This is such BS. They claim there are challenges with testing whether or not Denuvo causes performance issues but aren’t there 100s of games with Denuvo that have been cracked that clearly perform better than the legitimate versions? They talk about either the devs doing it or they themselves doing it but people don’t want to publish the results. If the results are that there is no performance hit, then surely that’s something everyone would want to show. It obviously does hit performance which is why they won’t publish it.
They also say Denuvo helps developers save up to 20% of revenue that they would not have otherwise received due to piracy. How do they even know that? You can’t compare two different games and you can’t release the same game twice for people to buy twice. The fact that they also say “up to” suggests this is also bollocks!
Those metrics are bollocks.
For Denuvo, you don’t need their data. Plenty of games let you play a week before release, then add Denuvo, wait a few months, then remove. During Denuvo days, there is a flood of poor reviews associated with performance.
For the 20%, they just invented a number, there is no real base for that, at least not a solid one. I wonder if Denuvo takes in account the number of games returned because of them.
A long time ago, a game distributor was a guest lecturer to a class I was taking, and I learned a bunch there. For piracy, it seems that their company navigate the seven seas to count downloads and estimate black market sales, multiply by the game price, and assume that was lost revenue caused by piracy. It was very weird, as some games piracy numbers were 100 times bigger than the amount sold and sounded like they were losing billions of dollars in revenue per game because of that. I asked if they really think they would sell that number of games if there was no piracy, if the people pirating games would buy/could afford the full price they took in account - they went from a well-formed teacher to straight red face mouth foaming dogma discourse. There is a lot of money in DRM, and it seems they want to keep that way with doctrine and/or bribery.
For the class, we (students) had to do a market research, and of our small reach (local game forums, malls and where people buy pirated CDs - this was a long time ago), we did not meet a single person self identified as pirate, who would buy a game they want to play if the pirated version was not available, either free from web or street vendors, they would just play something else they could find and afford. That did not bode well with the guest lecturer, but a lot of our findings about piracy narrowed it down to availability, price and convenience - well, there was a minor percentage of people that would always and only pirate for the most diverse reasons even if they could afford the game.
Afaik most Denuvo cracks are actually just bypasses, as in Denuvo is still there and running, it’s just tricked into thinking everything is fine. However there are plenty of games that launched with Denuvo but had it removed through updates some time after launch that allow us to compare: https://youtu.be/07NMuobVVwQ
Wild Hearts comes to mind. Koei Tecmo PC ports are bad at the best of times, but many of the performance problems present in the Steam version mysteriously don’t exist on the EA app version which released a few months later without Denuvo. Just like, buy the game again if you want your product to work I guess.
Up to 20% or more!!!
“Gamers”? Who else do they think is even going to encounter their shit? If the people that are forced to endure your shit aren’t happy, seems like a you problem.
The problem are Customers, who don’t just accept things that bring zero benefits for them whilst making their life worse.
But worry not, Denuvo does a great job at getting rid of those.
Denuvo’s customers are corporations, not consumers. “We had a poor reputation because of gamers. CEOs who aren’t gamers love us!”
Well, I meant it in the sense of End-Customers.
As you rightly point out Denuvo’s own Customers are other companies.
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Pirates & gamers
Lets blame 100% of the demographic we are fucking over. No wonder they get along so well with big devs.
I mean they aren’t wrong, due to piracy we know how awful the performance impact of Denuvo on games is (^:
Isn’t collective punishment against the Geneva Convention?
We aren’t at war with the corpos. But maybe we should be…
I saw a thread last week of PC gamers saying red dead for PC is gonna cost too much so they will just pirate it.
Honestly as a dev I would avoid PC as a platform, the fanbase is unpleasable and no matter how much they argue that it’s not true, 1 third of PC gamers openly admit to pirating instead of buying.
I also find PC gamers are becoming a toxic group, they hate everyone
Nah, they should ditch consoles, the money is in PC anyways…
Sounds stupid, doesn’t it?
This is depressing.
Isn’t it though?
Especially knowing mobile revenue is all just pay to win whale hunting and gambling addiction. There’s no reason games like Pokémon can’t exist on mobile. But they’ll never do it. And if they do it’s gonna have in game currency.
Is this saying the most money is in vr? That’s the only part of this that is surprising to me.
Edit: Wait no, I think it’s just a confusing graph. It’s definitely all in mobile
No, majority of the money is in Mobile is how I read it… size of the spreads and all.
Honest explanation of perspective from a PC gamer deciding weather or not to buy a game I think a dev should know:
According to the game’s Epic Games Store listing, Red Dead Redemption will cost $49.99/ £39.99 on PC, despite first being released in 2010.
I don’t think a game I played over 10 years ago is worth paying $40 again without some good value added to it. What makes this worth $40 to me as a consumer who enjoyed the original? I don’t see enough value to justify it.
It’s also a coin flip if the port is good, functional, or will have arbitrary technical limitations like no modding. I also don’t want to get screwed over and inconvenienced like the last time I gave them money. They are removing value from an over priced product by slowing it down and treating you like.
If I think a game is worth pirating, I am most likely willing to buy it or a future product from that dev if the situation was different or the product was better. Hell, I pirate games I intend to buy to make sure there not absolute dog shit and technically functional. I personally don’t thing its worth pirating Red Dead even without DRM, I already played it years back and I suspect Rockstar will make this version worse than the original knowing how they done things in the past.
I’m assuming I’m going to have to create an account, consent to spying, not own anything, install additional software to allow me to login and launch the game since they don’t like the one I choose, figure out compatibility, be exposed to predatory monetization, install a root kit to make sure I’m not bypassing monetization or cheating, worse performance, wave legal rights to contracts, deal with too little or too much moderation, and it still may be a turd that disappears 5 years alter after all of that. None of this is fun and removes value form the fun I would expect to purchase. I’m offended they think any of this shit is good. This is what will get PC players to hate your business. If you do this crap and you can only justify it to share holders and not customers, I want you to fail.
Corporate developers make games as an investment product and not a creative product. Denuvo is in the business as a designated ball squeezer that takes the reputational heat for a greedy dev that needs 0.3% on profit chart. We are not Denuvos customers. Denuvos customers are soulless board members creating investor profit by betting their reputation is still good enough to start enshitifying without immediately getting customers to jump ship.
Having a talking head come out once a week to make an offical statement calling people literally every insult in the book for saying “Game looks like shit and this dev has a track record of being shitty, save your money” is going to start a fight.
As a PC gamer, I only pirate games I don’t know whether I’m going to like or not. And even then, most of the time I’ll probably end up buying the game later if it’s available on Steam or GoG if I actually like the game, so I can support the devs. I personally don’t have the time to buy a game on Steam, play for less than 2 hours to find out whether I like it, and get a refund if I don’t.
I also find PC gamers are becoming a toxic group, they hate everyone
User Nuke_the_whales doesn’t like how toxic PC gamers are.
1 third of PC gamers openly admit to pirating instead of buying.
Source? My sample size is small, but out of my entire group(maybe 11 people) exactly one pirates PC games. I’d be shocked if 1/3 of gamers in general were pirating stuff with any kind of regularity.
If you’re including pirating console games to play via emulation that number jumps drastically, though.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/745996/gamers-pirating-video-games/
https://www.pcgamer.com/pc-piracy-survey-results-35-percent-of-pc-gamers-pirate/
I just don’t see how this type of statistic is attractive to a company who wants to sell games. Gamers may not like it but to a business executive, that’s a scary number. consoles have pretty much eliminated pirating. It’s certainly not as easy to do as it was back in the pre online days with a PS1 PS2, etc. I get downvoted but I’m trying to look at this through the eyes of capitalism and it doesn’t work. Lemmy likes to shoot the messenger. PC gamers asked why devs ignore them, here’s why.
I’m just looking at the PCGamer article- I don’t have a Statista account and I’m guessing the only source for that is the PCGamer article anyways because the numbers are the exact same.
There’s ~46,000 response that reported income there, and 22217 of them reported making less than $10,000. Another 9179 said less than $25000. I don’t think this is going to be indicative of gamers in general based off of just that.
Across the board the most common reasons were ‘demo game’, which would likely end up resulting in a sale anyways, and ‘can’t afford’ which would likely not result in a sale regardless of the ability to pirate.
But you’re right that I could absolutely see an exec reading that article, looking at a chart and losing his mind.
So basically their whole thing boils down to “The people who don’t like us are the people we’re trying to stop anyway, and everyone else is just wrong when they don’t like us.” When challenged on things like performance impacts they insist that they can’t provide metrics, because it would be difficult to get permission, and even if they did nobody would believe them anyway. Any time a third party provides those metrics, though, those are lies because those third parties are all pirates. So again, everyone who doesn’t like Denuvo is actually just wrong, at least according to Denuvo.
This effort at defending themselves is just so hilariously bad. Not only did they utterly fail to make themselves look any better in any way, the absolute shallowness of their answers makes them look so much worse.
Fuck Denuvo, absolute bunch of clowns, the lot of them.
“It’s the pirates’ fault because they prove we’re full of shit”
Denuvo blames its low reputation on anyone who has experienced its product
Uh huh. Speaking as someone who (stupidly) bought Star Wars Jedi Survivor at launch and expected a 12900KF and a 4090 to be able to play it stably – the game ran like absolute shit until the patch where they announced they removed Denuvo. They’d done all manner of patching to that point which made absolutely no difference for the majority of people, but miraculously, when they removed Denuvo the performance across the board was exponentially higher. Traversal stutter is still there, but it’s extremely minor and is aligned now with every other UE4 game’s traversal stutter.
But yeah, I guess that was just a surprising coincidence that the performance issues almost entirely resolved themselves the moment Denuvo was removed, and that they didn’t in the previous 8 patches.
Fuck Denuvo.
What’s traversal stutter?
Random dropped frames caused by moving around the world as the game loads and unloads data
Ah yes. I also have played on a 5400 rpm 60gb 2002 hard drive lol. I know the experience all too well.
So now imagine that you upgrade to a fast SSD and the latest CPU and GPU and you still get traversal stutter because the game and engine are poorly optimised
Yea that would piss me off. I gotta go see what games have denuvo. I might be able to test it out.
That game still runs like absolute trash tbh
Ullman’s argumentation is very wiggly when it comes to impact on performance. On one hand, he claims there’s very little proof, on the other hand he claims there is no point producing proof because they wouldn’t be believed. Furthermore he says their hands are tied as they’d need their client’s approval to publish such numbers, conveniently ignoring the possibility of anonymizing and grouping data. Remember they state to being included in 70-80 games yearly.
Finally, and this is an old song, but anyways: preventing loss in sales due to piracy is an exercise in wishful thinking. The amount of pirate players who would have paid in an alternate universe with no cracked version can’t be reliably estimated.
… he claims there is no point producing proof because they wouldn’t be believed.
He also dismisses any evidence created by others as untrustworthy.
What a load of shit. It’s up to the person making the claim to provide evidence. People have claimed the opposite, and backed it up with “low-quality” evidence. Refusing it would be pretty easy, if it were true; get someone independent to verify in a pre-funded, blind trial.
The only reason not to do this is because they know their product reduces framerate frequently enough to be a problem.
Stupid fuckin gamers and their “standards” and all of their complaining about “poor performance” because we’re basically requiring they run the game in a virtual machine that constantly stops to check if it’s pirated
So they have a great reputation with people who aren’t gamers?
Yeah, the C level execs!
Oh? Does this mean they are finally starting to actually lose business because of how shitty the product is?
They wouldn’t be whining about being hated if it didn’t impact their bottom line…
Yep. Comcast doesn’t seem to give the slightest shit.
Comcast has a monopoly though, it’s not like satellite or 5g is a serious competitor to cable/fiber.
This would be great job if it weren’t for all the people vibes
Existence be like that sometimes
Lmao it’s kinda hilarious, because all the positive PR in the world isn’t going to fix the fact that they’re a shit company with a shit product that only makes products it’s used on worse. Do as much investor spin as you want - that fact will never change, and you’ll still be hated.
I mean, they are right.
Just not in the way they think.
