What? ALL DRM only punishes paying customers.
this post was submitted on 24 Jan 2024
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Not necessarily. All DRM punishes paying customers, but some also punishes pirates. Very few games with Denuvo ever get cracked, instead the publisher removes it after a while because Denuvo charges a license fee as long as its in your game. E.g. the Hatsune Miku game on steam hasn't been cracked in the two years it's been out. So there's an argument for using it, even if it's a flawed one.
But these games already went without DRM for years. They're long since cracked. The only purpose this DRM serves is to make it harder for paying customers to use mods. Not pirates, they can keep using the same mods they've always used. This is literally for the purpose of degrading the experience of paying customers. That's what they mean by "only punishes paying customers".
Very few games with Denuvo ever get cracked
I was under the impression that all the major Denuvo games got cracked within the year they launched if not the first couple weeks? Maybe there wasn't the right attention for that game?
Do you know of a place that tracks that kinda thing? I'm pretty curious now about the statistics of release to cracked.
There is basically only one or two people involved with any sort of denuvo cracking, someone named Empress and another I can't remember.
Ugh, fucking Empress. What a transphobic piece of shit that one is.
That name just sounds narcissistic
You should see the rants they leave with some of their releases, like the nfo for Hogwarts Legacy
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Well, when the game is essentially running in a virtual machine with an address translation layer that scrambles the backing memory every few minutes you're lucky the game even runs. Good luck trying to decipher that hell. A few guys have done it, I remember the one dude ranting on Twitter about trying to crack Borderland's 3 back around launch.
And then the follow up which was that Denuvo was basically adding a ~30fps overhead to the game and everyone was initially blaming the devs for releasing unoptimized garbage.
Gabe had it right, piracy is a service problem. And my motto has always been if the game has some garbage like Denuvo, then you couldn't even pay me to take a copy. Not worth the headache.
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There's an r/crackwatch, with a pinned list of Denuvo games.
For example, in 2021, only 7 games released with Denuvo were cracked (out of an approximate 30). In 2022, only one. There was only one cracker in the world who was any good at breaking Denuvo, and Denuvo hired them, so it almost never happens anymore.
~~(Be careful when reading the crackwatch updates, because they mark 'denovo removed' the same colour as 'denuvo cracked', you have to read the notes)~~ My mistake, they stopped doing this a little while ago.
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We're talking about a rhythm game with a smaller audience then, say, Binding of Isaac. I'm guessing yeah, it might not be a prime target for cracking.
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At the time of this post both the game and proton had been updated and the game was working again.
Adding DRM to a two year old already cracked game is still an insane decision, but the problem of it breaking the game was fixed relatively quickly.
It's an long-term decision meant to kill modding. Having to seek a cracked version for modding isn't a problem for some users, but it's an imposing thing for users on average. It makes it less likely that your average user will attempt to engage with mods, which reduces the audience for mods, and that in turn makes mod developers less likely to develop them.
It's about strangling the life out of modding communities slowly.
Which is incredibly stupid since mods prolong the lifetime of a game's value
The problem is that game companies are no long interested in prolonged lifetime they can't directly monetize. Who cares that mods add a decade of additional sales if people are modding costumes instead of buying them from the cash shop.
And this sort of attitude is making me wonder if it's still worth buying from these companies.
Who cares that mods add a decade of additional sales if people are modding costumes instead of buying them from the cash shop.
Indeed, people seem to forget but modern monster hunter sells cosmetics, they have a financial interest to not let you mod the game to change skins.
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The games that I love the most more than any other are games that have a good modding community. Factorio, skyrim, minecraft, hoi4. It just creates content that the developing company doesn't have to do and the consumer gets to experience.
I don't understand why some publishers of singleplayer focused games are against modding.
I understand that it could impact other players experiences in a multi-player setting. And I support any game developer segregating modded clients from vanilla. What I can't wrap my head around is why some try to ban modding all together. If a player ruins or enhances their experience with mods, it's on them, not the developers.
IIRC, it’s from a Street Fighter tournament scandal, where one particular player had a nude Chun Li mod installed. The tournament didn’t know about it, the player forgot to disable the mod ahead of the tournament, and nude Chun Li was broadcast to the entire banquet room full of viewers (and everyone streaming online) because they had the game projected on a giant screen.
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Every DRM punishes paying customers, not only this new thing.
Lmao, this is months after they released a steam deck focused patch for Monster Hunter World that made it run on the deck, World was suddenly being played by several people again, congrats capcom for the fumble.
Digital rights management - who's rights? Certainly it's not in my best interest.
Digital restrictions management.
More like digital wrongs management.
This is why I primarily shop at GOG. There are almost no other storefronts left that promote DRM-free games.
But they don't promote linux platform.
That's true, they don't. But they're at least open enough to allow community efforts on Linux like Heroic.
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GOG lost my trust with the Hitman situation, and lashing out at customers that were leaving reviews detailing the situation.
https://www.eurogamer.net/hitman-gog-release-sparks-drm-row-review-bombing-accusation
They also sneakily updated the page to mention the DRM after people had bought the game.
There’s an updated article that includes GOG’s follow-up to that situation: https://www.eurogamer.net/gog-pulls-hitman-from-its-own-store-admits-it-shouldnt-have-released-it-in-its-current-form
Dear Community,
Thank you for your patience and for giving us the time to investigate the release of HITMAN GOTY on GOG. As promised, we’re getting back to you with updates.
We're still in dialogue with IO Interactive about this release. Today we have removed HITMAN GOTY from GOG’s catalog – we shouldn’t have released it in its current form, as you’ve pointed out.
We’d like to apologise for the confusion and anger generated by this situation. We’ve let you down and we’d like to thank you for bringing this topic to us – while it was honest to the bone, it shows how passionate you are towards GOG.
We appreciate your feedback and will continue our efforts to improve our communication with you.
All this because Capcom heard that a Street Fighter tournament participant was using a nude mod for Chun-Li. Just blacklist him and move on, let me keep my flashlight lasers on dropped materials in MH:W please.
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While this is awful for a company to do and I'm 100% against drm in games in general I do think the steam deck issue is being overblown. Valve quickly put out a proton update that fixed compatibility on steam deck. The game works fine now.
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I'll never pay for another capcom game but you can be damn sure that doesn't mean I'll never play another capcom game.
Good work you old dipshits, shooting your long time fanbase instead of doing literally anything else
So, I don't know how to put this, and I don't this actually isn't true . Not sure how this blew up, but yeah.
Maybe people should stop supporting these companies. I know saying it for the 729,631st time won't change anything, but all I'm gonna say is I don't have issues with Capcom, EA, Ubisoft, or a few other studios, because us simply 🌠 dont play their games 🌠
I have issues with Ubisoft even if they make shitty games I don't play. (I've played older titles but have since quit supporting or playing the ones I have), since the company is still preying on whales, children and gamers who are less savvy about dark patterns. Ubisoft also still continues a toxic work environment in which the upper management preys sexually on the clerical staff and then works to bury any scandals and silence the victims. And I'd regard that as offensive and bad for the economy even if it was happening in a fissile fuel rod manufacturing company I never personally engaged with.
Ubisoft, and much of the gaming industry generally is really awful across several compound practices. I mean EA and Gearbox have the same kinds of developer abuse climate and they routinely crunch and do massive layoffs even though both practices make their games measurably worse.
That said, Capcom has been a problem for a long time, and I've ceased getting or playing capcom games over a decade ago. But I hope it tanks and stops taking money from gamers who don't know better.
This is why I only play unlicensed Tengen games on my NES. R.B.I. Baseball, Gauntlet, and Pac-Man are really all I need and I like their cartridge shape better anyway.
Damn. This is why my recent steps in Steam, after seeing a good sale is: does it have Denuvo? Do I need to install a separate launcher? Is the discount worth it?....
I still have a PC copy of 2007(?) Sega Rally I can no longer play because the DRM software is no longer supported in Windows.
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