They have no fucking idea.
In the pirating/cracking community, we’re seen as evil because we’re helping DRM exist and we’re ensuring people make money out of games
To a minor extent, but no – They’re seen as evil because their software significantly lessens the end product. Why the fuck would you play a new $70 game that runs like shit on your machine because the publishers rammed in a bunch of trash code to annoy game crackers, when you can just pirate the game with all the trash code removed and have a much better experience?
The ethics situation aside, until they can solve that issue and prove that it’s actually solved outside of useless press conferences, they aren’t going to gain any good will.
How much does piracy actually cost them? The Witcher 3 sold 50 million copies, and it is DRM-free on GOG. Its lack of DRM doesn’t seem to have hurt sales at all.
DRM does cause problems, and the discussion shouldn’t be about mitigating those problems, but whether it actually solves a real problem.
It hurts sales if you take the number of unique ip addresses on a torrent and count them all as lost sales, nvm all the people who have dynamic ip address, never finish downloading it, never installed it, uninstalled it after 2 mins, never got it running, never would of bought it anyway etc… There is no scientific or factual basis for any of their claim because they are impossible to make with the anti intellectual discourse they use. Some study in Europe found that pirates actually buy more media, funny that.
And I think people pirate when they’re unwilling to buy anyway (i.e. not a lost sale), and then they provide free advertising to those who might be willing to buy. At least that’s my experience.
That said, if it’s easier to get something by piracy than by legal means, perhaps they’ll lose sales. So it behooves content producers to improve access, not restrict it.
Piracy, as always, is a service issue. Give people what they want and don’t make it difficult to obtain, and don’t add unnecessary shit to it, and piracy all of a sudden goes down.
Exactly. Valve’s Gabe Newell explained that succinctly, and Netflix proved it with digital distribution. Piracy takes more effort than buying a game on Steam, playing one with Game Pass, or watching a Netflix show. Give me the content I want at a reasonable price and make it easy for me to get it, and piracy rates will go down.
DRM raises the barrier to getting a game. Plenty legitimate buyers have issues legally getting games, and if the DRM server goes down (e.g. game gets abandoned), people who bought it are screwed. If you remove DRM, make a good game, and make it available on a variety of stores, it’ll sell well. It’s not complicated.
For me, a lot of times it is just like a demo of the olfen days. I play a bit and then decide if I want to buy it. And if not then I have had some fun at least.
The lack of DRM only hurts sales of games that are bad by themselves. For good games, piracy is practically just free advertising.
You’re wrong. Denuvo isn’t removed from cracked games, just circumvented. When you play a cracked Dwnuvo game, Denuvo is still running while being tricked into thinking the game is legit. Besides this, we’ve seen time and time again already that Denuvo in fact doesn’t have an impact on performance, both in games that have had executables without it leaked and had it removed later on as it’s intended to be. At worst it increases the initial startup time of a game, but doesn’t affect your framerate once the game is up and running.
What does impact performance, however, is in-house anti-tamper/DRM bullshit and other insane practices that’s often implemented alongside Denuvo. Capcom is especially a bad offender here. To make a somewhat recent example, you know what made Resident Evil 8 run so badly? Among others, checking the list of available resolutions on every. Single. Frame. This and other dumb crap implemented by Capcom themselves was disabled in the cracked version and by using reframework, hence the cracked games runs better.
Everybody loves to circlejerk about how bad Denuvo is, but the reality is that it’s become a scapegoat taking attention away from the real issues with games.
You’re partially correct. A considerable portion of the earlier denuvo builds were able to be removed completely, which is what I’m referring to. You’re right in that crackers have trended towards circumvention as later builds have been more difficult to combat. Though I would disagree that there is overwhelming evidence to suggest that running a game with denuvo does not affect performance in comparison to the same game with the denuvo build removed. There is evidence showing statistically that it does negatively impact performance, not always on the user end, but sometimes on the hardware.
That and yeah, in-house anti-tamper and other DRM bullshit is an equal if not greater issue.
I’ve already decided it is, so I don’t care what they say. I also refuse to purchase games with digital restrictions management like this - franky, these days I have better things to do with my time.
I cannot state a “FUCK YOU” big enough to reading those quotes from these devs. Screw all of this always online DRM bullshit. This era of gaming is irrepareably impossible to preserve for the future.
I’ll never know, cause I won’t buy any games with that crap in them.
Just last week I was about to buy Like a Dragon, but canceled the sale because I noticed the word Denuvo in the sidebar.
Yes, wasting precious CPU and GPU cycles because the whole fucking thing is running on a VM isn’t “evil”.
The lead is actually buried by this headline. Denuvo is unironically claiming their DRM has no performance impact and that gamers are spreading a myth. And to prove it they will provide a test example, entirely controlled by them, to game journalists in the future.
Now that no one left to crack denuvo-protected games, I’m sure denuvo adoption will only increase at accelerating rate.
Wait, what happened to empress?
Apparently she decided to stop cracking a few months ago. Not sure if she came back.
Uh, another casualty of recent AI advancements I guess.
I am in no way shocked at this development but it is absolutely halarious
DRM isn’t evil…to rights holders.
