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 Which will take a toll on the already outdated hardware.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.
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.
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.
I heard Denovo is a subscription so eventually it’s less cost effective to keep paying for it
