Denuvo is tired of gamers saying its DRM is bad for games

monstoor@lemmy.dbzer0.com to Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ@lemmy.dbzer0.com – 310 points – Anti-piracy company Denuvo is tired of gamers saying its DRM is bad for games: "It's super hard to see, as a gamer, what is the immediate benefit"
gamesradar.com

""I think it's super hard for a gamer," Ullmann tells Rock Paper Shotgun. "I'm a gamer myself, and therefore I know what I'm talking about. I think it's super hard to see, as a gamer, what is the immediate benefit for me that a certain game developer, game publisher, is using our anti-piracy services." This gap, coupled with the fact that Denuvo "simply works" and "pirates cannot play games" which use it, as Ullmann puts it, are two main contributors to its negative reputation, he argues."

Let's not forget about being always-online or not being able to test different wine/Proton setups for fear of activating the DRM. Or even trying simply to run the game in some situations...

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"I'm a gamer myself, and therefore I know what I'm talking about"

Should we call it a fallacious call to authority, meme on it for being a "how do you do, fellow gamers" moment, or simply mock the guy for whoring himself out in favor of daddy corporate? I could write an essay on the ways this is an absurd statement.

Gamers hate Denuvo because it doesn't "simply work". It limits paying customers from accessing their content, bogs down mid-range machines that are already overtaxxed by poor optimization and, in admittedly uncommon cases, full on breaks some games until patches and fixes roll out. Stop pretending that "gamers" are out here rioting because they're too cheap and immoral to pay for content. Quit your fuckin' lying.

What's crazy is that it's more than that.

"I'm a gamer so I know what I'm talking about, that gamers know nothing about this topic."

The logic is very backwards.

Well I'm a game dev myself and drm is bullshit. Denuvo can get fucked

Too bad you're not a gamer like Denuvonian Man, you'd know a thing or two about games.

Denuvo's DRM is bad for games.

DRM is shite by itself as well.

I'm a gamer, therfore I know what I'm talking about. Denuvo is SHIT!

I'm a gamer too and I agree. Now there's two gamers saying that denuvo is crap vs one gamer. We got majority.

Its simple.

Pirates don't ruin games for other players.

Pirates ruin games for the dealers.

Not necessarily even that. Piracy can benefit the developer by increasing popularity. Piracy made Bill Gates a billionaire despite his fighting tooth and nails against it.

Pirates mostly enhance games, in my experience

And also for longevity of the games, I heard that one company (I don't remember the name) selling pirated version of their games for modern system because they can't get rid of DRM themselves

Good luck trying to PR like this garbage is useful to the end user, you gonna need it.

Well, he's not wrong that it's "super hard" to see any benefit of Denuvo for anyone other than the beneficial owners of Denuvo Software Solutions. Gamers might have a better than average ability to suspend disbelief, but that "new study" was pushing it a bit far.

Gravity is tired of humans saying it causes things to fall down.

well... it doesn't. Mass bends space-time which is the reason why things appear to fall. Einstein figured that out a long time ago.

Is that the phenomenon commonly known as "gravity"?

It's like Jimmy Neutron calling salt sodium chloride lol

That’s a long way to say “falling down”

only good thing about their drm its so expensive very few companies will pay a subscription to keep it active forever

Denuvo and every employee there can suck my hairy, unshaven, sweaty, salty, moist, oily ball sack.

We should totally just go along with DRM, or they might decide to break other stuff. This is totally an innocent request, and far from attempted extortion.

/s

Well then just stop and we stop. Fuxk them, denuvogames won't be bought, glad steam is marking those games.

Denuvo Games Curator Gives a great and clear indicator so there's no way you could possibly buy one by accident, like the trolls keep trying to argue will happen.

This list is awesome. Unsurprisingly nearly every game has bad reviews.

They're not even for denuvo itself.

I wonder. Do the shitty shovelware games gravitate towards Denuvo? Or do they install denuvo as part of their enshittification process

I figure they must think they can make their games sell better if they include it because it still hasn't occurred to these dumbasses that if your games suck people just won't buy them. Maybe its cope, after all you can't tap into a market of people who don't want your game (well I mean you can, but most companies don't consider scamming people), so they assume all the people not buying it are pirating it.

unless you buy a game that later adds denuvo, of course

Adding denuvo later wouldn't do any good, if a game launches without it it's going to get cracked instantly

Exactly, adding it later just means people can use the earlier versions. Some wiseasses may argue about missing content but that's a stupid argument since cracked games don't get updates to them either unless new cracks are published, and that doesn't happen as often as actual updates are published.

Thankfully it doesn't happen very often and if a game is out for a long while it's a safe bet it very likely won't be added. If they do though that curator still helps because it makes it more visible on the store page, so you can give a negative review, block its updates, and downgrade to a previous version without it (whether that's officially through Steam's downgrade tools, or downloading it elsewhere depends on the circumstance). Or remove it from your account if you don't care about it anymore.

Didn't steam allow refunds regardless of hours played for some game that did this recently?

Not sure, I guess it would depend on the game, and whether or not it was badly affected enough by the update for Valve to consider it broken by the update.

I am not going to say that I think Denuvo is good for gaming. I fully accept the importance of DRM for week one sales (which make a huge difference to publishers) and understand that activation models are incredibly useful for that but I also think activation model DRM is fundamentally shite because it renders games unplayable in order "Why is this random ass server plugged in in this closet?".

But I do think people overly attribute negative performance to denuvo. Implemented correctly, there are MAYBE a few checks per hour and that is system noise. The problem is that, for whatever reason, so many games end up adding the denuvo checks to critical path operations that either completely delay the loading of a new area or tank performance completely because it is checking a dozen times per minute. And that is 100% on Denuvo for not working properly with the studios they license their tools to.

But for the ones who DO implement it sanely? It is barely noticeable to the end user... from a performance standpoint.

Remember kids: Hate mother fuckers for what they actually do. Rather than going the "bitch eating crackers" route.

Regarding performance implications: I believe Denuvo DRM runs through a type of virtual machine environment. While this theoretically should be relatively transparent, there are definitely documented instances of it negatively impacting performance, sometimes severely. Maybe the VM it runs in is just bad with certain instructions/calls on certain CPU's or api's, hard to tell for sure. But it's not nothing.

Basiaclly all DRM models have had variations of that problem. It, again, boils down to what the check is, when they do it, and how often they do it.

For example:

  • Back in the day, Splinter Cell Conviction (and a few other ubi games) actually connected to a remote server for game logic. If you were running a cracked version and a blocker (I think peerguardian is what we used? Been a minute) then you would actually notice your game just completely hang when you went through certain doors and Sam wouldn't start talking until you turned PG off.
  • Similarly, quite a few securom and even starforce games would add the DRM check as part of the fundamental gameplay loop so you were potentially checking dozens of times per SECOND. This was a rapid checksum or a value in memory but it was still very noticeable

And Denuvo is kind of the worst of all worlds since it is an activation model which, potentially, involves phoning home to a server.

To my knowledge, every single case of "Denuvo killed performance in mah gerhms!!" was either

  • Complete noise. Like, less than 5% difference which could just as easily be a case of having a different tab open in your browser
  • A case of a poor implementation where the checks were way too frequent

I am not aware of anything that was fundamentally denuvo itself. I would love to know more if you can point to a documented example but everything I have seen that actually has numbers ends up being one of the above.

You seem to be arguing it's all about the implementation of the phoning home itself- I'm arguing that running the entire executable/binary through a virtual environment likely has far more drastic performance implications than a phone home, regardless of frequency. It probably IS mostly an implementation problem, but I'm more inclined to believe that the implementation of the Denuvo virtual environment is at fault, not just a server call and response delay. **EDIT: Apologies, forgot to include a link- see HERE. Looks like a substantial/measurable difference. Not massive, as measured here, but certainly enough that if your hardware is just barely able to run a game it could easily make or break the entire experience.

I can't forget how my PC get lagged as fuck every time to time in sonic mania when it have denuvo... I mean, sonic mania, my PC can run monster hunter world full graphics with 60fps stables.