The official Steam page for Deep Silver and Starbreeze’s PAYDAY 3 game has been updated to show the use of this ever-controversial third-party DRM.
Edit: Seems the below statement was factually incorrect. Oops!
It’s a very obnoxious and heavy-handed approach to anti-piracy measures. It slows down games, kills framerates, gives users a whole host of other performance issues, and just makes the experience worse overall. It’s a product that doesn’t even seem to care to improve, because they make their money from publishers, not the people who buy and play the game. Many people hate it, and I believe it’s absolutely justified.
There isn’t a lot of evidence to back these claims up. For most users, it’s entirely transparent. You would never know a game shipped with Denuvo unless your first launch is offline and it fails to authenticate.
There have been games that had their performance impacted, but I don’t think it’s the norm. Games like Doom 2016 shipped with it and saw no performance gains when Denuvo was eventually patched out. I think titles like Rime and RE8 are usually the exception, but it’s something I always watch out for in reviews. If a game runs bad, I don’t buy it, regardless of the cause.
Denuvo has proven successful for 2 reasons:
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It’s actually effective. Games go months or even years without a crack.
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It’s nowhere near as draconian as what came before (TAGES, StarForce, SecuROM, etc). Most players aren’t even aware of its existence. They just buy these games on Steam and they work, which is why all the weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth that goes on in these threads never accomplishes anything.
Honest question here. Could it be possibly that as they improved their DRM with more triggers and methods that it has started to impact performance since 2016?
As Empress was cracking Denuvo, I wouldnt be surprised if they started to quickly add extra defencive measures compromising what could have been optimised in the past.
I don’t think so, because it has become less common over time for Denuvo to be the cause of bad performance. Doom 2016 is an early good example, likely because Id Software takes optimization very seriously. Stories of games having bad performance due to DRM were a lot more common back then. The worst example I can recall was Rime in 2017, which was borderline unplayable until the developers removed Denuvo in a patch.
So, I went back and tried to look for a source, but you’re right. Thanks for informing me! From the few sources I read, those issues were debunked, exaggerated, or due to bad implementation. I want to add that I still don’t like the idea of Denuvo (or any other DRM) on digital media that I purchase, but that’s a different topic.
