It has always played great tbf.
The always online is the only annoying part
Yeah, the implication that it didn’t run before by the headline is strange. Denuvo is officially supported in Proton.
Single player works fine offline though
Agreed, but that’s a big benefit on the Deck. Unless Eternal has some additional always-online requirement (and maybe it does).
It already played great on the Deck (Denuvo hasn’t been a problem for Wine/Proton for several years), but the removal of DRM is always a win in my book.
I’d like to see this trend of publishers stripping it out of their games after a couple years continue.
I am pretty sure that when Denovo pricing leaked a while ago, we learned that keeping Denovo in a game is way more expensive the longer you keep it (yes, it’s basically a subscription service for game publishers)
Denovo is really only designed for early sales, and it accomplishes that pretty well.
Why wait a few years and not avoid it completely? I doubt there’s any reliable data that confirms a significant loss in sales if they launched without Denuvo and its ilk. DRM is at best useless and at worst “harms” customers.
I doubt there’s any reliable data that confirms a significant loss in sales if they launched without Denuvo and its ilk.
There’s no publicly available hard data one way or the other. However the fact that publishers continue to use it while abandoning other forms of DRM suggests that there is probably some benefit.
I don’t really buy the argument that the only people who pirate content are people who would never pay for it to begin with. I know too many fellow software engineers that make comfy 6-figure salaries and pirate everything they can and spend money when it’s the only option.
… there is probably some benefit.
I was not thinking about the business side but rather about what the customer gets out of it. What bothers me about DRM systems is that they cause problems that you don’t have with pirated game, which is the opposite of how it should be. I don’t want to struggle to get a game running, when the pirated version does not caus those problems. That being said, I haven’t bought any large AAA title in years and my experience is from 7+ years ago. Maybe things have changed but I kinda doubt it.
I think this is why Denuvo has been successful. Where old DRM solutions got up in your face with onerous installation procedures, installing borderline rootkits, and ridiculous activation limits, Denuvo is essentially invisible to the end-user. It’s not ideal, but if developers are going to insist on shipping DRM I’ll take this over what we used to deal with any day of the week.
I’d be surprised if there WASN’T reliable data that confirms a significant loss in sales if they launched without Denuvo.
I don’t think that astroturfers claiming to be pirates who “gave in and bought the game because of the DRM” is what people have in mind when they say reliable data.
Sure I don’t deny that those people actually exist but I do also know that there is an incentive to push that narrative because they are spending money or time (in the case of In-House DRM) on implementing these measures so they got to make it seem as worthwhile as possible (especially in the case of publicly traded companies with shareholders).
After the first 6 months would suffice. That’s where they make the money.
I feel like this is just a new cash grab technique, and it’s actually pretty smart. The audience of people who will buy immediately despite DRM will do their thing, first wave of money complete. Over the next few years, trickle in more cash through steam sales. Once that well dries, get one more wave of cash by removing DRM, which appeases the audience that abstained the whole time, collecting their cash.
Edit: my half baked conspiracy theory got some attention. the argument that companies remove DRM like Denuvo because of cost makes way more sense, Occam’s razor holds true. Both can be true, they save money by removing the DRM, which has the nice side-effect of creating a small new wave of sales. Win/win. I’m sure Denuvo hates this and will one day make it more difficult for studios to just remove their software, because money.
I heard Denovo is a subscription so eventually it’s less cost effective to keep paying for it
Whoa, it looks like you may be right. Quick search shows it’s a sum for the first 12 months, then about €2000/mo after.
The one time software as a service comes through in our favour…
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Sorry but that doesn’t really make sense. In that scenario it is more sensible to just release a DRM free game at start, because the first group would buy either way and the second group would buy at the higher launch/near-launch pricing (since games drop in prices over time). It doesn’t make sense to make essentially 2 versions of the game over such a span of time like you described.
A more realistic scenario would be that there is some cost / licensing fee to use Denuvo tech and it no longer makes financial sense for Doom Eternal to do so, hence BOOM! DRM free.
Well, the intent behind adding DRM at first is to maximize profit by making piracy more difficult. Trust me I hate DRM too, but it’s not like they add it for no reason.
but it’s not like they add it for no reason.
I didn’t say anything about that. I’m saying the main reason Bethesda removed Denuvo from Doom Eternal is likely because of cost reasons, not because it’s a marketing play to drive sales (like OP suggested).
@habanhero @corytheboyd Will they really re-release a game just to say it has no DRM to make more money in sales? that sounds really exploitative
They haven’t re-released the game, it’s just an update that removes the DRM which they have to continue to pay for otherwise
Yes I do. The whole point of AAA games is to rake in cash, and you still get a badass game in exchange for your money. My original sentiment was more “this is 10% slimy, but I get it, respect”
I mean, if there are people who want to buy it, why not? It would just be icing on the cake for Bethesda.
That’s the intent behind it, how well does it actually work in that front well it’s tough to say. Fact of the matter is I know this from hanging out in these communities people who aren’t willing to pay for the game but still play it usually aren’t willing to pay for it just to play it.
The actual amount of people who “give in” is tough to estimate, because many people who do it are either astroturfing or are pretending, and most of the people who do “give in” typically will keep quiet about it, it’s not in their best interest to Brand themselves as a shill to other pirates.
So the legitimate people almost never speak up about doing this, and most of the people who speak up aren’t really doing this either. So it’s hard to say just how much the DRM actually curbs it, and since the companies and their shareholders are paying for it they would probably want to imagine that number to be as high as possible because if it isn’t they really are paying for it for nothing more than an imagined benefit.
Pretty sure that’s literally Denuvos pitch. They don’t expect it to be uncracked forever, just last long enough to maximize initial sales and then eventually remove it when it’s done its job. It’s like a padlock on a bike, keeps honest people honest but won’t actually stop a real thief.
It stops real thieves “long enough”, which is why developers and publishers continue to use it. Lots of AAA games go uncracked for a year or more. The first few months or so are the most critical time for sales.
They’ve come a long ways since the '00s, when DRM schemes were both far more draconian and rarely effective for more than a few days.
Edit denuvo lasts longer than I thought… https://fossbytes.com/list-of-all-popular-games-cracked-by-pirate-groups/
ok, now I can think about buying
And tempering!
And ripping!
Considering that this shitty DRM doesn’t actually stop the game from being pirated, why even bother doing it?
Some guy had success selling the idea that it does stop pirating to someone in management or something.
Because the sales in the first weeks matters the most. A lot of people always want the latest things either for free or in the worst case, they will have to pay . Denuvo has shown that the anti piracy mechanism are effective enough to stop a working cracked version to appear at day one or two. In some cases it took people 2 to 4 days to release a working version without Denuvo. So its an easy gamble for publisher to release a version with Denuvo. https://www.makeuseof.com/what-is-denuvo/
In some cases it took people 2 to 4 days to release a working version without Denuvo
2 to 4 days? How about months and counting? Not to mention many Denuvo protected games are only playable through Switch emulation, something that might end soon.
Oh, I didn’t know it was this bad. But I already heard that Nintendo wants to start to work with Denuvo. Which will take a toll on the already outdated hardware. Not to mention that you probably wouldn’t be able to play Nintendo exclusives with 60 fps or more on PC anymore.
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/07/denuvo-wants-to-convince-you-its-drm-isnt-evil/
Of the 127 Denuvo-protected games released since 2020, only half have had their DRM protection successfully cracked, according to a list maintained by the Crackwatch subreddit (this includes some games that officially removed Denuvo after being cracked). And among the half that have been cracked, the median title received a full 175 days of effective DRM before a crack was released, according to that same list. That’s a lot better than the “under a week” Denuvo cracking times that were making headlines in 2017 and means the vast majority of recent Denuvo-protected titles can’t be effectively pirated in their first month of two of sales, “where the bulk of the money is made for a premium game after being made available,” as Huin put it.
Good to hear Denuvo being removed but overall bad that it was ever included. If I’m ever looking for more DOOM 2016 then I know it exists.
You’ll be disappointed if you’re looking for “more DOOM 2016”- Eternal is a different beast entirely. Feels much more like a realtime first person puzzle game than a mindless arena shooter. Knowing enemy weak points and what guns do the most damage to that specific enemy + micromanaging ammo, health and armor is a BIG part of Eternal’s gameplay loop. It’s very good, but it’s quite far removed from 2016 in terms of gameplay.
Surprised that it still had Denuvo up until now. I’m pretty sure they accidentally released a Denuvo-free executable on the day the game launched so the game was pretty much cracked instantly.
I doubt Denuvo helped their initial sales at all. Doom Eternal is a good game and that’s what actually makes them money, not stopping the pirates out there.
All denuvo has to do is generate more sales than it costs to license. And it seems it does given how popular it is. If it wasn’t a profit generating thing for games companies then absolutely they wouldn’t pay for it.
crys in armored core 6. even thou it’s really easy to run it without easy anti cheat
Ran like shit for me at launch. Maybe I should give it another try now.
It’s been running like a dream for a long time I can only imagine it runs impeccably
Did it have issues before? I used it on my SD a long time ago and it seemed fine
@vividspecter What does this mean?
It just means Denuvo DRM was removed, which can cause issues with offline setups. Probably won’t affect performance unless it was particularly poorly implemented.
I didn’t realize it had Denuvo. Maybe their claims that Denuvo doesn’t impact performance isn’t as much of a lie as I’d thought. I’m still waiting on them to post benchmarks though.
Looks more like a tricky headline. There’s 2 claims there: Denuvo was removed. The game plays great on the Deck. The headline is just making it look like one lead to the other.
The article actually says “now that it’s removed, maybe it plays even better.” But doesn’t tell us if it does.
Not to say Denuvo doesn’t have a performance impact, this just isn’t a smoking gun.
