compared to older DRM schems. Piracy as a service problem has mostly been solved on PC by now, so there's not a lot of incentive to crack games anymore.
Most of what Denuvo does has been done by other DRM schemes before, VMProtect has been used by DRM schemes before Denuvo. It just seems that Denuvo is more aggressive with online verification than previous schemes.
I don't think most of the pirates actually care that much about whether people download their releases. They just want the credit within the scene of cracking something that's hard to crack or leaking something before street date. For-profit pirates would be an exception to this but I doubt they're very prevalent because most people are pirating to avoid paying.
Denuvo is also an exception to piracy as a service problem being solved because it is widely hated even by non-pirates. If pirates rendered it ineffective, companies would not be using it for their games but preventing piracy is worth the backlash as far as they're concerned.
I wonder why this happens? Does Denuvo cost a lot of ongoing subscription money for a developer or something? I’ve noticed this happens a decent amount.
[0] https://www.techpowerup.com/275158/denuvo-drm-pricing-struct...
Maybe the devs of the game you mentioned decided that after the initial spike had passed, and they are in a long tail period, it is cheaper to remove Denuvo.
Or they just used Denuvo to protect the game during early time when most sales happen and they removed it because they want better performance and also they want people to be able to play the game 20, 50, 100, and 1000 years from now.
In the case of Lies of P though, the developers accidentally included a debug build .exe without Denuvo in an update, only afterwards was it actually removed entirely because there was no point in including it anymore.
You’re limited to 3 or 5 activations per day.
The guy in the video makes the point that: Game is released --> paying users suffer the lower perf caused by DRM while pirates crack it --> pirates succeed, company removes DRM, paying users benefit from improved perf ^^
I'll need a source for that.
These may not be games you'd want to play but the important message is that it's concerning that the biggest publishers (Ubisoft, EA etc.) can release stuff that will randomly die at some point in the future for no good reason and that they won't even release a patch or server software so you can play the product you paid them for.
https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/List_of_games_using_Always...
It seems you did not actually read what I wrote. I put anymore in caps for a reason.
I never said any recent AC title or any newer Denuvo version suffers from any FPS issues. The loading of games (startup only I think, not level loading) is in fact still very much impacted, especially in the first run.
So all what you wrote is pretty pointless. Denuvo in the past in fact slowed down FPS of games early on as it was making calls the slowed down FPS on every single frame. People did the testing of games after they got cracked, and the cracked versions ran faster.
You can argue that a good developer will configure Denuvo to only "compile" functions where those side effects doesn't matter (like after loading screens, during cutscenes, when the game is paused, etc). However, I've seen so many stupid mistakes in this industry that I would never trust the experience and skill of said developers, unless I can asses it myself by working on a daily basis with them.
[0] https://www.pcgamer.com/bethesda-accidentally-left-a-denuvo-...
Keep in mind that FPS drops are only one issue with Denuvo's performance. Another common one (which i think is more common in recent releases, judging from comments i've seen) is frame pracing/stuttering/etc - people very often mention in Reddit threads about Denuvo's removal from a game that the update that removed Denuvo fixed these for them (of course it could also be some other change the game had, but this has been the case with more than one game and games receive other patches before removing Denuvo, so i have a hard time accepting all are coincidences).
A slow/lengthy call every few seconds wont affect your average framerate (which is what often developers check for performance measurement) but it will affect your frame pacing and give a stuttery feel. Most people tend to call this a "performance issue" (regardless if it is due to performance or not).
And Denuvo will be why I pirate it, should I get tired of waiting for the vendor to remove that crap.
Is the game installed encrypted? What encryption schema allows you to decrypt the same set of data using multiple different keys in this way?
If the game isn't installed encrypted it seems easiest just to not allow it to encrypt itself before running.
