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[Rivdoric]

Oh, so who along with Empress cracks denuvo?



Huh. Gone as in she's out of the scene or taking a break? These people crack denuvo which is in the biggest games (high traffic) right?

Empress gone and no one except that group was there anymore.
You see, games using Denuvo now requires so much skills to crack than whoever has the skill to crack those makes tons more money by working legit.
The "scene" is not what it used to be.

 

[Kupfer]

$60 a game
- 30% to seller
= $36

25.000 / 36 = 694

So the amount of $25,000 only covers 694 illegal copies of a gme per month.

If pirated copies were truly as big a problem as they always claim, Denuvo would certainly be far more expensive.

 

[winjer]

Let me quote Gabe Newell about piracy.
The reality is that a great service like Steam or GoG have done a lot more to reduce piracy, than denuvo ever did.

"We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem," he said. "If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate's service is more valuable."

 

[Denton]

If true that is extremely cheap and extremely worth using to protect at least the first month sales.

 

[Rivdoric]

If true that is extremely cheap and extremely worth using to protect at least the first month sales.

I'm entirely okay with that as well.
They should use Denuvo for 6 months at most and then remove the crap.
All shitty optimised games released since 2022 use Denuvo that can't be a coincidence.
I perfectly get why they use it but ffs remove that shit after some months.

 

[Denton]

All shitty optimised games released since 2022 use Denuvo that can't be a coincidence.

This is not really true. Plus there are plenty of games that use Denuvo and run fine (e.g. Dead Island 2, Atomic Heart..).
Now, I expect there to be some impact, but minimal. 2-5% at most. I hope some third party like DF will do some proper testing of this already, so these claims about how (correctly implemented) Denuvo destroys performance can be confirmed or disproven for good.

 

[Laptop1991]

What a waste of money when games without Denovu sell more

 

[KungFucius]

50 cent per activated game license.

So if the game sells 1,000,000 copies, that's $500,000 fee right off the bat. Wow.

Took almost a month for someone to comment on this aspect of it. FFS it is a lot. The 25k is nothing until the sales are down to nothing. The per copy cost is insane for big games.

Lets assume games are 60 on average so for each million you would need to have forced 8.3k sales due to DRM to cover that cost. Its less than 1% so it seems reasonable, but its hard to make the argument that it is actually worth it, plus they want a return, not break even so really they want to prevent 20k lost actual sales to piracy per million or more. Pirates have choices too. They could buy that one game or go play some emulated Switch game, or some old game that just got pirated or Gamepass, etc.

My intuition, which could be very wrong, tells me that this is not a good move. Many PC gamers spend a shit ton on their rigs and buy a lot of big games. They complain about anything that makes a game run worse even if it is not true. Having Denuvo there is an easy scapegoat. It costs them some goodwill. Are they really getting 2% or more of their sales from people who would have pirated but bought instead? Is that worth the backlash and the possible lost sales or delayed sales from PC gamers who dislike DRM? Another side of this is how games get a boost from social media. Letting Pirates pirate games could add to the chatter and make a game trend more and sell more to people who would never consider piracy. Seems like that could lead to 2% sales. The DRM thing really seems like an emotional decision based on the fallacy that pirated sales means lost money. By itself it might, but across everything, it might not.

That said, most games have Denuvo and are not cracked within 6 months if at all. This is the norm now and this can change people's behavior over the longer haul. So even if it pisses gamers off now, it could help the industry sell more copies in the long run by stopping people from even being exposed to piracy in the first place.

 

[RoboFu]

I honestly thought it would be more.

 

[YeulEmeralda]

Kinda puts in perspective why devs remove it after a while most of the time.

Also why you rarely see an indie game with Denuvo.

 

[The Janitor]

Imagine if they spent that money optimizing their games instead, but I guess spending money on Denuvo and Sweet Baby Inc is more important...

 

[Davevil]

Nobody else cracks Denuvo besides Empress.

Last I heard she quit but apparantly not

she

 

[MMaRsu]

she

Who knows, who cares.

 

[Fafalada]

Would that be a universal price? You have to wonder if major publishers get major discounts.

Everything is negotiable.
The monthly fees in particular would depend on the type of game and projected sales, there's no value if game sells in smaller numbers there.

 

[DrFigs]

Well we know that games that are cracked early also sell less in the long run. so it's a tradeoff between paying for better drm and selling less copies.

 

[Laptop1991]

According to Bethesda and Microsoft, Starfield sold well, it didn't use Denovu,

Denovu is now a minor negative now and doesn't help game sales in anyway, shape or form, it's still a negative in a much bigger problem of game sales down across the board,

Higher prices putting off day 1 purchases, lacklustre AAA games not worth the price, broken releases, forced dei, and subscription's like GP and Ubisoft + which cost a lot less than buying hitting sales and not every subscriber pays all year round, they sensibly in my view only pay when there are new games they want to try or play then cancel the sub,

Denovu is pointless now and companies are wasting billions on games that are failing right left and centre, like most of the so called big games this year alone, they are going bankrupt and being shutdown or bought out, it isn't needed anymore.

 

[Kasane89]

This price is insane considering Sega never removing denuvo drm

 

[Toots]

25000 is 500 sales at 50 dollars

Only if you manage to shit your product out of thin air directly into the consumer's hands.

25k$ a month is wild for a service no one actually wants. Only place i saw that type of useless expense was in public service contracts....

 

[Dr. Wilkinson]

Is this a lot? A little? Average? I don't know what DRM normally costs.

 

[Magic Carpet]

Is there a list of games that have had Denuvo or are going to have it in the futuer?
I don't know if I've ever bought a game using it before, I'd like to see for myself if it's as bad as everyone says. Slowing the game down and such.

 

[SportsFan581]

All statements are true yet if they use it it's because they get extra sales by using it, otherwise they wouldn't be using it in the first place.

That's true. You've got to imagine they have some data with/without it in order to justify that kind of expense.

 

[Ozriel]

Considering there are studies, even from official governments, that claim that Piracy does not reduce sales, it's a guarantee that devs are losing a lot more money from Denuvo, than from Pirates.
Devs are getting robbed blind by Denuvo. And then they have the nerve to whine that games are too expensive to make, when they are wasting so much money.
Worse yet, Denuvo by causing performance issues, is reducing sales.

Theirs is only one study that makes that claim, and that's from 2013, with PC gaming in a significantly different place then than it is today.

Anyone telling you that piracy doesn't harm sales today is lying to you.

 

[kapshin]

Who on earth still plays pirated games?

Jack Sparrow.

 

[VolticArchangel]

Nobody else cracks Denuvo besides Empress.

Last I heard she quit but apparantly not

So, she's still active. Interesting. Is she some former disgruntled denuvo employee or some shit? "Annihilate this company" her goal? Lmao.

Also, what does she mean by DD2 will go denuvoless, so she will never bother cracking it? Implying that Capcom will remove denuvo in the near future for DD2?

The "scene" is not what it used to be.

The scene used to be what? Can you explain?

 

[Rivdoric]

The scene used to be what? Can you explain?

The involvement and motivation, simply.

 

[VolticArchangel]

The involvement and motivation, simply.

Again, by "scene", going by the discussion here on who's cracking denuvo, which is pretty much empress alone, you mean her involvement and motivation?

I mean, what can one woman do when there's a slew of AAA releases with denuvo, which takes (just for argument's sake) 1 or 2 years to crack, to even have that motivation in the first place?

Imagine, 10 big games with the current uncrackable (uncrackable in this context = takes time to crack, not in the literal sense) build of denuvo, all high profile, and all use some form of generative AI in the future that will dynamically shuffle encryption keys on the fly, with minimal cpu perf hit? What's gonna happen then?

 

[nkarafo]

But... but... Games are so expensive to make?