[karlkloss]

The thing is, this DRM stuff causes a lot of problems, like performance loss and even crashes. Therefore even honest buyers use the cracks, to get rid of it.

Some people even wait until the game appears DRM-free on GOG, because of this.

[cwyers]

I suspect that at least 99.9% of PC game buyers don't even know whether a game has something like Denuvo or not.

[tomc1985]

I suspect that number is far lower... like 95%

PC Gaming may be mainstream now but in its nerdier days awareness of cracking was quite high... and I imagine it still is among demographics that cannot afford to plunk down $60 for the latest whatever-they-want

[Certhas]

Awareness of cracking is high, but if you own a PC that can play these games you can afford 60$ to pay for the game. Or you can just wait a little and get one of the millions of games on Steam for approximately no money.

[jdietrich]

You can put together a competent gaming PC for about $400 these days. Buy a refurb business desktop with a fourth-gen i5, add a GTX 1650 and you can run pretty much any game at 1080p on medium settings.

A lot of young people (or people in middle-income countries) can scrape together a few hundred bucks for an entry-level gaming PC, but would find a $60 game to be prohibitively expensive. IMO the move away from demo versions and physical media has substantially incentivised piracy - if you can't try before you buy and can't resell your game, you're less inclined to hand over your hard-earned cash for a game that you might hate.

[tapland]

I paid less than 20x that for the PC I run, that I bought 8 years ago. One single $60 title per year would add 1/3 to the total cost.

[halfdan]

People can easily spend their entire money on a new PC and then not have the money to buy games.

You'd be surprised how many people with iPhones shoplift clothes worth much less than $60

[tomc1985]

Dude you obviously did not grow up on computer games, because if you did you may have saved up for that $500-$1000 gaming PC over a period of months (or years) and then had very little money left over or per month for games.

When I was younger I could barely afford a gaming PC and certainly didn't have very much money for games, and I knew a lot of other people in my boat. I lived for the bargain bin (and later, Steam Sales) and it was still not enough

[FDSGSG]

Well, he did say "PC game buyers" :)

[fxtentacle]

In my group of friends, we tend not to buy any multi-player game with EA Origins requirement because 2 of my friends so vehemently oppose it that I already know that I would be playing alone if I bought it.

[saagarjha]

I wonder if they do but they cannot name it.

[pizza234]

Users like to hate DRMs, even when it's not justified.

Technically Denuvo is not a DRM, it's an anti-tampering system. This is not just a matter of wording - nobody complains about Steam's DRM, so it's not about DRMs, it's about a specific product.

Having said that, Denuvo performance loss is minor. It's quite amusing that in one case, a patch which also included its removal, decreased the performance: https://www.pcgamer.com/uk/rage-2-patch-removes-denuvo-but-p....

Regarding the crashes, there's much hearsay around. However, in absence of rigorous examinations, there's the benefit of doubt. In my opinion, it's not buggy in itself (I've played several games with Denuvo, and they were working fine), rather as the general bug risk of adding extra functionality to software. As the article above points, "[...] that would imply Denuvo checks constantly running within the main game loop, which would make no sense.".

All in all, defining Denuvo as "this DRM stuff causes a lot of problems" is definitely a mischaracterization, although it's not clear if "this DRM" refers to Denuvo, or DRMs in general.

[HelloNurse]

Are you seriously trying to distinguish different flavors of shit? Seriously claiming that Denuvo is not harmful hostile software?

[SCdF]

Isn't "a lot of problems" somewhat of an exaggeration? I don't like DRM conceptually any more than I imagine most people do, but hasn't most people's ire with it been reddit-level sleuthing / whinging?

I have seen evidence that heavy DRM (Denuvo I think, specifically) caused increased loading times.

Apart from that, every time someone tries to prove there is any other difference with any measure of scientific rigour they find no statistically differences.

[tambre]

Overlord Gaming has done significant benchmarking with Denuvo and after the developer removed Denuvo. There's one on loading times [0]. And others on performance and disk size.

Loading times obviously varied per game, but the differences for most games were pretty significant.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ByfLg9wGB4o

[SCdF]

Yes.. I said that? You linked the one reference for the very thing I referenced as known to be bad...

[nieve]

The comment listed three things, not one...

[molticrystal]

For Denuvo they have been better lately at implementing the checks in a way where it does not interfere with performance or if it does, it is very difficult to detect.

But for DRM overall and Denuvo there are numerous issues, and thanks to the "make a game and forget it", principle they games continue to suffer from bad implementation. In particular games with the older iterations of Denuvo continue to have performance issues.

To expand upon this, the older a game continues to have DRM the more problems become apparent. For example just recently in December, where Disney's decision not to renew Securom caused legal owners Tron:Evolution to have their game stop working.[0]

Who knows what fate all those expensive Denuvo titles have in store for them, but we probably have a fair idea. Due to the resources needed to bypass more difficult DRM, often the updated version of the game will remain uncracked and that could make it possibly unplayable for the average consumer if things go south.

[0] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20191204/09531743504/disne...

[FDSGSG]

> Therefore even honest buyers use the cracks, to get rid of it.

How many of these cracks actually fully get rid of denuvo? I'm not familiar enough with current developments, but most DRM patches I've seen didn't actually get rid of the DRM.

[sudosysgen]

You're right, almost none of them do.

[m-p-3]

I just wait for a GOG release, I'm patient and my game backlog is already way too long. No point in paying the full price if I can play something else I bought for cheap in the meantime.

[trekrich]

i try to buy as many games on gog as possible now.

[tanilama]

It doesn't matter TBH. As long as the DRAM slows down everyone, it would just be part of the game experience then.