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Denuvo wants to convince you its DRM isn’t “evil”
(arstechnica.com)
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this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
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I wouldn't say that it's evil, but rather it doesn't exist for the benefit of players, it exists for the benefit of corporations. They know that it hurts performance in games and prevents a lot of people from playing games that they've legitimately purchased, but so long as it's preventing some piracy they do not care.
Except it doesn't prevent any piracy. Pirates strip the DRM away within hours or days, and then the game runs better for the pirates than the paying customers.
So, you have a small window of the game being "protected" but that's the same window that people on the fence ab out the game wouldn't have bought it anyway.
Denovo isnt getting cracked in days. Sure Empress cracks it, but they are doing a handful of games per year. Most games with Denovo are years to never cracked.
I agree on the point that Denuvo DRM negatively impacts performance but I’m not sure where you got the idea it can get stripped away. Very few games using Denuvo have been cracked, unfortunately it’s very good at its job.
It is a difficult problem, but there have been a lot of cracked Denuvo games, even in this article, it mentions that about half of the released Denuvo games have been cracked out of a total of 127, that's not a small amount.
It is true though that Denuvo is complex and there's currently only one person who has been doing them for a bit and that person is presenting as very very mentally ill and may also be on a break... it's amazing reading, but it's hard to tell conclusively what's up with Empress.
The overall goal seems to be to slow down piracy in the initial launch period where they're trying to get critical mass for sales. Eventually it looks like a good number of them get cracked, but by that time it'll probably also be discounted on steam sales
I admit to being a bit out of the loop on new games/cracks. The last time I look was a couple of years back, when Denuvo was being cracked with zero day exploits.
So, looking it up now, there's just one cracker left working Denuvo, and the company downloads the cracks themselves and reverse engineers them to make future cracking harder...
Quite the change in three years.
Anyone sane with the skillset has been hired to do similar work for an actual paycheck and no fear of jail
Meanwhile, 162 days and counting for dead space.
Doesn't make me want to buy it, without trying it out first, but saying hours to days for denuvo is..a joke really. Sure there were a couple of games that were cracked in a couple of days, but that's a handful of them in the last 6 years or so. Most take a long, long time.
IT doesn't need to be good at stopping piracy as long as it stops some piracy, or at least as long as they can sweet talk executives into believing it makes a difference.
Did you read the article?
It's not hours to a few days.
The article is a puff piece about how the company behind Denuvo totally has data that says their root kit doesn't negatively impact performance.
They assert this with the same sort of confidence that I had back in 3rd grade when I claimed to have a girlfriend, just one that went to a different school and no, you wouldn't know her.
The interviewer completely ignores the massive amounts of 3rd party data that says, yes, Denuvo is cancer that makes games run like shit while also making it easier to hack people's computers. Doesn't bring it up at all.
Now for my part, I had to actually look to other sources to see what the current crack speed was, because I'm not going to trust a puff piece to be honest. I remember plenty of stories about how Denuvo was "uncrackable" and then cracked in literal hours.
Sadly, current crack speeds are much slower than they were just a couple years ago when I had last looked. Only one person is still bothering to crack Denuvo, and the company is constantly downloading the cracks and patching around them.
It’s not a puff piece, it’s an interview that clearly prefaced his comments with background info about Denuvos performance impact. You can disagree with it (I do) without discrediting the article. Also, as far as I know Denuvo games have always been slower to crack.
Been a while since I pirated games so idk just how out of the loop I am, but It looks to me that Denuvo games took longer because not a lot of people work on them. I could be wrong, of course, but Empress seems to crack them quickly.
Yeah but I believe people have to pay her and she’s kind of unstable too.
Scatter shot approach, they DGAF who gets caught up in the crossfire so long as it makes life harder for pirates
They don't really care about the effect on pirates, it's all about being able to sell the illusion of stopping piracy to suit wearing idiots.