I've been getting mostly indies so I feel safe, but maybe I should check...
This isn't about being right or wrong but about what the publishers will do when they see their games are again getting cracked day one, and if it'll be a catalyst to again return to getting either less PC releases or at least delayed releases compared to consoles.
I will hope that does not happen.
Or trying to do heists and having a cheater in every session.
I'd like to play the game again but it's just not fun.
Private servers are a nice way to do this and do still exist in places. My favorite online game uses them along with server side anti-cheat and while cheating occasionally happens, it has never been an ongoing issue. I've maybe seen a cheater once or twice in all my many hours playing the game over 10 years (elite dangerous, in case you were curious).
No, the overwhelming majority of denuvo games released after ~2020 (when they changed there licensing model to SaaS) have it removed after 2-4 years not because of user complaints but because of licensing costs, contracts and compliance.
If anything with many games it is very clear that the developer/publisher do not care for the user, since even when the DRM gets broken and has lost its purposes, many still refuse to remove it and give paying customers the same better non DRM experience as pirates.
>If only Microsoft hadn’t fucked up so badly with Windows 11 requiring an account
I don't understand how that is related at all.
And users complaining because denuvo messes up their Windows, sometimes games don't run and so on? Just cost of doing business, as long as enough people buy it who cares.
A good percentage of people who would download the cracked games would not have bought those anyway. And with Steam being so convenient it's hard to decide to go for a cracked copy of dubious origin that might install god knows what into your machine.
We're not in the early 00s anymore.
Good riddance.
Greenheart Games famously released a "cracked" version of their own game (Game Dev Tycoon) onto torrent sites on launch day. In this version, the player's in-game studio eventually goes bankrupt because "pirates" steal their games.
The Data: Within 24 hours, 93.6% of players were playing the pirated version.
The Consequence: The developer's blog post highlighted the irony of pirates posting on forums complaining that the "in-game piracy" was unfair and "ruining" their fun. The experiment proved that even at a low price point ($8), a massive majority of the PC audience will choose "free" regardless of the developer's size or struggle.
https://web.archive.org/web/20161118042043/http://arstechnic...
https://web.archive.org/web/20131214165241/http://aussie-gam...
P.S.: It bears repeating that the game cost only 8 dollars.
If they would release only the paid game, there wouldn't be 93% + 7% of the gamers playing, far from it.
Cost is almost irrelevant to pirates, either its free or its not, like it or not. There is mix of folks who do it for the lulz, some do it to have higher performance gaming without denuvo taking resources and computing power, and some are outright poor. Even 8-usd-is-too-much poor.
I've lived like that. Don't judge too easily. Don't do stupid mistakes and count those as otherwise-paying-gamers. Thats PR for denuvo and similar, not a fair discussion.
Most pirates aren't people who could pay for this stuff. This is utterly meaningless.
So much in fact I don't even want to link counter examples to it.
No/very few paying user pirates even single player games these days if they can afford it as a luxury please understand that.
I would likemy regular updates bug fixes patches and new feaures ASAP. And on sale at 8$ for a game is less than 0.01% of my income so sure.
But if it costs 800 USD I will get it for free because I am literally too poor for it.
Anyone who thinks otherwise is beyond deluded.
Instead of denuvo you can use simple steam drm, non trivial to pirate for small games cracks will take days or weeks to appear and updates won't be available instantly.
It's safe simple and easy. And doesn't hurt any one.
Denuvo is just invasive bullcrap that deluded people think helps anyone.
Someone playing/watching/listening to something for free doesn't mean they would still do it if they had to pay for it.
The other option I can see for the large companies is that any project involving tens or hundreds of millions of dollars is likely to be insured, and a condition of that insurance is they take all reasonable options available to get the most success out of it that they can. If they don't they need to reduce the risk which probably means less resources allocated which again may not be interesting to the companies capable of making grand experiences versus other options.
Isn't historically piracy positive for sales [1]?
That said, I'm pretty sure the real issue is that single / local coop games are just not appealing and so they get weaker sales. Like wtf was with Pikmen 2 not letting player 2 control louie? And then when local games start to sell poorly they get divestment but I'm pretty sure it was just lousey games and not piracy.
[1]: https://www.engadget.com/2017-09-22-eu-suppressed-study-pira...
Was pleasantly surprised to find Doom Eternal is now on GOG a couple of days ago. If you're willing to wait, some AAA titles show up that previously had draconian DRM.
I don't like Anti-Cheat solutions with elevated privileges but they have (at least for some time) reduced the number of Cheaters in games like Valorant or BF, for most users this is at least a somewhat understandable tradeoff. Denuvo on the other hand is DRM and a pure tradeoff in favor of the publisher at the cost of the consumed.
There is no user argument for DRM, if anything there are many against it = higher game price/less money for the actual game and devs, indirect funding of DRM software, worse performance, higher system requirements, worse preservation, worse privacy, longer loading times, online requirements, worse usability, machine activation restriction, bugs...
And I'm not speaking about cost of implementing a technology to actively make the product worse.
> in late 2025, the MKDev collective and the prolific DenuvOwO came up with a hypervisor-based bypass (HVB) that installs a kernel-level driver to intercept and respond to Denuvo's checks. While that's not an actual crack, it's good enough for piracy work, as the saying goes.
Neywiny•4d ago
Kirby64•4d ago
It’s trivially easy to use a signed response that is encoding some part of the metadata of your system in the signature to make it impossible to emulate the server. Don’t think the Denuvo devs would be stupid enough to provide a “return true” request for a server call.
Can the underlying function that checks if the server call is correct be bypassed? Sure, but that’s much harder.
jospeh554•4d ago