Denuvo Know They're In Trouble.

EA Games abandoned Denuvo, and Denuvo are panicking over their reputation.

Sources:

00:00 EA Drops Denuvo
00:38 What's The Deal With Denuvo?
03:26 Denuvo Speak Out
06:54 Why No-one Likes Denuvo
14:03 The Cost of Denuvo
15:27 EA Don't Really Trust You

[stefanradebach]

Who knew that having atrocious DRM was actually a bad idea and did nothing but empower the very thing it was fighting against.

[Teranewone]

The day copy protection software prevented me from playing a game I legitimately purchased and installed, and then their customer service accused me of piracy even with receipts in hand to prove I bought it, was the day I lost all trust in copy protection, and assume it will do nothing but harm the consumer. I still never got to play Neverwinter Nights 2.

[pug]

The best thing Denuvo has done for gamers is to charge publishers a recurring fee so that they are incentivised to eventually remove it from their games.

[YouCanCallMeBobot]

The fact that Denuvo denied everything at first and then they got caught lying about just shows you the type of company they are.

[lexvstee]

Denuvo protects me from buying games at launch. I'll get it once it gets removed, likely on sale.

[thebigbrzezinski]

People playing pirated copies of their games isn't what's killing their launch window sales. People playing completely legit copies of their games, then revealing just how dogshit those games are to other people over the internet, _that's_ what's killing their launch window sales.

[TheBlargMarg]

Ironic that Denuvo is trying to save corporate games money by making the game un-piratable, but charging those corporate games an arm and a leg so they can't be pirated lol.

[Khadharphak]

"Yeah, we have a bad reputation, and we're going to fix it by saying it's _everyone else's_ fault"

[Magnumaniac]

Why would anyone trust a company that not only forgot to renew a domain name, causing hundreds of thousands of people to be unable to play games they had legitimately purchased for an entire weekend... but didn't even have any monitoring in place to warn them about the expiry.
That proves they are an incompetent tech company, and also proves there is probably a point sometime in the future when they decide not to maintain that domain and you can lose access to legitimately purchased games. So nope, if a game has Denuvo that is a guaranteed lost sale to me.

[jackbowman]

"It's not our fault that games with denuvo often run badly, its the developers for implementing it poorly!" Doesn't change the truth that if denuvo was not there in the first place then implementation wouldn't be an issue. If it happens so often then it must be pretty tricky to implement well. Imagine if that development time went to actually improving the game instead.

[RaptureSR]

Regardless of how effective Denuvo is, the argument that it only affects paying customers is valid because paying customers are the only ones who ever have to deal with it.

Developers having faulty Denuvo implementation is also not a good argument in favor of Denuvo. If they weren't using Denuvo, there would be nothing for them to implement in a way that unintentionally impacts performance.

[sewerlol]

It's not very often mentioned; but Denuvo is also a hindrance to game modding (by design), wasting a lot of modders time. A lot of cases of mods breaking after updates can be attributed to Denuvo, as it randomly messes with the game code to make games harder to mod.

[artofchang]

The whole Tekken 7 Denuvo performance thing was proven by Harada himself that Denuvo was messing with the code thus creating lag and input delays cuz Denuvo does periodic checks on code. As soon as Denuvo was removed, those issues were gone.

[VitorHugoOliveiraSousa]

Cyberpunk 2077 launched day one at GOG, so naturally there was a torrent day one available with no crack needed. Yet it is one of the biggest PC launches of all time and most of it's sales were on GOG. More proof than that the DRM is useless you will never get. DRM is coping for corporations executives sleep better thinking they are stopping something unstoppable and gaining something out of it. People will buy games if they are good and have a good value proposition (reason regional pricing is super important), people will either ignore or pirate your game if they are unsure of it's value, if the game is good some of the pirates may buy it and if it's bad they will never touch it again legitimately or pirated. What I'm sure that never will happen is that someone that pirate games for whatever reason buy a game they are unsure if it's worth the asking price because a pirated version isn't available. The most likely scenario is that they will ignore it and the majority of people for the majority of games will never look at "old games" again if they didn't played them at the launch window. With the exception of course of those massive 10/10 games with lot's of legs (Cyberpunk 2077, Witcher 3, Elden Ring, Baldur's Gate, any Rockstar game since GTA IV, Bethesda games, etc).

The gradual drop of denuvo is probably because companies are trying to shift to bigger sales windows, trying to build games with sales legs that are not that much front loaded and sell well more than in the first few weeks alone, specially those massive 50-100 hour titles. And in case of Veilguard in general by the pre-orders numbers EA probably knows that this games will at least under-perform if not outright flop, why the hell would you undercut themselves more giving a cut of every sale to denuvo or pay a huge fee upfront?

[tech-bore]

"Denuvo has become harder to crack" Alternatively: fewer and fewer games have become worth the effort to crack.

[Baldeagle-twnv]

The Denuvo games that came out in 2023 - 2024 weren't worth cracking or pirating. The "quality" of AAA games is becoming lower and lower to the point where pirates don't want to waste their time cracking a game that's a PoS and going to be a waste of time. The best way to prevent piracy is to make a crappy game that no one wants to play, buy, or pirate, and it seems like AAA companies have figured that out.

[TheLuceon]

The problem is I don't view Denuvo as actually saving the studios money. For starters, the money that Denuvo would be saving for studios is potential sale lost - cost of Denuvo = supposed profit earned. Potential sales are just that, potential. The people that pirate the game are in no way shape or form going to rush out to buy the game because they can't pirate it. Some will, how many is really going to be up to guess work. However, I absolutely do not believe 20% of sales are lost to piracy (which again, is were the profit is supposedly saved by Denuvo).

[MadocComadrin]

Denuvo: "People are toxic and negative!" - This is a tired consumer-slander tactic anyone can see through at this point, and it's all their own fault anyway. Moreover, companies don't get to complain about "toxicity" and negativity. It's one thing if their employees were getting harassed or even just unduly exposed to normal criticism outside of work, but unlike them, a company is not a person, it's a professional business entity and should act like one.

Denuvo: "We bring value to players by increasing revenue!" - A minority of instances of piracy would be/are converted to actual sales if they could be/are prevented. I'd bet there are even less lost sales or lost full-price sales after the launch window, because pirates can be patient. If a crack never gets out, the ones that can or would buy the game wait for a sale. Moreover, we don't know how much Denuvo charges. That extra revenue could just be used to line Denuvo's pocket!

Denuvo: "It's not our fault! The developers implemented it wrong!" - This is still partially if not mostly Denuvo's fault. It's a failure of Denuvo to provide adequate support services to developers, especially before launch. It's in their own best interest (especially for their bottom line) that they ensure products that use Denuvo don't use it incorrectly, and they ignored that.

The problem with Denuvo is not performance, it's GAME PRESERVATION. And eventually even the copyright will expire.
And there are companies like Frontier that NEVER remove Denuvo.

[commentinglife]

Here's the thing: I don't care about piracy as a customer! For real, I don't! The claim that I'm somehow made better as a player because the company gets more money? Yeah, that might work if these scumbag companies weren't also nickel-and-diming me with scumbag monetization practices! "But, it would get a sequel!" Yeah, let's ask the Overwatch folks how THAT turned out, eh? For a single player game, Denuvo does ABSOLUTELY NOTHING for me as a player no matter what the company claims. And for a multiplayer game, anti-cheating may be a good thing, but guess what? A pirated copy creates more players in the lobby!