Denuvo may have reached the end as every protected PC game is now crackable

[BlackyNoir]

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024...-percent-of-revenue-according-to-a-new-study/
The true cost of game piracy: 20 percent of revenue, according to a new study

Have you read the study? Calling it a study might be very generous... no A/B testing, no adjustment for how not fungible games are, no taking into account the sales lowered by the mere presence of Denuvo for adjusting the baseline, no consideration for release schedule of other games at the same time or price point or sales, the reputation of the publisher, the quality and reputation of the previous title when it's an established studio or a sequel, and of course the kicker it's pure wet finger in the wind statistics (and poor ones at that).
We can also look how closely their numbers are to those Irdeto's marketing are. That should make anyone pause.
Most of these things are noted in the article mind you, despite its clickbait title.
And it does not answer the very basic question: if piracy cost so much, why doesn't it affect games sold on GOG? Because it most certainly does not.

 

[Alfonso Maruccia]

The funniest part of the hypervisor bypass is that it doesn't even bother removing Denuvo — it just politely lies to it. "Yes sir, totally legit copy, carry on." The DRM is still there, fully intact, completely fooled. It's like beating a lie detector by being an incredibly confident liar.

Something like... a large language model? :-D

 

[Anton Longshot]

After a fight that lasted for years I fi-nal-ly got my military disability pension.
So as of last week I can and will BUY software I want/need.

However, as security measures often make legal games suck I will keep playing pirated versions of the games I buy if those work better which is often the case.
Best of both worlds.

Still I do believe developers would have made more and possibly a LOT more if the anti-piracy trickery wasn't so user-hostile. Example of how it's done: GOG.

 

[pcnthuziast]

I've never understood what Denuvo is for? It never stops pirates and commonly, negatively affects paying customers experiences

 

[BlackyNoir]

I've never understood what Denuvo is for? It never stops pirates and commonly, negatively affects paying customers experiences

I believe it's the exact same thing as was big blue in the 70/80s, as the saying goes: "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM".
As in, it's wrong for everyone, except the individual managers and executives who can just chuck it on and don't personally don't get bad side effect from it. Because the myths about piracy and sales and DRM are much easier to believe from higher ups with little technical knowledge (technical here include commercial ones, unfortunately).

 

[Alfonso Maruccia]

I've never understood what Denuvo is for? It never stops pirates and commonly, negatively affects paying customers experiences

Marketing, lies and bu******. Which are essentially the foundations of today's overinflated tech industry.

 

[VaRmeNsI]

With access to uncensored LLM's it should be even easier for crackers to deal with these sort of protections nowadays.

 

[Rapob]

I've never understood what Denuvo is for? It never stops pirates and commonly, negatively affects paying customers experiences

Before Hypervisor crack, Denuvo stopped tons of games from being pirated. This is a fact and the reason they kept using it (meaning, paying for it)

Some Denuvo games took months, even years to crack. Some still uncracked after several years (unless Hypervisor crack is out)

The problem with Denuvo, is that paying customers gets worse performance, as the internal VM is taxing their hardware, hence lowering performance. Can even lead to stuttering on lower end systems.

Customers should never "pay" for DRM. Developers (publishers, more likely) did not care much - as many people bought the game without knowing. Some people don't want to wait for crack and buy the game instead.

There has been many comparisons between Denuvo and Denuvo-less versions of games, and the Denuvo version pretty much always have lower performance. Yet they will claim this is not the case.

 

[m4a4]

I've never understood what Denuvo is for? It never stops pirates and commonly, negatively affects paying customers experiences

Denuvo is a solution looking for a problem.
Since a lot of publisher higher ups are disconnected from the games they "manage", it's easy for Denuvo to sales pitch them into buying it based on inflated numbers and fearmongering about pirates.

It's along the lines of scammers convincing your grandparents into giving them money to "fix" their computer; if they actually knew what was going on, it wouldn't work.

 

[Chadeuk]

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024...-percent-of-revenue-according-to-a-new-study/
The true cost of game piracy: 20 percent of revenue, according to a new study

That article is a load of crap. The vast majority of people who pirate were never going to buy the game in the first place. They haven't lost anything.