this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2024
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This is such BS. They claim there are challenges with testing whether or not Denuvo causes performance issues but aren't there 100s of games with Denuvo that have been cracked that clearly perform better than the legitimate versions? They talk about either the devs doing it or they themselves doing it but people don't want to publish the results. If the results are that there is no performance hit, then surely that's something everyone would want to show. It obviously does hit performance which is why they won't publish it.
They also say Denuvo helps developers save up to 20% of revenue that they would not have otherwise received due to piracy. How do they even know that? You can't compare two different games and you can't release the same game twice for people to buy twice. The fact that they also say "up to" suggests this is also bollocks!
Those metrics are bollocks.
For Denuvo, you don't need their data. Plenty of games let you play a week before release, then add Denuvo, wait a few months, then remove. During Denuvo days, there is a flood of poor reviews associated with performance.
For the 20%, they just invented a number, there is no real base for that, at least not a solid one. I wonder if Denuvo takes in account the number of games returned because of them.
A long time ago, a game distributor was a guest lecturer to a class I was taking, and I learned a bunch there. For piracy, it seems that their company navigate the seven seas to count downloads and estimate black market sales, multiply by the game price, and assume that was lost revenue caused by piracy. It was very weird, as some games piracy numbers were 100 times bigger than the amount sold and sounded like they were losing billions of dollars in revenue per game because of that. I asked if they really think they would sell that number of games if there was no piracy, if the people pirating games would buy/could afford the full price they took in account - they went from a well-formed teacher to straight red face mouth foaming dogma discourse. There is a lot of money in DRM, and it seems they want to keep that way with doctrine and/or bribery.
For the class, we (students) had to do a market research, and of our small reach (local game forums, malls and where people buy pirated CDs - this was a long time ago), we did not meet a single person self identified as pirate, who would buy a game they want to play if the pirated version was not available, either free from web or street vendors, they would just play something else they could find and afford. That did not bode well with the guest lecturer, but a lot of our findings about piracy narrowed it down to availability, price and convenience - well, there was a minor percentage of people that would always and only pirate for the most diverse reasons even if they could afford the game.
Afaik most Denuvo cracks are actually just bypasses, as in Denuvo is still there and running, it's just tricked into thinking everything is fine. However there are plenty of games that launched with Denuvo but had it removed through updates some time after launch that allow us to compare: https://youtu.be/07NMuobVVwQ
Wild Hearts comes to mind. Koei Tecmo PC ports are bad at the best of times, but many of the performance problems present in the Steam version mysteriously don't exist on the EA app version which released a few months later without Denuvo. Just like, buy the game again if you want your product to work I guess.
Up to 20% or more!!!