What? ALL DRM only punishes paying customers.
Not necessarily. All DRM punishes paying customers, but some also punishes pirates. Very few games with Denuvo ever get cracked, instead the publisher removes it after a while because Denuvo charges a license fee as long as its in your game. E.g. the Hatsune Miku game on steam hasn’t been cracked in the two years it’s been out. So there’s an argument for using it, even if it’s a flawed one.
But these games already went without DRM for years. They’re long since cracked. The only purpose this DRM serves is to make it harder for paying customers to use mods. Not pirates, they can keep using the same mods they’ve always used. This is literally for the purpose of degrading the experience of paying customers. That’s what they mean by “only punishes paying customers”.
Very few games with Denuvo ever get cracked
I was under the impression that all the major Denuvo games got cracked within the year they launched if not the first couple weeks? Maybe there wasn’t the right attention for that game?
Do you know of a place that tracks that kinda thing? I’m pretty curious now about the statistics of release to cracked.
There’s an r/crackwatch, with a pinned list of Denuvo games.
For example, in 2021, only 7 games released with Denuvo were cracked (out of an approximate 30). In 2022, only one. There was only one cracker in the world who was any good at breaking Denuvo, and Denuvo hired them, so it almost never happens anymore.
(Be careful when reading the crackwatch updates, because they mark ‘denovo removed’ the same colour as ‘denuvo cracked’, you have to read the notes) My mistake, they stopped doing this a little while ago.
There is basically only one or two people involved with any sort of denuvo cracking, someone named Empress and another I can’t remember.
Well, when the game is essentially running in a virtual machine with an address translation layer that scrambles the backing memory every few minutes you’re lucky the game even runs. Good luck trying to decipher that hell. A few guys have done it, I remember the one dude ranting on Twitter about trying to crack Borderland’s 3 back around launch.
And then the follow up which was that Denuvo was basically adding a ~30fps overhead to the game and everyone was initially blaming the devs for releasing unoptimized garbage.
Gabe had it right, piracy is a service problem. And my motto has always been if the game has some garbage like Denuvo, then you couldn’t even pay me to take a copy. Not worth the headache.
Not anymore, Hogwarts Legacy was just cracked, almost a year after release, but EMPRESS is only one person, there are several games releasing with denuvo every year, my friend is still waiting for a crack to Stranded Alien Dawn but since it’s a smaller game it’s not even on their radar.
Most denuvo games you are seeing on sites, if you go to the crackwatch twitter account, you’ll see it’s just the devs themselves removing denuvo since they probably didn’t want to renew the contract for a game that already sold for an entire year.
I guess you’d start with a dupe check or pre db site to see what known Denuvo games have a cracked version, and when it came out. Example: https://predb.me/
At an absolute minimum, the DRM prevents me from easily making a backup of my legitimate copy, which I am otherwise entitled to do.
So yeah, by definition DRM has a negative impact on paying customers.
This is why I only play unlicensed Tengen games on my NES. R.B.I. Baseball, Gauntlet, and Pac-Man are really all I need and I like their cartridge shape better anyway.
Digital rights management - who’s rights? Certainly it’s not in my best interest.
Digital restrictions management.
So MH Rise is still busted? I figured they would have done something about that far more quickly
At the time of this post both the game and proton had been updated and the game was working again.
Adding DRM to a two year old already cracked game is still an insane decision, but the problem of it breaking the game was fixed relatively quickly.
It’s an long-term decision meant to kill modding. Having to seek a cracked version for modding isn’t a problem for some users, but it’s an imposing thing for users on average. It makes it less likely that your average user will attempt to engage with mods, which reduces the audience for mods, and that in turn makes mod developers less likely to develop them.
It’s about strangling the life out of modding communities slowly.
Which is incredibly stupid since mods prolong the lifetime of a game’s value
The problem is that game companies are no long interested in prolonged lifetime they can’t directly monetize. Who cares that mods add a decade of additional sales if people are modding costumes instead of buying them from the cash shop.
And this sort of attitude is making me wonder if it’s still worth buying from these companies.
I don’t understand why some publishers of singleplayer focused games are against modding.
I understand that it could impact other players experiences in a multi-player setting. And I support any game developer segregating modded clients from vanilla. What I can’t wrap my head around is why some try to ban modding all together. If a player ruins or enhances their experience with mods, it’s on them, not the developers.
IIRC, it’s from a Street Fighter tournament scandal, where one particular player had a nude Chun Li mod installed. The tournament didn’t know about it, the player forgot to disable the mod ahead of the tournament, and nude Chun Li was broadcast to the entire banquet room full of viewers (and everyone streaming online) because they had the game projected on a giant screen.
