[GuB-42]

Well used, Denuvo is not that bad. It is misuse that cause games to become slow or unplayable. And generally, it only serves to protect the first few months of sales, it is not uncommon to strip out DRM after that.

Indie games often don't need it (and don't do it). AAA games are a different story. Including DRM is a significant expense in a low budget game, these games are usually cheaper, and people are often more sympathetic to small studios. Also, indie games need exposure first, and they get at least that from pirate copies, AAA games rely on advertising for that and run close to market saturation so pirate copies are more of an opportunity cost.

[shmde]

> Well used, Denuvo is not that bad.

Ubisoft admitting that Denuvo ( idk why they used the term third party lol ) causes PC stuttering.

https://gamerant.com/ubisoft-third-party-software-pc-stutter...

Resident evil 8 runs better when it is stripped off its denuvo protection. As confirmed by Digital foundry's video.

https://youtu.be/UXZGCwAJpbM

https://www.pcgamer.com/resident-evil-village-drm-denuvo-stu...

You will now see a huge influx of video games being stripped of denuvo because it literally shits itself in 12th gen Intel chips and games become unplayable with denuvo.

> And generally, it only serves to protect the first few months of sales, it is not uncommon to strip out DRM after that.

Nope, disagree. The only time they strip Denuvo out is when the game is cracked by warez scenes or if the cost of paying denuvo gets bigger than the people actually paying for it.

Some video games which are out for well over an year but just got denuvo removed in the last 2-3 months out of the blue. It is because of denuvos incompatibility with win11.

1.Shadow of Tomb Raider (3 years)

2.Rise of tomb raider (6 years )

3.Injustice 2 (4years)

4.Jedi fallen order (2years )

5.Nier replicant.

6. Tekken 7 (6years).

> AAA games rely on advertising for that and run close to market saturation so pirate copies are more of an opportunity cost.

Trust me when I say people who pirate are usually the ones who never ever buy video games. Pirates can never be considered an opportunity cost. Not trying to glorify pirates, but people waited patiently for over an year to play RDR2 till it got cracked, so that they don't have to pay outta their pockets.

[chaostheory]

Ubisoft is notorious for misuse of DRM. I believe you have to disable virtualization from the BIOS to even be able to play some of their games. They also reverted back to needing an always on connection for some of their games. What confuses me is that their use of DRM seems really inconsistent, and they keep it on even for old games.

Stay away from Ubisoft on PC.

[bluesign]

> Trust me when I say people who pirate are usually the ones who never ever buy video games.

It is not like black and white. There are a lot of people in between pirate and pre-order player.

[shmde]

> It is not like black and white. There are a lot of people in between pirate and pre-order player.

I can tell with confidence its not the case with my country. People who are well off, who are desperate enough to play it do pre-order vidya. And the other half don't spend money on video games because they think its a waste of money, why ? because its gonna get cracked anyway why pay for it now ? People are willing to wait for a few months for it to get cracked if it means that they can save that money. I know it sounds strange but when it comes to piracy its quite black and white over here.

[lostcolony]

I mean, "never ever" is extreme. But the point is "does leaving a game easy to pirate, vs making it hard to pirate, actually decrease sales".

And unfortunately it's kind of impossible to test that.

[GuB-42]

Denuvo, like most game DRM engines have libraries that can be called from anywhere inside the game code and perform a variety of checks. If the developers are overzealous and make frequent, complex checks, it will result in stuttering. If I remember well, RE8 has a check when a zombie spawns, resulting in mid-gameplay slowdown. They could have put checks only in naturally slow events, like loading a map, and no one would have noticed.

And I kind of agree about pirates never buying games, I don't remember buying a single game during all my student days. And I have now mostly stopped piracy, DRM or not, mostly because I earn enough money, play less, and platforms like Steam are really convenient.

[hota_mazi]

> Trust me when I say people who pirate are usually the ones who never ever buy video games

Why would we trust you? This is just you speaking for yourself.

I used to pirate and when I couldn't, I bought the games. I'm probably not the only one.

The fact that publishers routinely spend millions of dollars on DRM is evidence that DRM works at protecting their sales. They wouldn't throw this kind of money with hundreds of experts crunching the numbers if it wasn't valuable for them.

Money speaks, while you are just making claims without any evidence.