The “slows down your game” bit has always been hotly contested. There are certainly occasions where a modified exe without Denuvo runs faster, combined with accusations that that specific game integrated Denuvo in a very poor last-minute implementation that calls it dozens of times a second.

I don’t work on video games, but my own experience with software engineering and release management suggests those sorts of murky answers are likely to be the norm.

[–] Linkerbaan 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Cracked games with Denuvo removed run significantly faster.

[–] Katana314 -2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Given that I already mentioned there are anecdotes of that happening under poor coding, I sincerely hope you have a more reliable source for that.

[–] Linkerbaan -2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

How about a YouTube video people love it when I use those as a source

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5y_bab5wtHY

[–] NocturnalMorning 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

There's nothing contested about it. Add a bunch of extra operations to the game loop and you can slow down a game. You only have so much headroom in each frame. Dunova takes up a lot of that time. And let's not forget you can literally go tests with games that had denovu and then removed it. The testing shows pretty clearly that it does indeed slow down games.

[–] Katana314 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

...Great, so you're going to start giving just as much criticism to devs for writing debug logs every so often?

There's an order of magnitude between a difficult task slowing operations, and pure inefficiency / bad coding doing it. Can you describe something that actually proves you know the slightest thing about how programming works?

[–] NocturnalMorning -3 points 2 months ago

I work in software... how about that.

[–] Lost_My_Mind 1 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Would buying the game and playing it legally still slow down the game?

[–] [email protected] 22 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Yes, cracked Denuvo games actually run better because you aren't running ~~a virus~~ anti piracy software in the background. It runs at the kernel level and Crowdstrike is a pretty good case study on why that's bad.

[–] Lost_My_Mind 9 points 2 months ago

Alright. I guess I understand why the best option is to NOT buy this game. But not only that, we need to all make our voices heard that Civilization is a game we WANT to play, but will not buy until Denuvo is removed.

Vote with your wallets, and let them know this choice cost them millions of sales.

Otherwise the NEXT game will have this too. Because we tolerated it.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago

Yes, that's the issue.