The Denuvo DRM Thread

[Goi~Yaas~Dinn]

Just Cause 4 cracked in 1 day
https://torrentfreak.com/just-cause-4-cracked-a-day-after-release-but-it-gets-worse-181206/



cracked in 20 minutes

https://torrentfreak.com/new-valeroa-anti-piracy-system-cracked-by-pirate-in-20-minutes-181203/

Remember Voksi, you parasitic middleman pricks.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018...-how-bad-denuvo-is-for-pc-gaming-performance/

Evidence continues to mount about how bad Denuvo is for PC gaming performance
Analysis series began earlier in 2018, has grown as more publishers patch DRM out.

 

[BlackAdderBG]

Warning, autism alert on my behalf!

Reading comments on that article and in many others where piracy is discussed I see the same repeating argument that publishers/developers have seen the data, know that DRM helps them and are not stupid to waste money if it was pointless or not effective. I call bullshit on all that. I was looking at one particular game franchise that can provide actual data without going to need real sales numbers from publisher. Football Manager. Over the years the top man in Sports Interactive, Miles Jacobson, was crying about piracy all the time. Here is some links where he talks with numbers and where we can deduct his rational about piracy and how it impacts sales:

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-10-10-si-discusses-football-manager-piracy

“Eurogamer: Roughly how many sales are lost to PC piracy with each FM release?

Miles Jacobson: That's a question that is impossible to answer without speaking to every single person who has pirated the game! We know that for every one person who bought FM09 there were at least four pirated copies, not including the fact mentioned above regarding how we couldn't track all of them from April that year and beyond.

We also know that being cracked ahead of release leads to people to cancel, or not pick up, pre-orders, and lower first weekend sales.

But one pirated copy does not equal a lost sale. Not everyone who pirates games would buy them if they couldn't pirate them - they'd just do without it. But there are a small percentage who would go out and buy it if they couldn't get it for free.”

https://www.trustedreviews.com/news/football-manager-piracy-is-a-very-big-problem-for-us-2919643

“Piracy is a very big problem for us. The official stats that we had were on Football Manager 2013, because that was uncracked for six months due a new type of protection system that we were using,”

Then he says they saw 17% increase in sales from preventing piracy for 6 months.

https://www.pcgamer.com/football-ma...-10-million-people-claims-sports-interactive/

Same as above, but says 10M pirated mostly in China, Turkey and Portugal.

“According to Jacobson, over 10 million unique IPs have been reported as using an unregistered copy of the game.”

After that there is no more cries about piracy and I think it’s obvious why. Preventing piracy don’t increase sales. I will use steam charts for peak player to prove that. Also will show how many downloads the game had on the biggest Bulgarian torrent site and compare them to see if uncracked for long time versions had more players:



https://imgur.com/a/ZpppPPV

Steam chart:


https://imgur.com/a/XbD4jPS

FM 2012 was the first that made Steam requirement to play the game. Some people didn’t get the game to prоtest about Steam exclusivity, some couldn’t navigate Steam to even buy the game, I remember a lot of SI forum threads about that at the time. Lower numbers show that.

Cracked after 10 days 361k downloads- 63k peak players

FM 2013 Cracked after 6 months 170k downloads- 87k peak players - 54% pirated +38% peak players (+17% sales according to Miles Jacobson)

FM 2014 Cracked after 10 days 107k downloads- 78k peak players -36% pirated -11% peak players

This checks with what SI says, more sales from not cracked version. What doesn’t check is next years where fast cracked games didn’t lose players, but not cracked for 7 months ones did.

FM 2015 Cracked after 14 days 282k downloads- 81k peak players +255% pirated +4% peak players

FM 2016 Cracked after 3 months 60k downloads- 82k peak players -80% pirated +1,5% peak players

FM 2017 Cracked after 7 months 23k downloads- 72k peak players -60% pirated -13% peak players

FM 2018 Cracked after 7 months 23k downloads- 71k peak players -0,1% pirated -1,5% peak players

FM 2019 Cracked after 5 days 8k downloads- 62k peak players*

*FM games peak in January (last patch, 50% sale and winter transfer window) so 70k is the expected peak.

So in last 8 years two times less piracy had increased player count, but one time more piracy got more legit players too. In 2017-18 FM was practically not cracked, piracy was defeated, but Steam charts show less players and I would presume less sales.

One thing worth noting is this is franchise and a niche genre, so more popamole games may have different trends, but I doubt it. It could be even the opposite as niche products tend to have more dedicated players not willing to wait for cracks or having no other similar games to fill the gap. Are you really losing that much if some FPS or Action game is not cracked when there is hundreds more to choose from.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

One thing worth noting is this is franchise and a niche genre

aren't soccer sims some of the most popular games on steam?
europeans really enjoy ordering brown people to kick balls at each other for some reason

 

[sullynathan]

No more denuvo for Resident Evil 7

https://steamdb.info/app/418370/history/?changeid=U:9973659

 

[Goi~Yaas~Dinn]

No more denuvo for Resident Evil 7

https://steamdb.info/app/418370/history/?changeid=U:9973659

About time the daft bastards caught on.

 

[cvv]

After that there is no more cries about piracy and I think it’s obvious why. Preventing piracy don’t increase sales.

A grand post but this is more complicated. First, as was already mentioned, FM is not a typical case. More mass-market popamole games like AssCreed or Tomb Raider would be a more useful indicator here.

And second the idea that most pirates wouldn't buy the game anyway will never be reliably confirmed or debunked but we have a strong hint that a lot of people don't pirate games because they can't afford it. That's not the real reason. With the rise of mobile games it turned out that people will go out of their way to pirate even 2 or 3 bucks games on an industrial scale. There are countless interviews with mobile developers about gigantic pirate rates in the mobile market and how it's killing them.

I always thought all this publisher talk about piracy being the difference between a successful game and a flop is a load of BS. But I don't believe piracy is a negligible phenomenon either, bc human nature. But it'll never be resolved bc we'd need a parallel universe to reliably test this.

 

[Reinhardt]

There are countless interviews with mobile developers about gigantic pirate rates in the mobile market and how it's killing them.

WTF i love pirates now!

 

[sullynathan]

people even pirate free games, money was never the issue

 

[Perkel]

After that there is no more cries about piracy and I think it’s obvious why. Preventing piracy don’t increase sales.

A grand post but this is more complicated. First, as was already mentioned, FM is not a typical case. More mass-market popamole games like AssCreed or Tomb Raider would be a more useful indicator here.

And second the idea that most pirates wouldn't buy the game anyway will never be reliably confirmed or debunked but we have a strong hint that a lot of people don't pirate games because they can't afford it. That's not the real reason. With the rise of mobile games it turned out that people will go out of their way to pirate even 2 or 3 bucks games on an industrial scale. There are countless interviews with mobile developers about gigantic pirate rates in the mobile market and how it's killing them.

I always thought all this publisher talk about piracy being the difference between a successful game and a flop is a load of BS. But I don't believe piracy is a negligible phenomenon either, bc human nature. But it'll never be resolved bc we'd need a parallel universe to reliably test this.

Piracy yes does have impact but not piracy as most of us here understand.

Piracy as in people trading selling physical goods. YES because it is a way of piracy available even to layman.
Piracy as in people being able to just to copy paste games. Yes because it is a way of piracy available even to layman.

Those two are pretty much only viable piracy methods you could argue that CAN hurt sales.
Any other kind of piracy is simply not available to layman. Which effectively means impact of it is not significant enough to tank game or even make any dent.

Any other kind of piracy is just pissing into wind. Because:

1. Hardcore gamers who do it most of the time just don't have money which means no sales even if you have protection
2. Hardcore gamers are super finnicky which means they pirate games they wouldn't buy either way. They buy games they would play.

In the end it all comes down to money.

Layman piracy is net negative because people who do it usually have money to buy games
Hardcore piracy is not net negative (and in fact could be argued positive) because people who do it are addicts who are either way out of money because they bought their favorite games but they can't put crack down.

Obviously no one discuss benefits here. It is pretty much established right now that community around game is the best marketing you can get for your game. The fallacy here is that many people assume that people who pirate don't take part in community, which is false. Those people talk about game with friends, community and other effectively promoting game. While they might not bought the game if they talked to 10 people there is huge chance that at least one of those will buy game.

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Final nail in the coffin is PC gaming itself. Up until very recent every single PC game was cracked from get go.
And yet we saw games being sold in milions or games failing, we saw small games with 0 PR selling milions and big games with hug money on PR selling 0.

The very idea that piracy kills simply does not work with above.
It is not piracy that kills games but either lack of community or just game not being actually good or targeting overcrowded genre like platformers.

 

[sullynathan]

Seems to me Capcom removes Denuvo once they've gotten most of their sales. They even removed denuvo from Mega Man 11.

 

[Valky]

What really kills game sales is a shitty game. Anti piracy measures that pirated copies aren't affected by and only put restrictions on the legitimate buyers (all forms of DRM) are a strong indicator of a shitty game, because the developer/publisher has very low faith in the merit of their product and deflect to piracy instead of looking critically at the pile of garbage they produce.

DRM is like gun control.

 

[Great Deceiver]

Denovo 5.5 cracked (Resident Evil 2 remake).

 

[fantadomat]

Soooo it didn't even last a week....again.

 

[Cyberarmy]

 

[passerby]

You can't measure piracy with few odd games that took few weeks/months to crack, since pirates just played other games, if all games were successfully protected and pirates had to buy, to have anything new to play, the story would be completely different.

Of course, majority of downloads are not lost sales either, since there are people who download everything to just collect without even ever installing it, or to demo without serious intention to play.

Probably bigger issue than piracy are used copies on consoles and parasitic companies like Gamestop, these are actually 100% lost sales from customers willing to play and pay.

 

[FeelTheRads]

Yeah, don't worry, that will stop soon.
There's been a push for quite some time now to eliminate the second hand market.
Because for some reason software developers are above consumer laws: no refunds, no resells, just buy revocable licenses to play our games and be grateful, you piece of shit consumer.

 

[BlackAdderBG]

You can't measure piracy with few odd games that took few weeks/months to crack, since pirates just played other games, if all games were successfully protected and pirates had to buy, to have anything new to play, the story would be completely different.

Of course, majority of downloads are not lost sales either, since there are people who download everything to just collect without even ever installing it, or to demo without serious intention to play.

Probably bigger issue than piracy are used copies on consoles and parasitic companies like Gamestop, these are actually 100% lost sales from customers willing to play and pay.

If piracy stops one day I hope you enjoy F2P models.

 

[passerby]

We have F2P, P2W and "game as service" infestation precisely because in the most extreme "always online" form it's immune to piracy already. Lack of piracy and reselling would only strenghten traditional commercial model in comparison to this shit.

 

[Devoidless]

How much are publishers paying Denuvo for the 'honor' of being ridiculed and actually losing sales? I was -this- close to buying RE2 Remake until I saw in that brightly colored disclaimer box "Incorporates 3rd-party DRM: Denuvo Anti-tamper". I'll pass on your always-online bloatware, thanks. In the attempt to prevent the alleged 'loss' of a sale to piracy, they actually lost a sale due to incorporating the DRM equivalent of AIDS.

 

[Jarpie]

I wonder how long before they'll remove denuvo from RE2 remake, as it's already been cracked.

 

[Mustawd]

I wonder how long before they'll remove denuvo from RE2 remake, as it's already been cracked.

 

[Raghar]

As we clearly see, we have a new interesting image, which probably helps some university educated people with further education.

I liked that part "with eyes".

 

[Raghar]

This is old from 2016.

And this is what they had on theirs web page. Remember folks don't link to their web page.
Don't link.
They would change text on theirs web page, and you'd be ridiculed for what you said.

 

[Drax]

Goddamn denuvo must burn in hell.