It has always played great tbf.
The always online is the only annoying part
Yeah, the implication that it didn't run before by the headline is strange. Denuvo is officially supported in Proton.
It already played great on the Deck (Denuvo hasn't been a problem for Wine/Proton for several years), but the removal of DRM is always a win in my book.
I'd like to see this trend of publishers stripping it out of their games after a couple years continue.
I am pretty sure that when Denovo pricing leaked a while ago, we learned that keeping Denovo in a game is way more expensive the longer you keep it (yes, it's basically a subscription service for game publishers)
Denovo is really only designed for early sales, and it accomplishes that pretty well.
Why wait a few years and not avoid it completely? I doubt there's any reliable data that confirms a significant loss in sales if they launched without Denuvo and its ilk. DRM is at best useless and at worst "harms" customers.
You can't really measure the proportion of players that would buy the game were they not able to pirate it, which makes it easy for CEOs to imagine every incidence of piracy as a lost sale. Who's going to convince them they put the cart before the horse? It absolves them of direct responsibility for almost any shortcoming possible
I doubt there’s any reliable data that confirms a significant loss in sales if they launched without Denuvo and its ilk.
There's no publicly available hard data one way or the other. However the fact that publishers continue to use it while abandoning other forms of DRM suggests that there is probably some benefit.
I don't really buy the argument that the only people who pirate content are people who would never pay for it to begin with. I know too many fellow software engineers that make comfy 6-figure salaries and pirate everything they can and spend money when it's the only option.
There is definitely a benifit, it just doesn't necessarily have to be for the bottom line. If you are running a major publisher you are likely spending public shareholders money or executive partners money (with some skin in the game yourself) on these games.
At the very least based on the consistency some publishers use Drm we know getting Drm buys piece of mind/job security that whoever is managing the project is doing something to prevent shrink/theft.
It's like the ad line goes, nobody ever gets fired for buying an IBM.
There is safety in doing the best practice or industry standard.
That all said, it's entirely possible there is hard data out there that strongly suggests there is a cost benifit too it, and it's just not public data.
After the first 6 months would suffice. That's where they make the money.
I feel like this is just a new cash grab technique, and it’s actually pretty smart. The audience of people who will buy immediately despite DRM will do their thing, first wave of money complete. Over the next few years, trickle in more cash through steam sales. Once that well dries, get one more wave of cash by removing DRM, which appeases the audience that abstained the whole time, collecting their cash.
Edit: my half baked conspiracy theory got some attention. the argument that companies remove DRM like Denuvo because of cost makes way more sense, Occam’s razor holds true. Both can be true, they save money by removing the DRM, which has the nice side-effect of creating a small new wave of sales. Win/win. I’m sure Denuvo hates this and will one day make it more difficult for studios to just remove their software, because money.
I heard Denovo is a subscription so eventually it's less cost effective to keep paying for it
Whoa, it looks like you may be right. Quick search shows it's a sum for the first 12 months, then about €2000/mo after.
The one time software as a service comes through in our favour…
Sorry but that doesn't really make sense. In that scenario it is more sensible to just release a DRM free game at start, because the first group would buy either way and the second group would buy at the higher launch/near-launch pricing (since games drop in prices over time). It doesn't make sense to make essentially 2 versions of the game over such a span of time like you described.
A more realistic scenario would be that there is some cost / licensing fee to use Denuvo tech and it no longer makes financial sense for Doom Eternal to do so, hence BOOM! DRM free.
Pretty sure that's literally Denuvos pitch. They don't expect it to be uncracked forever, just last long enough to maximize initial sales and then eventually remove it when it's done its job. It's like a padlock on a bike, keeps honest people honest but won't actually stop a real thief.
It stops real thieves "long enough", which is why developers and publishers continue to use it. Lots of AAA games go uncracked for a year or more. The first few months or so are the most critical time for sales.
They've come a long ways since the '00s, when DRM schemes were both far more draconian and rarely effective for more than a few days.
Considering that this shitty DRM doesn't actually stop the game from being pirated, why even bother doing it?
Some guy had success selling the idea that it does stop pirating to someone in management or something.
Because the sales in the first weeks matters the most. A lot of people always want the latest things either for free or in the worst case, they will have to pay . Denuvo has shown that the anti piracy mechanism are effective enough to stop a working cracked version to appear at day one or two. In some cases it took people 2 to 4 days to release a working version without Denuvo. So its an easy gamble for publisher to release a version with Denuvo. https://www.makeuseof.com/what-is-denuvo/
In some cases it took people 2 to 4 days to release a working version without Denuvo
2 to 4 days? How about months and counting? Not to mention many Denuvo protected games are only playable through Switch emulation, something that might end soon.
Oh, I didn't know it was this bad. But I already heard that Nintendo wants to start to work with Denuvo. Which will take a toll on the already outdated hardware. Not to mention that you probably wouldn't be able to play Nintendo exclusives with 60 fps or more on PC anymore.
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/07/denuvo-wants-to-convince-you-its-drm-isnt-evil/
Of the 127 Denuvo-protected games released since 2020, only half have had their DRM protection successfully cracked, according to a list maintained by the Crackwatch subreddit (this includes some games that officially removed Denuvo after being cracked). And among the half that have been cracked, the median title received a full 175 days of effective DRM before a crack was released, according to that same list. That's a lot better than the "under a week" Denuvo cracking times that were making headlines in 2017 and means the vast majority of recent Denuvo-protected titles can't be effectively pirated in their first month of two of sales, "where the bulk of the money is made for a premium game after being made available," as Huin put it.
Good to hear Denuvo being removed but overall bad that it was ever included. If I'm ever looking for more DOOM 2016 then I know it exists.
Surprised that it still had Denuvo up until now. I'm pretty sure they accidentally released a Denuvo-free executable on the day the game launched so the game was pretty much cracked instantly.
I doubt Denuvo helped their initial sales at all. Doom Eternal is a good game and that's what actually makes them money, not stopping the pirates out there.
All denuvo has to do is generate more sales than it costs to license. And it seems it does given how popular it is. If it wasn't a profit generating thing for games companies then absolutely they wouldn't pay for it.
crys in armored core 6. even thou it's really easy to run it without easy anti cheat
Ran like shit for me at launch. Maybe I should give it another try now.
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