Legendary PC developer says Denuvo is “a punishment to the consumer”
pcgamesn.com
Quote from the article: “The inclusion of intrusive DRM softwares [sic] like Denuvo is a choice that yields an unfair punishment on the consumer,” Running With Scissors says. “Respect the consumer, make a game they want to play, and you will never feel the need to fight piracy. The gaming industry deserves a better future, fight for that.”
Running With Scissors is a "legendary" developer?
Postal was a violent mess that didn't age well.
Postal 2 was a buggy mess that also didn't age well.
After that, it was just legitimately bad games on top of the humor not aging well. (They literally don't even acknowledge Postal 3)
Seriously, who the fuck would label them legendary? They've been a broken mess for over a decade.
I'd label them legends in the sense that they're probably one of the game studios I know by name the best even though that's all they have to show for it. Postal 2 for as bugged and edgy as it is, is an extraordinarily famous game.
Sure
Ehh.... Even putting aside things like Nintendo.... Let's just say I know the names of actual developers on several small studios, including bad games, and I have no idea of a single person who made Postal
The Titanic is a legendary ship, but it wasn't a very good ship
But everybody has heard about the Titanic.
People who agree with their stance on DRM.
Theres a definite trend of people elevating the value of opinions of those they agree with. It makes any kind of intelligent discourse very hard to do.
They didn't release the third game, it was done by a third party (I believe with some licensing shenanigans?), which is why they don't acknowledge Postal 3. They didn't make it. Which is why they (somewhat recently) have given the A-OK to pirate that game.
I'd assume that last part is why they say legendary.
No one said the legends were good.
You're not the target audience, the target audience is edgy teenage boys. Postal 2 was the perfect game for 13 year old me.
You're right labeling them as "legendary" is just weird tho.
For clicks and to bait comments exactly like this one.
While I'm not fond of the company, and perhaps legendary is a bit excessive, they're still a big name that made remarkable videogames. With Postal 2 they nailed it, can't say about the other 3 because I've never played them.
All this serves to prove is that you have fucking god awful taste
I'm thinking that's gonna be a bit of projection on your part.
I'm honestly disappointed to see people disrespecting two absolute classics in such a way.
I can understand not liking the first postal, but postal 2? I'm afraid there is no hope for you
Glad to know you never grew out of your edgy gamer bro stage. Being able to pee on things is peak gaming, amirite? /s
I'm literally saying this as one of the few people who watched the Postal movie more than once simply because it had David Foley in it and I'm okay with bad movies.
Pretty much, yeah. I don't feel the need to posture as somehow intellectually superior to a game that is designed to be fucking stupid. I appreciate and recognise all art for exactly what it is.
It's more that there's actually games that rise to the level of great art that are designed to be fucking stupid, like Katamari Damacy, which leans hard into absurdism, and is often quite funny, but more importantly the gameplay is original, brilliant, and fun. The art direction in KD is also off the charts quality, especially the music, all of which was written for the game.
Look, I loved Postal 2 back in the day (I always sort of rolled my eyes at Postal, but 2 seemed less serious and more tongue-in-cheek). I might even replay it someday, but it's not great art. Especially now it's ugly, it's clunky, more importantly it continues to be a buggy mess. Not even a Gary Coleman cameo could save it. They were fun games for what they were and for the time they existed in, and it's okay to remember them for that, but it's a little absurd to just act like the world hasn't moved on and that they were great art to begin with. Art direction was bad, level design was bad, there was a lot of bad stuff about the game, beyond even getting into the edgelord shit.
Bad art is okay. I love B-movies, but we don't have to pretend they're anything other than what they are: B-movies.
I'm sorry but that is exactly why postal 2 is good. Unpretentious, offensive, provocative, unpolished raw art designed to generate chaos - whilst simultaneously having that certain charm which is impossible to put into words (hence the cult following) - which is exactly what it did. All of that without punching down (OK there was a bit of dodgy stuff, but for the time period it isn't too bad). Truly one of the greats and you can't change my mind, so we'll have to agree to disagree.
Yeah, it's fine to agree to disagree, but just one caveat
Man this game came out two years after 9/11 and went whole hog on the "all muslims are terrorists" stereotype. It punched down quite a bit.
Just my opinion, but that was an intentionally outrageous caricature of the narrative being served by the US government, and in fact the way many americans viewed Muslims at the time. Or it could be outright racism/sectarianism but idk I haven't looked into it at all. Thats the beauty of postal 2 I guess
I actually agree with you here, but I had a serious experience years later that changed my mind on the whole thing. It's perfectly fine for folks like us who have any kind of media literacy to understand that it's maybe not meant to be making fun of Muslims, but rather America, but...
GTA 5 has this torture scene, right? It hit me like a brick wall one day when I met people who read that scene way, way, way differently than I did. I had read it as an indictment of torture. The problem is, there's way too many people who think that scene is cool as fuck and want to do that kind of shit in real life. It's like the people who look up to Scarface from the movie Scarface. Like these characters aren't good people or people to look up to, but because America is full of violent uneducated fucking yokels you had a bunch of absolute fucking idiots taking the exact opposite message from it. ( I mean, just look at Trump voters...)
You can't control how others interpret your art, and if you're not clear enough, you might end up in a similar position as the people behind Postal 2 and GTA 5, where you have a lot of folks totally misinterpreting what you're trying to say, and then deciding it means vile, horrible things are not just okay, but cool.
It's actually something I worry about a lot in life, because I've had so many times where I thought I was teaching a person one thing, but it turned out I was accidentally teaching them something horrible. In a country with basically no media literacy and an average 7th grade reading level, we can't actually take it for granted that absolute fucking morons might misunderstand us.
The problem in particular with Postal 2's caricature of the views of Muslims in America is that functionally, most Americans who played the game never understood that intent or cared. So when it came down to it, they further entrenched those ideas in the American consciousness, instead of them being read by most people as a critique. Was that their intent? No. Does it matter that the opposite happened? Yes.
That's a valid take, and actually explains why a large number of people will never understand the nuances or even primary message of art. For example, conservatives discovering the true meaning of "killing in the name of" by rage against the machine.
I suppose RWS knew the consequences of this, which reveals the nihilistic backbone of the game's theme.
I piss on people who talk shit about Postal 2 and then I throw a cow head over their fence. If they dare to continue I get the cat ...
Poor cat, his hole can only take so much
Denuvo is the apex of a long history of bad choices.
Maybe actually sell us the games in a way we really own it, without any sort of online activation/account/telemetry/data-gathering like when we could buy a disc and just use it, and it should all be ok.
I feel like a dinosaur every-time I think this nowadays, but what is so problematic with the "own as in physically own" that is so hard to implement? If they want to provide a service, sell a service.
In the past I used pirate versions of games I bought just to be able to play them offline, or because I did not agree with the terms of service. It is so much for our info, it goes beyond just knowing you are the real owner of the software copy: it comes to the point where it looks like it's to guarantee we are not its' owner.
Now some DRMs even destroy gaming performance and its just faster to use 'ked versions. I hope it changes somehow.
Is it really possible to own them properly? If in almost all cases we lack the source code and there are even proprietary requirements for both software and hardware, what chance do they have of working halfway well in a few decades?
And with stuff like SecuRom, even owning a legit physical copy of the game does not help you when the service vanishes
Even the devs hate denuvo. It slows down the build times and makes it hard to debug.
"Postal" is such a steaming pile of edgelord shit that even Civvie11 doing videos on the franchise doesn't make it any more bearable for me.
Critical support for this developer's message here, that said.
I appreciate Postal 2 because the premise is kinda funny. It's deliberately designed so you can beat it without doing any violence at all. You're given tasks like get milk, pick up your paycheck, etc. And it involves standing in lines or people berating you. You're stuck doing tedious annoying repetitive tasks, or you can get a flamethrower. I think standing in line to get Gary Coleman's autograph takes 90 minutes if you do it normally.
Otherwise it's very silly early 2000s edgy white guy dudebro humor
That premise, while cute, hasn't aged well for me. The ever-rising number of chanlords shooting up their schools (and elder chanlords murder-suiciding their own families) because no one would blow them behind the bleachers (or because the wife left him or the kids won't call anymore) sours the premise of "wouldn't it be funny to murder everyone that mildly annoyed you" white guy dudebro humor for me long ago.
Yo its a video game
"Yo its a video game"
Yeah, and that changes nothing about why I don't like it. You're giving a lazy thought terminating cliche here.
EDIT: Christ, you activated a long dormant alt account just to stan for your edgy video game? That's just sad.
This is my only lemmy account and I made it before reddit killed 3rd party apps as I quit going on there. Going through my post history to try and judge me is something weird to do though
Rising from dormancy while otherwise doing nothing with that account, just to announce how mad you are that your edgy game wasn't to my liking is weirder to me.
"Yo its just an opinion"
I comment when I have something relevant to say and typically delete mean shit after typing it out cause morons like you aren't worth my time.
Have a nice life man. Hope you find something you can enjoy your time at instead of whatever it is you're doing.
Surely someone must be a moron if they don't like your edgy video game! What an emergency! And I'm so not worth your time that you're still replying, you foaming frothing edgy gamer stereotype.
Your passive aggression and petty concern trolling attempt, because I didn't like your edgy video game, is noted and will receive all the consideration it deserves.
Abolish intellectual property (and private property in general)
I think the best way is to just have basic piracy detection, if someone trips it, then have a message that you can get past appearing guilt tripping them for it lmao
Back to OG times in gaming where you would have stupid hats saying pirate or other weird things happening in game like not being able to complete it if it was cracked, good times.
I’ve seen RWS’s take on this a bunch recently. This feels like a feel-good PR move because they don’t have any substantive updates on their actual games.
Crackers: We don't do it for the piracy, we just like the challenge.
Denuvo: Try this one then.
Crackers: Too hard bro, at least give us a chance!
I acknowledge that this isn't going to be a popular opinion in a piracy sub, but the main reason people hate Denuvo is that it works.
It's basically killed the entire game hacking scene, because by the time they break it, nobody is interested in the game any more. There's like one person left that can do it, and they're more than a little bit odd.
It may be "anti-consumer", but you know what was worse? All the other shit they tried on PC. Always online bullshit. Single player games that you couldn't save any more if your connection wobbled. Actual rootkits.
People hate Denuvo because it requires a regular connection to the Internet and has a big impact on the performance of games.
I'm not buying these games not because I can't pirate games with Denuvo (I don't really pirate games at all anymore) but because they tend to run like shit.
I pirate because the original runs like shit.
I haven't pirated any actual software since the 1990s (too cowardly) but my hatred for Denuvo and the like burns with unsurpassed intensity. I will never knowingly buy a game that includes it. "Anti-tampering" indeed. I'm not sure if that shit should be legally allowed at all, but certainly not in ordinary mass-market PC games.
It does require you be online, and it is essentially a "rootkit." Its malware features are more polite and better hidden than some of the worst of what has been tried before, but that just adds to the danger that it might be seen as acceptable by people who don't know any better.
Death to the concept of intellectual property and all but I've never actually felt Denuvo making problems for me when I played a game using it, you're right it seems to be working as advertised.
I'm still hoping someone to crack it in a more reliable and fast manner, fuck large gamedev companies and their profit margins.
I've definitely played games that used it, and I wouldn't even have known without the handful of negative steam reviews shouting about it.
"I'm too stupid to notice the difference so it must not exist"
I've seen Denuvo combined with the always online requirement with the latest Far Cry 6 on steam. The always online requirement makes a cracked version worth it in my use case.
Most bad Denuvo stuff seems to come from any extra DRM they add as well, just in case Denuvo wasn't enough. Always online sounds like one of those extras, because I don't think it's part of Denuvo itself. I think the Denuvo online requirements are when you install, every X days (seems to vary from two weeks to a month, probably configurable per game), and when you change your hardware configuration.
Denuvo alone is enough, because as soon as Denuvo is removed, the rest can be removed by regular mortal hackers.
You act like this is some hidden secret lmao. You should change your name to Captain OBVIOUS.
damn you fucking got their ass
Do I need to repeat the Gabe Newell line again?
I have always wanted to be a giant space crab?
"Piracy is a service problem?"
"These things... they take time" -Gabe Newell
Basically lit the fuse to keep people pirating...
It is bad for the consumer... but the alternative is instant cracks, as seen with a lot of games on r/Crackwatch that don't have the DRM.
Denuvo is the first software in a long time that has been able to successfully stop the supposedly inevitable march to cracking. It's a miracle that more AAA devs don't use it, since it works so well. (EMPRESS aside)
You can hate me all you want for saying this, but the war against piracy, for the most part, has been won.