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.
I like to use Denuvo as an indicator of a bad release. For someone with over 3k hours on PAYDAY 2, I just cancelled my preorder.
Thank you for the fun times OVERKILL, sad to see you go this way.
Why are we still preordering AAA digital video games from multi-million dollar corporations?There is no incentive to preorder AAA video games anymore - long gone are the days of midnight launches for physical games.
- Cyberpunk 2077
- Returnal
- Forsaken
- The Lord of the Rings: Gollum
- Fallout 76
- Grand Theft Auto: Definitive Edition
- The Last of Us Part 1
- No Man’s Sky
- Etc. ad nauseum
All of these games came with a half-assed apology from the publisher and how “this wasn’t their intention”. Yes, it was absolutely their intention. They released a knowingly broken game and charged us full price for it. They already got our money and laughed because they know we’re too stupid to do anything about it and that they’ve trained us well with “fear of missing out”.
How many times do us gamers need to get burned by video game publishers until we learn our lesson?
Stop rewarding and encouraging their predatory behavior. Opt out of this abusive practice by not preordering and voting with your wallet. Let them earn your money, so “they can feel a sense of pride and accomplishment”.
What was broken in Returnal on launch? Unless you mean the pc relaunch, I didn’t pay attention to that.
Pc had issues when it came to that platform, things like crashing and inability to launch the game. But that’s nothing compared to its debut on PS5. When it came to PS5, sometimes you’d lose your save file.
All those problems eventually got patched. When games get patched and they’re stable, that’s when it’s time to buy (especially because you’ll get a “definitive edition” for less money than the sorry state at launch). I like being a patient gamer when it comes to AAA games.
What’s the risk when I can just return it if the game is shit after playing it for almost 2 hours?
Two hours is a laughably short amount of time to figure out if a game sucks usually.
It really depends. There are some fan-fucking-tastic games that I did preorder, like FFXVI, Metro Exodus, SF6, TLOU:2 (I didn’t like the story, gameplay + graphics saved it for me), Zelda: TOTK, Elden Ring… the list goes on.
I preordered Zelda Tears of the Kingdom, a physical Switch cartridge. I took a gamble with that but I decided to risk it since: Nintendo has a stellar track record of creating almost perfectly optimized first-party games throughout their entire history, and Zelda’s been in development for over 5 years. That was the exception I made, and I guess I got lucky. One day Nintendo might sully their track record. That’s probably when I’ll stop preordering physical Zelda games if they ever lose my trust.
When you preorder these other games, you certainly have to calculate that risk. Cyberpunk 2077 was made by a developer with a wonderful track record of producing fantastic video games. A lot of people trusted them and preordered, and those with lower hardware that met minimum requirements got burned while those that had superior hardware were fine. A gamble that didn’t pay off too well at launch when people trusted a stellar publisher and developer.
Regardless of the game, it doesn’t make sense to preorder digital titles. There will always be ones that knock it out of the park, but if they do release a wonderful game, certainly buy it but don’t preorder it. Reward them with your money only after they prove they’ve released a good game that’s worth it’s cost. Else, we continue this cycle and publishers will continue to repeat the same behavior without consequence.
I don’t know a lot about Denuvo, is it a bad thing? Why did you cancel your pre order based on that?
It’s a DRM scheme to protect against piracy. Over the years I saw more and more shitty titles use Denuvo on release because God forbid someone steal their cash grab. A lot of titles that are of quality usually do not see the need for Denuvo.
Therefore, nowadays, for me Denuvo serves as an indicator of a potentially shitty release. They slap Denuvo on top of it so that they can pump & dump.
Maybe I’ll buy the game when it’s on sale, but for now I am too skeptical, especially since slapping additional DRM on an already DRM’d game (it’s multiplayer only and always online, unlike previous parts that allowed offline play) does not make any sense to me.
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.
There have been instances where it worsens performance. My computer is mid tier-ish at this point (3070, i7 10700k) and I haven’t noticed any poor performance from games running Denuvo (latest I tried Dead Island 2). It’s likely worse performance loss on older systems, but those older systems probably can’t run new AAA games well as it is.
I think most people don’t like the fact that it takes a while to crack games running Denuvo, so they’re not able to be pirated for that time.
The fact that you even gave them money and had a preorder to cancel in the first place means you’re part of the problem, my friend.
Stop preordering.
I usually don’t preorder games, PAYDAY is the exception, I have over 1k hours in the first game and over 3k hours in the second game.
Doesn’t matter. People said the same shit about having thousands of hours in CD projeckt red games and then we’re disappointed in cyberpunk
“Don’t preorder games” doesn’t mean “don’t preorder unless it’s your favorite series”.
It means don’t fucking give anybody money for a game that’s not fucking out yet, period.
Denuvo has become a very strong indicator to me that not the game devs are calling the shots during development, but the Excel-sheet-business-suit-monkeys are.
Only some business-fool would look at a proposal to buy that piece of performance-guzzling crap and go “Hey, then everyone who’d be a pirate otherwise will buy my product and spend money in muh cash shop, that’s totally worth the investment”, ignoring the immense drawbacks for paying costumers.
especially in a frickin’ coop-shooter where piracy will never be as big of a deal because people want to play together with others on your frickin’ servers anyway…
Yeah, I don’t get it – the game is essentially online-only (not sure if you can play with bot teammates like the previous titles, but that wasn’t too enjoyable anyway). Why pay for Denuvo as well unless you’re out of touch?
If past Payday games are anything to go by, you can play offline with just bots.
You wouldn’t want to, given the choice, and it’s not the point of the game, but you can.
Well, you can play “offline with bots”, but, unless something has changed since last I checked, it’ll be always online, which means that even if you want to play offline you need a constant connection to their servers anyway.
Almost feels like they’re going out of their way to see how many features that harm users they can add and still be able to sell well…
Bro who tf is stealing Payday let alone to play alone. What a waste of money and a fuck you to paying customers.
That’s the thing, the game is already online only, why do they need anti piracy DRM on top of it?
I think it may be more anti-cheat than anti-piracy, but Denuvo in particular can fuck itself
Overkill blew all their money with that WW2 spin off. And it crashed so hard there was a John Cleese shaped crater where it hit rock bottom.
They were only able to make Payday 3 with significant external investment. So basically, PD3 is going to be a gutted and whored game since those investors will get significant say what goes into the game. Denuovo just being the most obvious right now.
Isn’t the game going to be online only in the first place? They’re adding DRM on top of their DRM?
