It's a DRM scheme to protect against piracy. Over the years I saw more and more shitty titles use Denuvo on release because God forbid someone steal their cash grab. A lot of titles that are of quality usually do not see the need for Denuvo.

Therefore, nowadays, for me Denuvo serves as an indicator of a potentially shitty release. They slap Denuvo on top of it so that they can pump & dump.

Maybe I'll buy the game when it's on sale, but for now I am too skeptical, especially since slapping additional DRM on an already DRM'd game (it's multiplayer only and always online, unlike previous parts that allowed offline play) does not make any sense to me.

[–] Miqo 40 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Edit: Seems the below statement was factually incorrect. Oops!

It's a very obnoxious and heavy-handed approach to anti-piracy measures. It slows down games, kills framerates, gives users a whole host of other performance issues, and just makes the experience worse overall. It's a product that doesn't even seem to care to improve, because they make their money from publishers, not the people who buy and play the game. Many people hate it, and I believe it's absolutely justified.

[–] beefcat 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

There isn’t a lot of evidence to back these claims up. For most users, it’s entirely transparent. You would never know a game shipped with Denuvo unless your first launch is offline and it fails to authenticate.

There have been games that had their performance impacted, but I don’t think it’s the norm. Games like Doom 2016 shipped with it and saw no performance gains when Denuvo was eventually patched out. I think titles like Rime and RE8 are usually the exception, but it’s something I always watch out for in reviews. If a game runs bad, I don’t buy it, regardless of the cause.

Denuvo has proven successful for 2 reasons:

It’s actually effective. Games go months or even years without a crack.
It’s nowhere near as draconian as what came before (TAGES, StarForce, SecuROM, etc). Most players aren’t even aware of its existence. They just buy these games on Steam and they work, which is why all the weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth that goes on in these threads never accomplishes anything.

[–] Miqo 4 points 1 year ago

So, I went back and tried to look for a source, but you're right. Thanks for informing me! From the few sources I read, those issues were debunked, exaggerated, or due to bad implementation. I want to add that I still don't like the idea of Denuvo (or any other DRM) on digital media that I purchase, but that's a different topic.

[–] Alimentar 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Honest question here. Could it be possibly that as they improved their DRM with more triggers and methods that it has started to impact performance since 2016?

As Empress was cracking Denuvo, I wouldnt be surprised if they started to quickly add extra defencive measures compromising what could have been optimised in the past.

[–] beefcat 2 points 1 year ago

I don’t think so, because it has become less common over time for Denuvo to be the cause of bad performance. Doom 2016 is an early good example, likely because Id Software takes optimization very seriously. Stories of games having bad performance due to DRM were a lot more common back then. The worst example I can recall was Rime in 2017, which was borderline unplayable until the developers removed Denuvo in a patch.

[–] Braydox_ofAstroya 23 points 1 year ago

Denuvo in particular causes performance issues. And drm in general just gives the paying customer an inferior product when the pirates will just just get the better version.

[–] qaz 20 points 1 year ago

It’s DRM known for causing performance issues.

[–] [email protected] -4 points 1 year ago

There have been instances where it worsens performance. My computer is mid tier-ish at this point (3070, i7 10700k) and I haven't noticed any poor performance from games running Denuvo (latest I tried Dead Island 2). It's likely worse performance loss on older systems, but those older systems probably can't run new AAA games well as it is.

I think most people don't like the fact that it takes a while to crack games running Denuvo, so they're not able to be pirated for that time.