If it hasn't been cracked yet it will be. DRM is still useless and serves no purpose other than make DRM makers money.

 

Who cracked it? CPY or CODEX?

 

Codex

 

A pox on them all.

 

I prefer to ignore games with Denuvo in them until they patch it out.

 

Why not until it gets cracked? Shorter wait for you.

 

Denuvo is one of the worst, total waste of resources, performance and money. All DRM is pointless, it's nothing more than a game of cat and mouse, the mouse is gonna get it sooner or later. I'm more fan of oldschool protections that let you play but make the gameplay "weird", broken, etc. making it very hard to patch out, discover, test, ... it does get cracked too but since it's a custom thing for 1 game the incentive can be very small to do so compared to Denuvo which is annoying everyone in many games and most want it gone forever.

 

Well, yes, of course Denuvo has been cracked, like the 100s of DRM tools before. All of them, dating back in the years of the Amiga.

Like probably everyone else, I never understood why publishers were so keen on putting DRM, impacting the performance of their games.

I mean, I like to think people are honest by default. Way back when I was playing on my Amiga, yes, I was not paying for games. I couldn't afford them.

Now, it's different, I earn money and can perfectly pay for them. Gaming is really not an expensive hobby (talk to anyone in racing !) so there is no excuse for pirating.
I really don't see who is pirating now AND actively playing games.

 

Like probably everyone else, I never understood why publishers were so keen on putting DRM, impacting the performance of their games.

Because people making these decisions have no idea what's going on. They only see stats like "XX amount of copies were pirated in YY year, which means piracy costed us XX amount of sales."
It's a very shortsighted view.

There are not many developers I know who like DRM, it's always the publishers. In fact, devs straight up hate DRM as well. They work hard on the games they make only to see it have performance issues, get negative feedback from fans and such. Of course, they publicly can't really express that to the people.

 

Why they always call it a crack anyway DansGame

 

In truth, it isn't a true crack. I've heard in the early days a crack meant completely removing the DRM code. Now, it's simply bypassed.

 

I think denuvo has given an opportunity to answer some long standing questions about video games piracy and DRMs. Most games sell in the first few weeks, max 1 month. Denuvo has had quite a bit of success at holding off crackers for time periods close to one month. So, we should have enough information to do a decent study about how DRMs affect sales. Has sales gone up due to Denuvo?

If the answer is no. Then we should get rid of DRM altogether.

 

Only when a new version of Denuvo comes out does it hold cracks off for a month or more. Then it gets craked and all games are then cracked within a day to a week of launch. A year later we get a new version of the cycle repeats.

 

If the answer is no, wouldn't you then need to ask if sales have gone down due to Denuvo?

A solution isn't worthless simply because the solution doesn't completely solve the problem. If a house catches fire in your neighborhood you would want the fire department to save what they can right? There would be a lot of unhappy people if the fire department said "Well we can save every house so we might as well go home".

I have little doubt in my mind that pirated copies would increase quite a bit if all DRM was removed from games.

 

Denuvo works.

When a game releases, it gets a lot of free press via reviews and all that. With all that free press, interest in the game goes up and if during this time there is no piracy option, more people will buy it.

The goal of Denuvo is not to block piracy completely, they know that wouldn't work. It's just to allow games to get a decent windows period of piracy free sales in before it gets cracked.

It's not a popular opinion but it works, and I find it to be a good compromise between other methods. Always online game requirements are too far and no DRM is nice but not many big games can get away with that. Denuvo at least gives the game some time to sell before pirates get to it, but also inevitably is always cracked. Devs/publishers should have at least a month or two of pure sales before piracy gets mixed in.

I can't even remember the last time I pirated a game but if there was a game I was really on the fence about, I might pirate it and buy it later if I liked it. To me the main appeal for piracy has just been to try out games that don't have demos. I grew up in the age when we could rent games so having no ability to try a game before buying it is pretty lame.

Just a funny thought, I pirated skyrim back in the day because I had never played an elder scrolls game so had no idea if I would like it. I definitely liked it and ended up buying it, but I kept playing on my pirated version because I was afraid my save would get messed up if I tried to transfer it over. Eventually I switched over to the legit version but I spent waaaaay more time in the pirated version even after buying it.

And as was already said, I was young and poor once but not anymore. Seems to me the vast majority of people who pirate games are those who couldn't or wouldn't buy them. I would have never tried skyrim if I could not pirate it and thus I would never have bought it either.

 

Denuvo works.

When a game releases, it gets a lot of free press via reviews and all that. With all that free press, interest in the game goes up and if during this time there is no piracy option, more people will buy it.

Denuvo does NOT work.
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018/11/hitman-2s-denuvo-drm-cracked-days-before-the-games-release/
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/10/denuvos-drm-ins-now-being-cracked-within-hours-of-release/


Those were on Denuvo 4 and 5, we just got 6.0 release a couple months ago and now it too is cracked once again. Now any game that launches with Denuvo can be cracked in a day if someone wants to.

 

It has been proven that 'piracy' increases sales as most people who pirate a game/film/song/book wouldn't have played it in the first place

The word piracy is hilarious as it's not the person who downloads the content without paying who is the pirate but the mega corporations who hold us hostage as piracy is the control of the means of distribution and no pirate is greater than M$py.

 

This is said over and over but never proven. Any source on that info? I don't want to defend drm but I'll defend reality.

 

Dunno if it is related but here in Spain we are supposed to have a very high piracy rate but we have one of the highest legit media consumption too.

 

I know a guy who used to pirate a lot of shows he wanted to watch because he couldn't have access to them otherwise.

Now, that guy finally has access to HBO for €5 and Netflix for €8, so that guy no longer has to pirate anything.

Most of the time, give people a simple and easy medium for content at a fair price, and people will give you their money.

 

The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

 

I don't think it's possible to accurately find the answers to the questions people have about DRM. There are far too many variables when it comes to sales and the data can always be twisted to suit a desired outcome.

Example: An indie releases a game with no DRM and it sells like crazy, it sells so well that they pick up a publisher and release a sequel. The publisher required DRM for the sequel and the sales were terrible compared to what the first game sold.

It would be very easy to say that DRM killed the sales of the sequel, and the numbers would back you up. Let's assume that the sequel was pirated (cause drm doesn't work). It would be just as easy to say that pirating killed the sales of the sequel, and the numbers would back you up.

DRM and Pirating are the scapegoats for each side of this argument and either could be held up as the cause of bad sales numbers in any situation that involves the two of them. It's likely that DRM and pirating are pretty low on the totem pole of reasons for bad sales numbers. I'd be willing to bet that cover art plays a more important role in sales figures than DRM or pirating.

Saying DRM does nothing is is an oversimplification of a very complex situation. It's just as silly as saying DRM fixes everything.

 

I don't think DRM hurts sales of any games unless it's so borked that the game doesn't load. If DRM free was so important to people, GOG wouldn't be financially hanging on by a shoestring.

 

GOG got in trouble due to their fair price program, which means they charged less in countries where things are extremely cheap in general. They had to pay the difference out of their own pockets, which ultimately meant they had losses on each of those sales to many 3rd world countries.


As for the whole influence of DRM... The Witcher 3, which was available on GOG since day 1, is one of the best selling games, reaching over 20 million copies sold. It even sold more on GOG than on Steam. That says quite a lot about the relationship between DRM and sales.

 

:lachen:

there is no multi player in cracked games; single campaign only. sure over the years a few can get set up for a lan party, if one is so inclined but, not on any public server.


and a key to a CD is a far cry from a DRM as such as denuvo.

 

They may be considerably different but they are both DRM. DRM is what makes it so that multiplayer games have to be purchased in order to play online. Without DRM your entire clan could play Battlefield with one copy of a disk.

This is the point I am trying to make, broadstroking things by saying DRM does nothing is silly (maybe even ignorant).

 

you are obfuscating the topic; denuvo and in the meantime you want to dismiss a 277 page report based on less than a pargraph.

i can tell you first hand that you are wrong. as i said before; there is NO multiplayer w/cracked games. if thats your whole argument, well . . its irreverent.

btw, it would blow your mind to know cracked game don't have the issues (esp at launch) that their denuvo counterparts share. its useless, took one month to crack the first time but after that, its been irrelevant.

but believe what you want, i guess.

 

gotcha,

I'd have to go see what the traffic actually is these days, I know a good portion of it has always been blamed on the poor G4WL implementation, then decom.

 

thats probably the cause of it not working for some, windows 10 is not compatible with GFWL technically. and a good portion of the people on steam forums probably pirated it. i see it quite often on other games, pirates asking for help.

 

"can play for one hour" or something, or starter zone access onry, like in MMOs.

i was stoked when the return policy & demos hit, but the momentum on the demos seems to be slowing down.