I wonder who at Denuvo thought it was a good idea to make a discord server, like no one likes Denuvo, it makes games run worse, makes it harder to play games offline, and all it serves is to prolong pirates from cracking games for a month, Denuvo literally sucks and it does nothing good
That's not true, there's basically ONE person who can crack Denuvo, as she's not been doing frequently at all. Many Denuvo games remain uncracked years after release.
@@luganox2844 Not true, is just that now is done differently, the crack is not available in public pages (for safety of the crackers) and the process to get a crack/activator is by recommendation or donation whit crypto via telegram or discord.
@@luganox2844 Not true, is just that the activator is not shared on public sites now and can only by acquired by recommendation or donation. Also Empress is not a she... is a dude, actually a ex-employee at denuvo.
@@luganox2844 Yep. I just checked bunch of games and the second game that came to mind ( Total War: Warhammer 3 ) isn't cracked yet and that game came out in feb. 22.
DENUVO games gets cracked anyway, it just take them more time. Russians already cracked Metaphor, and just lol at Russia becoming a market cause of Denuvo. Fighting piracy is stupid, because its a war you can't win, people who pirate, usually wont buy game cause its not cracked, they just do not buy stuff, its their way of life. DENUVO only hurt people who actually give you money.
During covid I lost my job (along thousands of other people) so I stopped paying for internet for a while, after about 2 months I think ALL my games that have denuvo flat out stopped working, I remember Persona 5 was the first, it stopped working like a week or two after I stopped connecting to the internet, then I just kept checking the others and sure thing they all stopped working after a while.
@@TheRealUcanUwill Russians didn't do much, it was cracked day one because the devs accidentally left the exe of the demo without DRM. And since the demo is basically similar if not out right the same as the full game, it was easily applied.
The fact that they have a product manager stupid enough to say that “some games may not have been made if denuvo didn’t exist to curb piracy on past games” is incredible. The mental gymnastics necessary to reach that point are Olympic-tier, and the idiocy required to then say it out loud is unfathomable.
Ok kinda curious now but for sake of counter argument to prove ur point: Name one game that was made popular and made into modern times because they played a pirated game. OR u are just running ur worthless trap & vomitting the same with something u heard from a dumarse who have no idea what they are talking about So what's ur answer?
Gabe was and will remain 100% right about pirating. I used pirated stuff when I was a teenager back in the 90 when I didn't have the money. I stopped that and used legitimate sources as an adult when the service was good and prices were reasonable, and when things got legally available in my country pretty quickly and not 5-10 years later when it was (badly) ported for another console. Now, after a good decade of continued enshitification, I find myself going back to the high seas, because I will not pay two overpriced services to get a product in my country not even completely legally (as one of those paid services would be VPN) in a worse quality (e.g. lower resolution). When people say "the market will regulate itself" that is exactly what piracy is for modern media. Try and sell a mediocre product that is overpriced? We'll go to where the same product is better, cheaper, and more easily available.
Also the Denuvo guy's premise that Denuvo leads to better games has not proven true to begin with. Guys, do you feel game quality has gotten better overall since Denuvo started their business?
@@MrTomaat23are you stupid? The fact is denuvo undeniably hurts performance and punishes paying customers. I don’t care if he went from 1000fps to 1020 fps, that’s 20 fps that shouldn’t be taken from the paying customer.
@@MrTomaat23 No it really isn't... might be 120 to 140fps on HIS system (which by the way is still a big deal), but on lesser systems that could mean the difference between playable and unplayable. So I really don't know what you're trying to claim here, it's all relative.
Currently a student. I pirate stuff like 90% of the time. Reasons: 1. Don't have a job nor money to buy games especially in Asia 2. Companies like Ubishit offering me worse service when I pay for their stuff rather than when I pirate it. I have purchased several AC games and in Feb, they issued a localisation patch that that bricked AC Rogue, a single player game that took them two days to solve. Meanwhile, I have alternatively sourced Watch Dogs 2 that runs like butter, no DRM checks everytime I open, can shut it by alt f4 without it making a fuss about online saves n shit. It plain and simply, just works. Meanwhile, the games I bought via steam, always need to launch alongside the Ubi connect app, always check if it's me, do around 200 DRM checks regularly, despite the location, network, IP, Device ID, etc. all being the same. 3. I have also alternatively sourced games like Subnautica and Armoured Core 6, the way they run, the way they respect player choice. I will be buying these games from Steam ASAP coz it's imperative to support them
elden ring and baldurs gate 3 have no denuvo, ER sold 20+ mil copies and BG 3 sold 15+ mil copies within a year, if u have goodwill with ur customer u don't need denuvo, piracy doesnt affect sales in a big way if ur game is good and exciting enough for people to buy it
I will make a slight different example. I have never cared about switch emulation, but since emulators have taken down I secured my copies (just emulators). Again, bad practices created the problem
Every single most successful video game release on PC in past like 5 years didnt had Denuvo and even if we will look at like peaks on steam the only one would be Dying Light 2 lol. I dont count Hogwarts Legacy since that game was cracked basically day/week 1 so yeah Denuvo didnt do much there but as you pointed out 90% of titles that are bestsellers are not using Denuvo.
They ONLY sold 20+ mil copies and 15+ mil copies, they ONLY won GameOfTheYear, if they had Denuvo they would have sold Bazillion units and won GameOfAllTime award. -quote Denuvo,Probably
Pirates are going to pirate. Some cuz they can't afford it and some out of principle, which means you're actively punishing those who do the "legal" thing and support you.
Piracy to me will always be about game preservation. I hope to one day share the games that shaped me with my kids/grandkids or others who never had a chance or have no clue about those games. If those game “licenses” are gone and they don’t exist, I feel cheated and hence I’d rather have the game data on me
I have a Ubi plus account bc i happen to like some of the AC games for time killing. I put a pirated copy on my legion go so I don't have to worry about being connected to the Internet... It's annoying for single player games
As Customers, Copyprotection has always been a negative. And that will NEVER change. We have literally no upsides for any form of it. When Physical was still king, copying your own discs to use them was a common thing to protect the original. With DRM, the old versions where absolutly terrible. They wouldnt just make reinstalling games a pain, you also had to run their programm in the Background wich costs ressources, and PC Gaming was pretty down during the early years of DRM, even in heavy PC focused countries like germany. The main issue with all of these is that you basically got a worse experience as a customer for something you didnt even do or planned on doing, illegally distributing games for free. Most of us never had the ressources or the know how to even attempt of doing that.
Denuvo doesn't in any way protect Publishers from people pirating their games, it actively makes it worse because of how pissed off Players so much when it makes games so much worse that have it attached.
@@芽衣-c5x That's not exactly true, Denuvo games do still get cracked, it just depends on how popular the game is. Right now there aren't that many teams who are willing to crack Denuvo, but when someone wants to crack a game they do, it's not impossible.
"Denuvo - no buy" is a movement with a long tradition. Understandably Denuvo wants to get rid of their negative image. Thinking they can open a discord server for public relations when hated by everyone is just hilarious.
And like what Luke said. If they keep trying to get us to like them, we will inevitably bury them. They need to just focus on fixing their lies. They need to completely remove the performance hits that their software creates and change the process for verification to allow more consumer freedom. It's an oxymoron. The real answer is they need to stop existing
In a country where people earn less then minimum wage ($63 minimum wage/ month) you can't not justify pirating a $70 game. For me I played Many of my bought games as a pirated copy eg. RDR2, GTAV, Witcher 3, hellblade, saints row 3, Batman Arkham series etc.
In that case juz go sail the sea for all you want, do not solely let the moral compass preventing you from pirating. That being said, I recommend not pirating indies and AA games unless it's for demo purposes.
I live in a poor country as well. Not as bad as Original commentor here, our Min wage is 250 USD a month. Anyway, Regional pricing plays a much bigger role over here. Whether it's an indie, a triple A or double A. If we think your game is too expensive we wil pirate it to try it. (Publishers LOVE charging us the same prices they give to USA gamers) If we end up loving it and we feel it's worth that price. We then will purchase it. But if the regional pricing was there from the start, we never would pirate in the first place.
Tough luck. You're not entitled to steal a product just because you live in a poor country. Im so glad Denuvo is successfully blocking thieves from leeching off of real consumers.
@@eleongo We are poor because of USA. Petrodollar dollar monopoly need to go away. We can't trade freely with our neighbours like China and Iran due to USA dictatorships.
It’s easy to dismiss Steam forums as, “toxic,” and, “hurtful,” as a cop out from taking ANY responsibility. It’s a way of writing off the fact that most gamers are pretty young, perhaps not as articulate as they’d like to be, but still feeling a passionate anger at something THEY find, “toxic,” and, “heart breaking.” How about Denuvo takes responsibility for disrupting the game space, diminishing its quality, and being the source of the toxicity?
Despite the trash Denuvo and their team is, they are right on this account. One, the average age of a gamer is in their 30's, so the majority being "pretty young" is wrong. Second, the Steam forums is a cesspit of idiots. It's much worse than any other social space for video games.
@@XBluDiamondX : In their 30’s is still pretty young to me, but I’ll accept the point . . . if you can back it up? I was just guessing from outdated experience. And yes, most forums of that type are pretty awful, but that still leaves the fact that they walked blindly into that forum with no idea what to expect. That does not sell me any confidence in them as knowing what they’re doing. Why didn’t they research the platform before going on it? No matter how badly, offensively, unfairly or plainly wrongly expressed, the sentiment is a legitimate weed up their butts, and trying to gaslight people into believing that something inherently bad for them is actually, “good,” for them, will elicit the strongest of responses. To me, this is just like the, “Monetisation Manager,” of a company whining about how people are so negative (not rude or insulting) about the motivations of Ubisoft. He literally had no clue that half the gaming planet were about to turn around and shout, “Wait!? ‘Monetisation Manager’!? That’s a THING!? You should be criminalised!” They can’t see it! It’s like Dracula complaining about the negative reaction he gets from nurses at the blood bank! They’re blinded by greed and entitlement, which is why they sound so tone deaf. So, just because he’s got a point about the pack of ravening hounds, doesn’t mean he’ll get any sympathy from me, when he’s crying about how mean they were to him when he walked among the pack, twisting their balls and inserting his finger up their startled angry butt holes! My only response to that is, “Whadd’ya expect, son!? Wake up!”
12:58 He cares because game companies are using "No Denuvo" as an easy W in marketing. Dragon Age The Veilguard is a good example of this. "No Denuvo because we trust you".
And Baldur's Gate 3, And The witcher 3, And Cyberpunk 2077, And all Falcom games (Trails series, Ys series, Tokyo Xanadu eX+), all Gust games, like the Atelier Series, and the Blue Reflection series, All Bethesda games, like Skyrim, Oblivion, Fallout 3, Fallout NV, Fallout 4, Starfield, And of course also Dragon Age Origins, and the first Dragons Dogma game. The list goes on and on and on. NONE of these games needed the named protection to be a success...
@@thesomethingthatisntathing514 Why not? I already bought the game. I don't care about those "wokiewokiewokie Beep Beep" idiots. I only want to play a game. And so far all reviews are not negative (apart from those with a obvious agenda). And what I have seen about it looks fine to me.
"It just works!" - Todd Howard and Denuvo's Ullmann, apparently. If it does, take a game with Denuvo in it, remove the DRM from one copy of the game, and play the games side by side on identical hardware and identical settings. Do that for different game engines and games in different genres. That will clear up any misconceptions as to performance. Of course this is predicated on the company Denuvo acting in good faith up to now and in the future, so I'll probably be in a snowball fight in Hell first.
Fact is, that pirates often get the superior version. Release a good single player focused game on GoG, without any of that DRM nonsense, I'd be happy to throw money at that.
I love how they like to pretend like Denuvo works when the offline activations market exist. The only thing Denuvo does is make me not to buy a game. The problem is the way they sell Denuvo to developers is by letting them think that pirated games downloads = number of sales they are losing. No, people who weren't going to buy your game aren't going to buy it because it has Denuvo. There are exceptions for sure, as always, but pirates either don't have money or don't want to pay for your game.
Denuvo is great in theory. But then in reality, I think the vast majority of people who pirate games aren’t really lost customers - they likely never would have bought the game anyways, or maybe just get it two years later in a 90% steam sale or whatever. That, in combination with Denuvo actively fucking with performance and overall being a hindrance to paying customers only makes it excessively stupid. Like, sure, you may get back the few percent that actually pirate games they can afford, but like… isn’t there a better way for that
That Denuvo piracy study is literally an impossible study? You can't have a control group, that's literally all bogus "science". How can you know that not having Denuvo would increase your launch revenue by 20%? If a game launches with Denvuo and has X revenue, you can't then go back in time and re-launch it without Denuvo to compare. And unlike other studies where the subjects are relatively similar, video games are art. They are different from one another. Just because one game with Denuvo made X amount of money and one game without Denuvo makes Y amount of money, means NOTHING. The games are different, they have different audiences, marketing, appeal, etc. Not to mention other factors like launch windows, competition, what have you. It's literally an impossible study to conduct and Denuvo claiming it as accurate is just another lie they're perpetuating.
Piracy for games can actually sometimes help the company out. I remember downloading Witcher 3 and I loved it so much I bought it twice. So many games no longer have Demos or trials. Being forced to pretty much watch videos or buy the game to see what it is like is a bad way to do things. Not to mention if the DRM company goes out of business then that game you paid for will no longer work.
I do think there was a study done once that made piracy a net positive due to word of mouth and people, who otherwise wouldn't have been able to play, got to play and then buy later
There's a lot of talk about unsustainability in the game industry, but really all i'm seeing is people who are bad at their jobs wasting a lot of money. If you don't shake people like that loose then yeah, things become untenable real quick. A big part of this incompetence is that all of these people in charge of these various products have the idea of a "customer first" based approach as this alien concept. Everyone, including these Denuvo people, see their customers as this obstacle or challenge to overcome, cattle to corral, instead of the people they work for. Fact of the matter is, if Denuvo didn't impact performance and didn't make things worse for customers repeatedly, people wouldn't know what Denuvo even _is_. The PR marketing brain needs to be studied in a lab because some genius somewhere thought a company that has done nothing but garner ill will for almost 20 years could be defused with a discord server and some pouty press releases. Coming out and going "our software never impacts performance" when almost every month for decades there's been a "denuvo made this release take a performance hit" story is arrogance on a criminal level.
I imagine the reason they attempted this debacle was because a few publishers and developers likely refuse to use their software because of the bad press and performance concerns it gets, or maybe it's hurting their sources of funding. Otherwise why in the world would they even bother, we're not their clients, publishers are. It's futile regardless, unless their software somehow starts improving performance magically they will never stop being hated because there's no benefit to them being there for us.
That's a good point. Now that you've mentioned it, it is kind of strange that after a _decade_ of being scorned by gamers, they decided only now to try and soothe things over (albeit in the laziest way possible).
I have a 4090 and 7800X3D based PC, so I have performance to burn but I still deeply resent software that steals my FPS and on top of that behaves almost as obnoxiously as malware. Yeah I think the hate for Denuvo is well deserved
I mean it only makes sense. It's easily avoidable performance loss, you pay for a product, you should be able to play that product to its fullest potential. Besides it's not like we're trading performance loss for something that ultimately benefits us more... we literally get nothing out of the agreement
How is piracy a lost sale? How can anyone prove that someone pirating something would have bought it in the first place? You just can't. You can assume they would have (assuming they had the access and the money), but you can't prove that. On the other hand, you also can't prove that they wouldn't have bought it.
DRM is the worst thing that happened to the industry since piracy , In fact, piracy is better than DRM, companies should estimate losses with DRM as they did with piracy.
DRM was fine when it was just make an account, oh wait you didn’t buy this (steam) But now its too intrusive to the point where i will pirate a game just so I can actually play it
If denuvo were to go under i’d dance in the street in celebration. I can’t count how many times that sucky drm has made my single player games completely useless
companies in the game industry really really underestimates the amount of money people will give for just a little bit of convenience again Denuvo is not a convenience, it's a liability especially for someone who pays, that goes for bad live service implementations too, I don't even know why they think this is a good idea even after the Spore DRM incident
And it’s not just about, “performance,” either. It’s also about the fact that we gamers do not like being SPIED on by corporations. They find Denuvo invasive and sinister. And there are countless, reliable YT videos out there DEMONSTRATING Denuvo ruining games via Before & After demos.
I didnt purchase Star Wars Jedi: Survivor until i was informed that a there was a patch that fixed alot of PC issues and removed Denuvo. It was a good experience when i had frames to work with.
Dude, the people that pirate games is like one percent to 2% of people. Back in the days it was different because there were no services. I’ve been pirating games for 20 years, but I always pay for a game that is amazing and gives me what I want. Every time. Every time I pirate a game that I really like I immediately go and I buy it on steam just to support the Studio. Everytime. especially when it’s a smaller studio, visual novel, AA game and so on. I’ve been doing that for decades. Believe it or not some of us pirates have ethics and codes. Also, you can’t deny the performance issues denuvo has. It has been shown multiple times have impact on performance.
Frankly when I was younger and in high school I used piracy to test out games as it wasn't everyday that I had money in my steam wallet. But I can tell you now that every single game I played during that time (Skyrim, Prison Architect, Hotline miami, little inferno and a few others) I have bought. Some of them I even gifted to others. Now that I have my own money and don't need to ask for a steam gift card everytime I wanna buy a game, I buy everything and never resort to piracy. Without piracy I'm not even sure if I would be a gamer, I'm not saying it's a good thing nor is it morally right, I'm simply saying that it's not an inherent net negative for the industry.
"Which side of the gaming industry has basically no upside to the gamers and basically only helps the publishers?" To me, it's the Ubisoft director of monetization.
They can't come out and say their DRM product is terrible without getting fired for breaching their fiduciary duties, so they're forced to gaslight themselves into believing whatever straw they grasped is actually a selling point.
My message to Denuvo is the same message I have for publishers and developers. The problem is your product not your customers. You are receiving bad press and bad reviews and a lot of negative criticism not because your customers are evil but because your product is bad and telling you why. If you actually listened to your customers and fixed your product to address the issues that they are being brought up, you wouldn't be here. If you do that, you can dig yourself out of this self-made hole, it's the ONLY way to dig yourself out. No amount of gaslighting, lies, and manipulation will fix your product.
Piracy will happen no matter what depending on the country. I pirated, but the second I got Steam, I stopped, because as Gabe says, I got a better service there over the pirates. As Luke said, piracy is also used to test out games, with 2hr play testing from Steam and refund policy, even that has been reduced a lot. Denuvo does nothing except from holding the line a bit, but those that would pirate it, will do it no matter what. All it does is pissing off paying customers and make people not wanting to pick up the title at all. The second I hear a game has Denuvo, I stop caring about the game. At this point I don't care about whether or not they have fixed performance issues tied to it. They are so high on their own farts they made a Discord and made these statements like woe is me, tells me all I need to hear to keep my stance.
It holds the line forever. No one cracks it anymore because its become ridiculously advanced. The degraded performance thing is also a complete myth. There were 2 or 3 games out of hundreds that improperly implemented it, causing a noticeable performance deficit compared to the cracked version, which were then fixed with patches, but even that was years ago. Other than those exceptions it has 0 impact on your framerate and if you don't believe me you can search for the comparisons on youtube.
@@芽衣-c5x Probably, I am not in that space anymore. I dunno if I would say that nobody does it anymore. There is always somebody trying, and some succeding, looking around and see some cases just with a quick search. Not saying it is not advanced for what it does. I am pretty sure Denuvo cause framrate drops in nearly every game it is tested with. And some way worse than others, think Dragons Dogma 2 have it, and it was significant there. Generally, my rule of thumb, not worth taking the risk with a game that has it, wait until there is a sale down the line when they have also removed it. Personally, don't care much if it holds the ground against piracy, because again, like Gaben said, it is a service issue more than anything. And personally dislike it and softwares like it, to the point I really don't care that much if it is a neutral factor in games. And I am not of a mind to change my opinion on it, given their statements.
another point that get overlooked is the fact that most successful offline story driven games dont even have drm or denuvo , bg3, cyberpunk , the witcher , gta , rdr2 , elden ring and so much more also indies games too , so just make a good game and people will buy it
Harada himself (the lead for the Tekken series) on Twitter said that it was literally Denuvo causing issues with the code for Tekken 7. That was why there was lag and delays in animations. And as soon as Denuvo was removed from that game, no more lag or delays in animation.
I can't believe Denuvo said something I agree with. The Steam Forums are a toxic cesspit full of clown farmers. But then they say that developers earn MORE money and then they invest it into GREATER games. That's a bold-faced lie. Most games I've seen that use Denuvo are by publishers who take that extra cash and give it straight to their CEO and shareholders. Their games never get better.
Some DRM like STEAM essentially restricts you from owning a game. It defacto becomes a license for the right to play rather than own. Our games we PAY for are no longer ours to do as we please with. How could they expect consumers to like something that is ultimately anti consumer?
The availability of piracy has never been a deciding factor when buying games for me. I decide what games I buy based on how much I like them. Denuvo only decides if I'll be playing the game when I won't be buying it regardless
2:05 This. This about sums up my feelings. I don't mind if devs want to put in an anti cheat or way to protect themselves from pirates. But the problem comes when it's not those people can feel it, but me, who honestly paid for the game. And I especially hate it in cases of single player games, which I mostly play, and now I constantly have to be online to play. So many cases I've had where I got a day off from work, thought about playing a game, but couldn't because of some kind of maintenance or whatever issue.
Making DRM where the performance is worse and you need to be online 24/7 with a good internet to play games is such a baffling decision and i'm genuinely shocked many companies actually apply Denuvo for their games.
I really love the state of Steam forums, most of the games board (indie and not AAA, that is) are very chill and filled with civilized discussion, praises and constructive critics while AAA studios and ESG games are just a place to dump and jester farming lol.
With games being as expensive as they are. I just pir@te a game to test the waters to see how it is first, then buy it if I like it. It isn't entirely fair to the devs, but 2 hours nowadays tell you f@ck all about a game and isn't enough time to gauge if the game is good for you or not, especially when you look at how big games are. (2 Hours is the max amount of time you got to refund a steam game if you played it and 7 days or like 14 days? (not 100% sure on that one) of it sitting in your library max.) I just don't trust the industry anymore and buy games only once I see that I had a good time in a game.... This also allowed me to test games I never could have before. (Because devs and publishers also think demos are for chumps) Note: I buy most of my games these days, but I still like to test games like total war, europa universalis, victoria 3 and so on (aka strategy games) since a match/feel for it would take you at least 10 to 50 hours to see if you actually like the game or not.
locking culture behind a paywall. Games like AC, Mario, Call of Duty, etc. It's ridiculous to alienate a group of people because they can't afford to enter a culture. I mean, remember how it was back in the Xbox live time and how sad it would've been for the kids that couldn't get one; how much they had missed purely because they couldn't afford buying a game or a console. I'm not saying we should give games for free, but Piracy is a choice for those who can't afford, and it has worked for a long time. Why treat it as if it were a problem? Especially that it has been proven that showing good will alone helps sales much more.
denuvo is a nessesary evil. publishers that eventually phase out denuvo are okay in my book. i believe its okay to protect the game during the initial game release. what i dont beleive in is the overly agressive use of denuvo. just look at what they did to resident evil village. they added checks during animation events for some inane reason and to quote a steam user "Capcom couldn't place said checks in a worse place" , that meant there were severe laggspikes every single time they did the thing. thats not on denuvo or publishers. thats just bad developers. it took them 2 years to eventually remove the drm. adding denuvo to a game release is probably a last minute thing, some interns job to hodgepodge a good enough solution just to be done with it.
What's the point of Denuvo when the money you would hypothetically get more than you would have without Denuvo is used to... pay Denuvo license anyway?
its always interesting to see these studies. First of all .. how do you even know how many times a games has been downloaded and played with a crack? Most cracked games don't let you connect to servers. Also there are way too many places where to download, torrents, direct downloads so how would you tally all of the downloads. Second is the impact to sales. They try to say each download is a potential buyer which translates into full price loss and that is just stupid. there is no way to even say percentage wise how many would purchase game full price if they cant pirate it or even buy it on sale later on. It is just not possible. only way would be doing some Marvel multiverse crap that one universe has denuvo and other does not and then compare sales figures ..
I will never accept DRM outside the store DRM (steamDRM for example). Not only its mostly make the games online only, Reducing performance even stuttering, Make things hard for game preservation and most important things, If you use other device outside windows system like steamdeck, sometimes you cannot even play the game at all. For sure, best case scenario are everybody buying the product and this existed to protect the sales. But if it meant giving negative experience for paying audience, punishing those who supporting their product is never be the wises decision ever. I can tolerate if its only like for a year or so, But then we have something like Capcom that even updating their oldest games with new DRM which for me is the most anti customer move ever. Beside Like Gaben said "Piracy is an issue of service, not price." and adding DRM like Denuvo or other that are similar is not good service, not to mention some of them starting to remove regional price which pretty stupid as well.
I would also argue that game people can pirate that is also good will have stronger word of mouth, because people for whom it's too expensive or who has other problems with buying (like current Russian sanctions making them jump alot of hoops to buy some games) will still engage in the game's discussion. Obviously it's will only help if people love the game and this discussions bring positive word of mouth.
I think they are doing this PR blitz because they see a downturn in their revenue coming as game developers start to cut costs because of the current economic situation. It started with layoffs and next they are going to look for other expenses that they can do without.
For the sake of argument - any anti-tampering solution is reflected in the end price of the product and doesn't bring anything good/positive for the consumer. Also, the argument that it protects the product from piracy is also flawed: The Witcher 3 sold about 10 times more after CD Project removed the protection - people pirated the game, but the sales exploded. People who don't want to buy a game will never buy it with or without DRM...but those who want to try the product before buying (to make sure it's worth it), will end up buying it even if they pirated it to try before buying. Piracy is a necessary evil, created by the industry itself with it's toxic anti consumer practices. If a product is good, people will buy it - end of discussion!
a little thing Luke, the 2 hour time window for refunds isn't good anymore. specially for AAA games. it takes longer than 4 hours to just finish the freaking tutorial in games nowadays. so by the time you get to the meat, you can no longer get your money back.
The issue is crossplay !! Every console player who’s played gta , cod , fifa , Fortnite in cross play has played a match /round against some hacker from the pc side 🤷🏻♂️. Its rife
Let me guess, the paper looks at (estimated) sales numbers rather than actual revenue? I don't buy games with Denuvo, which in practice means I buy it half a year to a year later on a winter or summer sale at a 50% discount. Dragon's Dogma is a good example of that. Big fan of the franchise, but I haven't touched it yet. Without Denuvo, I would have bought it full price after the first patch.
Denuvo very often is a big hit on performance. The other day I tested the "performance demo" for Black Myth Wukong and guess what? It ran better than the actual game because of denuvo. It may not big the biggest hassle for people with "master race PCs" but if you're on a midrange PC or worse every bit of fps counts to having a better experience.
Piracy also helps people from poor countries to get access to software they otherwise wouldn't be able to purchase which can be crucial to education and creation of specialists. Talking from experience ... Basically Denuvo trying to keep poor people from playing video games.
All this talk about piracy and that it causes losses is just an excuse to steal players' money. Because when you buy a bad game, you cannot get back the money you collected for that game because a good game sells itself.
@@salemme4800 True. Especially true given how scammy some studios are these days when trying to sell their games. People who can't afford your games WON'T buy them if they have Denuvo regardless lmao. At the end of the day it's only hurting the players who pay money for their games.
@@NoName-ym5zj Look friend , I've been in the gaming business for over 20 years, and every year it gets worse than the one before, games get more expensive and their quality is below zero, games sell for over $70, then they're marketed as the game of the year, and in the end they're flops, which means you've lost all your money.
Out of all the people I know I think I have seen people pirate more on jailbroken consoles than people who use steam. I have one buddy who pirates as a demo, and everyone else just waits for a sale if they cant afford a game.
truth be told: Games are spensive! like, i'm brazilian, games here are almost half my salary, what the hell! so yeah, when a game just abuse the pricing, you can bet your ass i will pirate it! on the other hand, if a game is a really good one, who might want me to pay the game, but i'm concerned about if this is worth it, i will pirate it, play the game to test (like i did to Batman Arkhan Knight, for example) then if i realy like the game, i buy it! (like i did to batman) Games nowadays are not that friendly to the consumer, they want to suck up our money like the government and f the government! they never did me any favors! and so the game execs!
If you go back and watch any Resident Evil 8 gameplay footage from the version before they removed denuvo, the game skips a frame 99% of the time an enemy die. And it literally tanks 1/3 of the framerate in Monster Hunter World before they remove it. No matter how many "tests" they did with their bloatware it will never convince me that it doesn't affect game performance.
I did actually in the recent few years pirate a few games, it was all Ps4 games that I already have and I wanted to try how well they run on my computer, I put a couple of hours in them but did not keep them as I prefer to have my games on Steam or GOG, I have been tempted to pirate games more because the last couple of years have been a nightmare economically, I can't afford games. Hopefully things are looking up and I can get a few games I have been wanting for ages as I do prefer to pay.
Gabe is right, most people dont even know how to pirate software, even if they wanted to. Wasnt there a statistic a few years ago about how much software (not just games) actually gets pirated... i think it was around 3-5% or so. My cousin always buys all his games legally on steam/epic, but then stil "pirates" the games, because he doesnt want to play with all these enforced things like: always online and microtransactions in single player games, DRMs and especially all the fkn launchers. Ironically the effort companies put into all the messures to prevent piracy just anoys people and drives even more into piracy 😂
According to a 2022 survey, 4% of UK gamers play only pirated titles. 12% enjoy a mix of legal and illegal content, and the majority (83%) exclusively play games from official sources. (Source: Statista)
13:00 I think that once they saw that their removal would be used to generate possibe hype they saw their image as hugly important. Its not actually about gamers they are worried more tripple a games will pull veilgaurd
I don't even have time for the games i already own yet alone the games i want to buy. And they think i have also time for pirating their games? That's simply delulu.
Punishing the people who buy your games is a bad thing… and pushes them away when other means 🏴☠️ give a better product. Gabe was right that piracy is a service issue. Steam itself can be a minor form of DRM, and most people don’t care if it is because it has no negative impact. Those who don’t like that many games have the Steam DRM (they can be DRM free), have a great alternative like GOG to use (more publishers need to support it, but given they like Denuvo I don’t see that happening lol)
Denuvo asking the baby inc treatment LMAO. They should have stayed quiet and keep doing their sheananigans in the back as they always did. Now they got the spotlight, there is no coming back
![Yeat & Summrs - GO2WORK [Official Music Video]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/NEFEwfPcXRA/mqdefault.jpg)
I wonder who at Denuvo thought it was a good idea to make a discord server, like no one likes Denuvo, it makes games run worse, makes it harder to play games offline, and all it serves is to prolong pirates from cracking games for a month, Denuvo literally sucks and it does nothing good
That's not true, there's basically ONE person who can crack Denuvo, as she's not been doing frequently at all.
Many Denuvo games remain uncracked years after release.
@@luganox2844 Not true, is just that now is done differently, the crack is not available in public pages (for safety of the crackers) and the process to get a crack/activator is by recommendation or donation whit crypto via telegram or discord.
@@luganox2844 Not true, is just that the activator is not shared on public sites now and can only by acquired by recommendation or donation. Also Empress is not a she... is a dude, actually a ex-employee at denuvo.
@@luganox2844 Yep. I just checked bunch of games and the second game that came to mind ( Total War: Warhammer 3 ) isn't cracked yet and that game came out in feb. 22.
@@LICVIGO Regardless, it's not cracked in a month.
remember when denuvo servers went down awhile back a bunch of single player games were unplayable which is 100% unacceptable for paying customers
Exactly, or hardware reviewers who got their licence blocked.
It’s good developers get their revenue, but I don’t want this crap as a paying customer.
DENUVO games gets cracked anyway, it just take them more time. Russians already cracked Metaphor, and just lol at Russia becoming a market cause of Denuvo. Fighting piracy is stupid, because its a war you can't win, people who pirate, usually wont buy game cause its not cracked, they just do not buy stuff, its their way of life. DENUVO only hurt people who actually give you money.
Yeah ps5 r incident remember that
During covid I lost my job (along thousands of other people) so I stopped paying for internet for a while, after about 2 months I think ALL my games that have denuvo flat out stopped working, I remember Persona 5 was the first, it stopped working like a week or two after I stopped connecting to the internet, then I just kept checking the others and sure thing they all stopped working after a while.
@@TheRealUcanUwill Russians didn't do much, it was cracked day one because the devs accidentally left the exe of the demo without DRM. And since the demo is basically similar if not out right the same as the full game, it was easily applied.
The fact that they have a product manager stupid enough to say that “some games may not have been made if denuvo didn’t exist to curb piracy on past games” is incredible. The mental gymnastics necessary to reach that point are Olympic-tier, and the idiocy required to then say it out loud is unfathomable.
ok damn you nailed this whole comment lmaooo
"Some of these games wouldn't have been made"
Okay. Name them.
Ok kinda curious now but for sake of counter argument to prove ur point:
Name one game that was made popular and made into modern times because they played a pirated game.
OR u are just running ur worthless trap & vomitting the same with something u heard from a dumarse who have no idea what they are talking about
So what's ur answer?
@@MerlinCross13 product manager be like ALL OF THEM wink wink nudge nudge gaslight gaslight
Also, I like how he thinks that's the revenue goes back into making games and not to shareholders
People defending denuvo must go to a therapist asap
probably employees or friends of employees.
@@clarencealger8380or investors.
People need to understand that Real and Hardcore Gamers LOVE Denuvo. Deal with it and cope harder.
@@Mitch93636try harder with your bait next time:)
Is the same people who buy a mount in WOW for 80$.
Gabe was and will remain 100% right about pirating. I used pirated stuff when I was a teenager back in the 90 when I didn't have the money. I stopped that and used legitimate sources as an adult when the service was good and prices were reasonable, and when things got legally available in my country pretty quickly and not 5-10 years later when it was (badly) ported for another console.
Now, after a good decade of continued enshitification, I find myself going back to the high seas, because I will not pay two overpriced services to get a product in my country not even completely legally (as one of those paid services would be VPN) in a worse quality (e.g. lower resolution).
When people say "the market will regulate itself" that is exactly what piracy is for modern media. Try and sell a mediocre product that is overpriced? We'll go to where the same product is better, cheaper, and more easily available.
I've had more or less a similar experience. Pirate to ex-pirate to beginning to unmoor the boat because most things suck these days.
Also the Denuvo guy's premise that Denuvo leads to better games has not proven true to begin with. Guys, do you feel game quality has gotten better overall since Denuvo started their business?
It has been proven by pretty much every streamer or reviewer that Denuvo is a net negative on any game that has it.
The best games don't have Denuvo.
The only way Denuvo could win me over would be to disband the company, delete all their code and promise to never touch a computer again
Same
I get like 20fps more after jedi survivor remove denuvo
From what to what? 20fps to 40fps is very different than 120fps to 140fps.
@@MrTomaat23 From then to than.
@@MrTomaat23 Even if it's from 120 to 140, that's still ample 16% fps difference
@@MrTomaat23are you stupid? The fact is denuvo undeniably hurts performance and punishes paying customers. I don’t care if he went from 1000fps to 1020 fps, that’s 20 fps that shouldn’t be taken from the paying customer.
@@MrTomaat23 No it really isn't... might be 120 to 140fps on HIS system (which by the way is still a big deal), but on lesser systems that could mean the difference between playable and unplayable. So I really don't know what you're trying to claim here, it's all relative.
Currently a student. I pirate stuff like 90% of the time. Reasons:
1. Don't have a job nor money to buy games especially in Asia
2. Companies like Ubishit offering me worse service when I pay for their stuff rather than when I pirate it. I have purchased several AC games and in Feb, they issued a localisation patch that that bricked AC Rogue, a single player game that took them two days to solve. Meanwhile, I have alternatively sourced Watch Dogs 2 that runs like butter, no DRM checks everytime I open, can shut it by alt f4 without it making a fuss about online saves n shit. It plain and simply, just works. Meanwhile, the games I bought via steam, always need to launch alongside the Ubi connect app, always check if it's me, do around 200 DRM checks regularly, despite the location, network, IP, Device ID, etc. all being the same.
3. I have also alternatively sourced games like Subnautica and Armoured Core 6, the way they run, the way they respect player choice. I will be buying these games from Steam ASAP coz it's imperative to support them
elden ring and baldurs gate 3 have no denuvo, ER sold 20+ mil copies and BG 3 sold 15+ mil copies within a year,
if u have goodwill with ur customer u don't need denuvo, piracy doesnt affect sales in a big way if ur game is good and exciting enough for people to buy it
As the great GabeN himself once said, piracy is not a problem of pricing, it's a problem of service. Or something along those lines
@@regex2660 Service TM
I will make a slight different example. I have never cared about switch emulation, but since emulators have taken down I secured my copies (just emulators).
Again, bad practices created the problem
Every single most successful video game release on PC in past like 5 years didnt had Denuvo and even if we will look at like peaks on steam the only one would be Dying Light 2 lol. I dont count Hogwarts Legacy since that game was cracked basically day/week 1 so yeah Denuvo didnt do much there but as you pointed out 90% of titles that are bestsellers are not using Denuvo.
They ONLY sold 20+ mil copies and 15+ mil copies, they ONLY won GameOfTheYear, if they had Denuvo they would have sold Bazillion units and won GameOfAllTime award.
-quote Denuvo,Probably
Pirates are going to pirate. Some cuz they can't afford it and some out of principle, which means you're actively punishing those who do the "legal" thing and support you.
I use piracy like blockbuster. I’ll try a game I’m sketchy about paying full price for and if i like it I’ll buy it on steam so i get my trophies.
Piracy to me will always be about game preservation. I hope to one day share the games that shaped me with my kids/grandkids or others who never had a chance or have no clue about those games. If those game “licenses” are gone and they don’t exist, I feel cheated and hence I’d rather have the game data on me
Own what you buy.
"If buying isn't owing, pirating isn't stealing."
I have a Ubi plus account bc i happen to like some of the AC games for time killing. I put a pirated copy on my legion go so I don't have to worry about being connected to the Internet... It's annoying for single player games
@@jeffmacs2o223 Funny how it's easier to Pirate games and own them than to BUY them and RENT them.
As Customers, Copyprotection has always been a negative. And that will NEVER change. We have literally no upsides for any form of it. When Physical was still king, copying your own discs to use them was a common thing to protect the original. With DRM, the old versions where absolutly terrible. They wouldnt just make reinstalling games a pain, you also had to run their programm in the Background wich costs ressources, and PC Gaming was pretty down during the early years of DRM, even in heavy PC focused countries like germany.
The main issue with all of these is that you basically got a worse experience as a customer for something you didnt even do or planned on doing, illegally distributing games for free. Most of us never had the ressources or the know how to even attempt of doing that.
Denuvo doesn't in any way protect Publishers from people pirating their games, it actively makes it worse because of how pissed off Players so much when it makes games so much worse that have it attached.
It objectively does though because it makes piracy literally impossible. No one cracks Denuvo anymore.
@@芽衣-c5xtrue, anecdotally I know people who just pirate games cos... it's free lol.
@@芽衣-c5x That's not exactly true, Denuvo games do still get cracked, it just depends on how popular the game is. Right now there aren't that many teams who are willing to crack Denuvo, but when someone wants to crack a game they do, it's not impossible.
@@芽衣-c5x Everyone cracks denuvo. Stop believing the lies, shill.
@@naboume466 Currently, no one/team break Denuvo protection. All the games released are Denuvo-less.
I know it was silly but I preordered KCD2. Just cancelled it after they announced it's shipping with denuvo
Not silly at all.
Justified
"Denuvo - no buy" is a movement with a long tradition. Understandably Denuvo wants to get rid of their negative image. Thinking they can open a discord server for public relations when hated by everyone is just hilarious.
I'm just impressed that they lasted 2 days in 2024's internet landscape
And like what Luke said. If they keep trying to get us to like them, we will inevitably bury them. They need to just focus on fixing their lies. They need to completely remove the performance hits that their software creates and change the process for verification to allow more consumer freedom. It's an oxymoron. The real answer is they need to stop existing
In a country where people earn less then minimum wage ($63 minimum wage/ month) you can't not justify pirating a $70 game. For me I played Many of my bought games as a pirated copy eg. RDR2, GTAV, Witcher 3, hellblade, saints row 3, Batman Arkham series etc.
In that case juz go sail the sea for all you want, do not solely let the moral compass preventing you from pirating. That being said, I recommend not pirating indies and AA games unless it's for demo purposes.
I live in a poor country as well. Not as bad as Original commentor here, our Min wage is 250 USD a month.
Anyway, Regional pricing plays a much bigger role over here. Whether it's an indie, a triple A or double A. If we think your game is too expensive we wil pirate it to try it. (Publishers LOVE charging us the same prices they give to USA gamers) If we end up loving it and we feel it's worth that price. We then will purchase it. But if the regional pricing was there from the start, we never would pirate in the first place.
Tough luck. You're not entitled to steal a product just because you live in a poor country. Im so glad Denuvo is successfully blocking thieves from leeching off of real consumers.
@@eleongo We are poor because of USA. Petrodollar dollar monopoly need to go away. We can't trade freely with our neighbours like China and Iran due to USA dictatorships.
@@DarkReaperK97 It seems that some big publishers these days are refusing to add regional prices and that's sad.
We live in a world right now where gaslighting is accepted and is the norm. This is no different.
Ikr what's happened for us to deserve a 2024 on THIS timeline? 😂
@@DubberRucksHarambe
If denuvo is the lex luthor of pc gaming, then who is superman?
GOG.
@@alelokox88 Gog is the opposite of denuvo but it doesn't fight denuvo , i guess superman is empress...
Gabe
Piracy
Empress... She was one of the very few who could crack denuvo, she is gone though lol
It’s easy to dismiss Steam forums as, “toxic,” and, “hurtful,” as a cop out from taking ANY responsibility. It’s a way of writing off the fact that most gamers are pretty young, perhaps not as articulate as they’d like to be, but still feeling a passionate anger at something THEY find, “toxic,” and, “heart breaking.” How about Denuvo takes responsibility for disrupting the game space, diminishing its quality, and being the source of the toxicity?
Despite the trash Denuvo and their team is, they are right on this account. One, the average age of a gamer is in their 30's, so the majority being "pretty young" is wrong. Second, the Steam forums is a cesspit of idiots. It's much worse than any other social space for video games.
@@XBluDiamondX : In their 30’s is still pretty young to me, but I’ll accept the point . . . if you can back it up? I was just guessing from outdated experience. And yes, most forums of that type are pretty awful, but that still leaves the fact that they walked blindly into that forum with no idea what to expect. That does not sell me any confidence in them as knowing what they’re doing. Why didn’t they research the platform before going on it? No matter how badly, offensively, unfairly or plainly wrongly expressed, the sentiment is a legitimate weed up their butts, and trying to gaslight people into believing that something inherently bad for them is actually, “good,” for them, will elicit the strongest of responses.
To me, this is just like the, “Monetisation Manager,” of a company whining about how people are so negative (not rude or insulting) about the motivations of Ubisoft. He literally had no clue that half the gaming planet were about to turn around and shout, “Wait!? ‘Monetisation Manager’!? That’s a THING!? You should be criminalised!”
They can’t see it! It’s like Dracula complaining about the negative reaction he gets from nurses at the blood bank! They’re blinded by greed and entitlement, which is why they sound so tone deaf. So, just because he’s got a point about the pack of ravening hounds, doesn’t mean he’ll get any sympathy from me, when he’s crying about how mean they were to him when he walked among the pack, twisting their balls and inserting his finger up their startled angry butt holes!
My only response to that is, “Whadd’ya expect, son!? Wake up!”
12:58 He cares because game companies are using "No Denuvo" as an easy W in marketing. Dragon Age The Veilguard is a good example of this. "No Denuvo because we trust you".
And Baldur's Gate 3, And The witcher 3, And Cyberpunk 2077, And all Falcom games (Trails series, Ys series, Tokyo Xanadu eX+), all Gust games, like the Atelier Series, and the Blue Reflection series, All Bethesda games, like Skyrim, Oblivion, Fallout 3, Fallout NV, Fallout 4, Starfield, And of course also Dragon Age Origins, and the first Dragons Dogma game. The list goes on and on and on. NONE of these games needed the named protection to be a success...
Not that anyone would ever *want* to pirate Dragon Age: The Veilguard.
@@thesomethingthatisntathing514 Why not? I already bought the game. I don't care about those "wokiewokiewokie Beep Beep" idiots.
I only want to play a game. And so far all reviews are not negative (apart from those with a obvious agenda). And what I have seen about it looks fine to me.
"It just works!" - Todd Howard and Denuvo's Ullmann, apparently.
If it does, take a game with Denuvo in it, remove the DRM from one copy of the game, and play the games side by side on identical hardware and identical settings. Do that for different game engines and games in different genres. That will clear up any misconceptions as to performance.
Of course this is predicated on the company Denuvo acting in good faith up to now and in the future, so I'll probably be in a snowball fight in Hell first.
Fact is, that pirates often get the superior version. Release a good single player focused game on GoG, without any of that DRM nonsense, I'd be happy to throw money at that.
I love how they like to pretend like Denuvo works when the offline activations market exist. The only thing Denuvo does is make me not to buy a game.
The problem is the way they sell Denuvo to developers is by letting them think that pirated games downloads = number of sales they are losing. No, people who weren't going to buy your game aren't going to buy it because it has Denuvo. There are exceptions for sure, as always, but pirates either don't have money or don't want to pay for your game.
Denuvo is great in theory. But then in reality, I think the vast majority of people who pirate games aren’t really lost customers - they likely never would have bought the game anyways, or maybe just get it two years later in a 90% steam sale or whatever.
That, in combination with Denuvo actively fucking with performance and overall being a hindrance to paying customers only makes it excessively stupid. Like, sure, you may get back the few percent that actually pirate games they can afford, but like… isn’t there a better way for that
That Denuvo piracy study is literally an impossible study?
You can't have a control group, that's literally all bogus "science". How can you know that not having Denuvo would increase your launch revenue by 20%?
If a game launches with Denvuo and has X revenue, you can't then go back in time and re-launch it without Denuvo to compare. And unlike other studies where the subjects are relatively similar, video games are art. They are different from one another. Just because one game with Denuvo made X amount of money and one game without Denuvo makes Y amount of money, means NOTHING.
The games are different, they have different audiences, marketing, appeal, etc. Not to mention other factors like launch windows, competition, what have you. It's literally an impossible study to conduct and Denuvo claiming it as accurate is just another lie they're perpetuating.
Piracy for games can actually sometimes help the company out. I remember downloading Witcher 3 and I loved it so much I bought it twice.
So many games no longer have Demos or trials. Being forced to pretty much watch videos or buy the game to see what it is like is a bad way to do things.
Not to mention if the DRM company goes out of business then that game you paid for will no longer work.
I do think there was a study done once that made piracy a net positive due to word of mouth and people, who otherwise wouldn't have been able to play, got to play and then buy later
There's a lot of talk about unsustainability in the game industry, but really all i'm seeing is people who are bad at their jobs wasting a lot of money. If you don't shake people like that loose then yeah, things become untenable real quick. A big part of this incompetence is that all of these people in charge of these various products have the idea of a "customer first" based approach as this alien concept. Everyone, including these Denuvo people, see their customers as this obstacle or challenge to overcome, cattle to corral, instead of the people they work for.
Fact of the matter is, if Denuvo didn't impact performance and didn't make things worse for customers repeatedly, people wouldn't know what Denuvo even _is_. The PR marketing brain needs to be studied in a lab because some genius somewhere thought a company that has done nothing but garner ill will for almost 20 years could be defused with a discord server and some pouty press releases. Coming out and going "our software never impacts performance" when almost every month for decades there's been a "denuvo made this release take a performance hit" story is arrogance on a criminal level.
Most AAA game publishers do care about their customers. The only problem is the gamers are not the customers, the shareholders/investors are.
@@Ez3uwsacrq1mexactly
I imagine the reason they attempted this debacle was because a few publishers and developers likely refuse to use their software because of the bad press and performance concerns it gets, or maybe it's hurting their sources of funding. Otherwise why in the world would they even bother, we're not their clients, publishers are. It's futile regardless, unless their software somehow starts improving performance magically they will never stop being hated because there's no benefit to them being there for us.
That's a good point. Now that you've mentioned it, it is kind of strange that after a _decade_ of being scorned by gamers, they decided only now to try and soothe things over (albeit in the laziest way possible).
I have a 4090 and 7800X3D based PC, so I have performance to burn but I still deeply resent software that steals my FPS and on top of that behaves almost as obnoxiously as malware. Yeah I think the hate for Denuvo is well deserved
I mean it only makes sense. It's easily avoidable performance loss, you pay for a product, you should be able to play that product to its fullest potential. Besides it's not like we're trading performance loss for something that ultimately benefits us more... we literally get nothing out of the agreement
How is piracy a lost sale? How can anyone prove that someone pirating something would have bought it in the first place? You just can't. You can assume they would have (assuming they had the access and the money), but you can't prove that. On the other hand, you also can't prove that they wouldn't have bought it.
Denuvo doesn't even work as an anti-piracy software, meanwhile Black Myth Wukong still hasn't been pirated.
alot of ppls let u finish the game for free or1$ u really cant stop pirates those ppls
@@ゆきの-s5jyou can, i highly doubt anyone pirates free to play games
@@RusticRonnie what u saying is contradiction
@@ゆきの-s5j can you tell me how I wanna play ps5r so bad
@@humanrace6224 buy gamepass for a dollar or use a switch emulator, fitgirl has uploaded persona 5
DRM is the worst thing that happened to the industry since piracy , In fact, piracy is better than DRM, companies should estimate losses with DRM as they did with piracy.
DRM was fine when it was just make an account, oh wait you didn’t buy this (steam)
But now its too intrusive to the point where i will pirate a game just so I can actually play it
If denuvo were to go under i’d dance in the street in celebration. I can’t count how many times that sucky drm has made my single player games completely useless
Oh, cry my eyes out. Crocodile tears
🎻 👈 here you go Denuvo this is for you! 🤣
They've been sniffing their own farts for so long they decided to Todd Howard their way through their bad reputation and software.
Whatever copium they're on, it certainly IS Howard strength. 🤣
People used to believe that if someone took a photo of them, it would capture their soul. This is the same as believing that copying media is theft.
Creating a DRM comes with pros and cons. Pro is u get money. Con is you hated by 75% of gamers worldwide.
companies in the game industry really really underestimates the amount of money people will give for just a little bit of convenience
again Denuvo is not a convenience, it's a liability especially for someone who pays, that goes for bad live service implementations too,
I don't even know why they think this is a good idea even after the Spore DRM incident
And it’s not just about, “performance,” either. It’s also about the fact that we gamers do not like being SPIED on by corporations. They find Denuvo invasive and sinister. And there are countless, reliable YT videos out there DEMONSTRATING Denuvo ruining games via Before & After demos.
I didnt purchase Star Wars Jedi: Survivor until i was informed that a there was a patch that fixed alot of PC issues and removed Denuvo. It was a good experience when i had frames to work with.
Game is still not fully fixed
Dude, the people that pirate games is like one percent to 2% of people. Back in the days it was different because there were no services. I’ve been pirating games for 20 years, but I always pay for a game that is amazing and gives me what I want. Every time. Every time I pirate a game that I really like I immediately go and I buy it on steam just to support the Studio. Everytime. especially when it’s a smaller studio, visual novel, AA game and so on. I’ve been doing that for decades. Believe it or not some of us pirates have ethics and codes. Also, you can’t deny the performance issues denuvo has. It has been shown multiple times have impact on performance.
Piracy is not as black and white of a subject as the mainstream would like.
Denuvo destroy star wars and resident evil hahaha
The EU conducted a study in May 2015 which shows that pirating doesn’t harm games and even help with sales. 😇
The "free" Demo thing is REAL in former-USSR countries, as someone living in one, I can attest to it!
Frankly when I was younger and in high school I used piracy to test out games as it wasn't everyday that I had money in my steam wallet. But I can tell you now that every single game I played during that time (Skyrim, Prison Architect, Hotline miami, little inferno and a few others) I have bought. Some of them I even gifted to others. Now that I have my own money and don't need to ask for a steam gift card everytime I wanna buy a game, I buy everything and never resort to piracy.
Without piracy I'm not even sure if I would be a gamer, I'm not saying it's a good thing nor is it morally right, I'm simply saying that it's not an inherent net negative for the industry.
"Which side of the gaming industry has basically no upside to the gamers and basically only helps the publishers?" To me, it's the Ubisoft director of monetization.
They can't come out and say their DRM product is terrible without getting fired for breaching their fiduciary duties, so they're forced to gaslight themselves into believing whatever straw they grasped is actually a selling point.
My message to Denuvo is the same message I have for publishers and developers. The problem is your product not your customers. You are receiving bad press and bad reviews and a lot of negative criticism not because your customers are evil but because your product is bad and telling you why. If you actually listened to your customers and fixed your product to address the issues that they are being brought up, you wouldn't be here. If you do that, you can dig yourself out of this self-made hole, it's the ONLY way to dig yourself out. No amount of gaslighting, lies, and manipulation will fix your product.
Once Steam and Epic game store allowed refunds, Denuvo days are numbered. People have a low tolerance for poor performing games.
Piracy will happen no matter what depending on the country. I pirated, but the second I got Steam, I stopped, because as Gabe says, I got a better service there over the pirates.
As Luke said, piracy is also used to test out games, with 2hr play testing from Steam and refund policy, even that has been reduced a lot.
Denuvo does nothing except from holding the line a bit, but those that would pirate it, will do it no matter what. All it does is pissing off paying customers and make people not wanting to pick up the title at all.
The second I hear a game has Denuvo, I stop caring about the game. At this point I don't care about whether or not they have fixed performance issues tied to it. They are so high on their own farts they made a Discord and made these statements like woe is me, tells me all I need to hear to keep my stance.
It holds the line forever. No one cracks it anymore because its become ridiculously advanced. The degraded performance thing is also a complete myth. There were 2 or 3 games out of hundreds that improperly implemented it, causing a noticeable performance deficit compared to the cracked version, which were then fixed with patches, but even that was years ago. Other than those exceptions it has 0 impact on your framerate and if you don't believe me you can search for the comparisons on youtube.
@@芽衣-c5x
Probably, I am not in that space anymore. I dunno if I would say that nobody does it anymore. There is always somebody trying, and some succeding, looking around and see some cases just with a quick search.
Not saying it is not advanced for what it does.
I am pretty sure Denuvo cause framrate drops in nearly every game it is tested with. And some way worse than others, think Dragons Dogma 2 have it, and it was significant there. Generally, my rule of thumb, not worth taking the risk with a game that has it, wait until there is a sale down the line when they have also removed it.
Personally, don't care much if it holds the ground against piracy, because again, like Gaben said, it is a service issue more than anything. And personally dislike it and softwares like it, to the point I really don't care that much if it is a neutral factor in games. And I am not of a mind to change my opinion on it, given their statements.
another point that get overlooked is the fact that most successful offline story driven games dont even have drm or denuvo , bg3, cyberpunk , the witcher , gta , rdr2 , elden ring and so much more also indies games too , so just make a good game and people will buy it
Silent hill 2 doesnt have denuvo and it runs like crap. I dont think denuvo is the problem here
Harada himself (the lead for the Tekken series) on Twitter said that it was literally Denuvo causing issues with the code for Tekken 7. That was why there was lag and delays in animations. And as soon as Denuvo was removed from that game, no more lag or delays in animation.
Denuvo's defense sounds exactly like something Lex Luthor would say!
I can't believe Denuvo said something I agree with. The Steam Forums are a toxic cesspit full of clown farmers. But then they say that developers earn MORE money and then they invest it into GREATER games. That's a bold-faced lie. Most games I've seen that use Denuvo are by publishers who take that extra cash and give it straight to their CEO and shareholders. Their games never get better.
The Steam forums are amazing.
Some DRM like STEAM essentially restricts you from owning a game. It defacto becomes a license for the right to play rather than own. Our games we PAY for are no longer ours to do as we please with. How could they expect consumers to like something that is ultimately anti consumer?
Something happens to that account, or internet access? tough luck accessing your library of games.
@@solid_snek Facts! That’s why I mostly use GOG. I think it’s the more consumer friendly platform.
@@averagechadlegionary5824 Offline installer files is the ultimate way to go. Superior even to physical media.
Remember Arkham Knight flopping on launch due to Denuvo? Pepperidge Farm remembers...
The availability of piracy has never been a deciding factor when buying games for me. I decide what games I buy based on how much I like them. Denuvo only decides if I'll be playing the game when I won't be buying it regardless
I don’t know if you mentioned this but this is relevant since KCD2 is confirmed to use Denuvo
Its a pricing of service issue. Regional pricing is horrible and isn't even thought thought at the publisher level
This is like teachers in school trying to convince you maths is cool.
2:05 This. This about sums up my feelings. I don't mind if devs want to put in an anti cheat or way to protect themselves from pirates. But the problem comes when it's not those people can feel it, but me, who honestly paid for the game. And I especially hate it in cases of single player games, which I mostly play, and now I constantly have to be online to play. So many cases I've had where I got a day off from work, thought about playing a game, but couldn't because of some kind of maintenance or whatever issue.
Making DRM where the performance is worse and you need to be online 24/7 with a good internet to play games is such a baffling decision and i'm genuinely shocked many companies actually apply Denuvo for their games.
Also even pirates have games they like and don't want to get shut down!
A world that claps for denuvo would be a black mirror episode
I really love the state of Steam forums, most of the games board (indie and not AAA, that is) are very chill and filled with civilized discussion, praises and constructive critics while AAA studios and ESG games are just a place to dump and jester farming lol.
The entire place is a cesspit of trolls. Some more obscure games may not have much of it, but they are still there.
“I make your game work worse, I take away any possibility for you to own the games you buy. But hey, I’m your bro, PC gamer 😉” - Denuvo
With games being as expensive as they are. I just pir@te a game to test the waters to see how it is first, then buy it if I like it.
It isn't entirely fair to the devs, but 2 hours nowadays tell you f@ck all about a game and isn't enough time to gauge if the game is good for you or not, especially when you look at how big games are. (2 Hours is the max amount of time you got to refund a steam game if you played it and 7 days or like 14 days? (not 100% sure on that one) of it sitting in your library max.)
I just don't trust the industry anymore and buy games only once I see that I had a good time in a game.... This also allowed me to test games I never could have before. (Because devs and publishers also think demos are for chumps)
Note: I buy most of my games these days, but I still like to test games like total war, europa universalis, victoria 3 and so on (aka strategy games) since a match/feel for it would take you at least 10 to 50 hours to see if you actually like the game or not.
locking culture behind a paywall. Games like AC, Mario, Call of Duty, etc. It's ridiculous to alienate a group of people because they can't afford to enter a culture. I mean, remember how it was back in the Xbox live time and how sad it would've been for the kids that couldn't get one; how much they had missed purely because they couldn't afford buying a game or a console. I'm not saying we should give games for free, but Piracy is a choice for those who can't afford, and it has worked for a long time. Why treat it as if it were a problem? Especially that it has been proven that showing good will alone helps sales much more.
denuvo is a nessesary evil. publishers that eventually phase out denuvo are okay in my book. i believe its okay to protect the game during the initial game release. what i dont beleive in is the overly agressive use of denuvo. just look at what they did to resident evil village. they added checks during animation events for some inane reason and to quote a steam user "Capcom couldn't place said checks in a worse place" , that meant there were severe laggspikes every single time they did the thing. thats not on denuvo or publishers. thats just bad developers. it took them 2 years to eventually remove the drm. adding denuvo to a game release is probably a last minute thing, some interns job to hodgepodge a good enough solution just to be done with it.
If I buy a game I should never be required to connect to the internet to run it after installing. If you have to do that you dont own it.
It's funny that they say it's pirate that complaining about it, but it's the people who bought the game that's complaining
What's the point of Denuvo when the money you would hypothetically get more than you would have without Denuvo is used to... pay Denuvo license anyway?
there's enough consoomers to make it viable.
its always interesting to see these studies. First of all .. how do you even know how many times a games has been downloaded and played with a crack? Most cracked games don't let you connect to servers. Also there are way too many places where to download, torrents, direct downloads so how would you tally all of the downloads. Second is the impact to sales. They try to say each download is a potential buyer which translates into full price loss and that is just stupid. there is no way to even say percentage wise how many would purchase game full price if they cant pirate it or even buy it on sale later on. It is just not possible. only way would be doing some Marvel multiverse crap that one universe has denuvo and other does not and then compare sales figures ..
I will never accept DRM outside the store DRM (steamDRM for example).
Not only its mostly make the games online only, Reducing performance even stuttering, Make things hard for game preservation and most important things, If you use other device outside windows system like steamdeck, sometimes you cannot even play the game at all.
For sure, best case scenario are everybody buying the product and this existed to protect the sales. But if it meant giving negative experience for paying audience, punishing those who supporting their product is never be the wises decision ever.
I can tolerate if its only like for a year or so, But then we have something like Capcom that even updating their oldest games with new DRM which for me is the most anti customer move ever.
Beside Like Gaben said "Piracy is an issue of service, not price." and adding DRM like Denuvo or other that are similar is not good service, not to mention some of them starting to remove regional price which pretty stupid as well.
I would also argue that game people can pirate that is also good will have stronger word of mouth, because people for whom it's too expensive or who has other problems with buying (like current Russian sanctions making them jump alot of hoops to buy some games) will still engage in the game's discussion. Obviously it's will only help if people love the game and this discussions bring positive word of mouth.
Piracy is good. Its like getting a Demo you rightly deserve before putting money into rubbish.
Stop getting scammed by DRM companies, it won't magically boost your game sales.
I think they are doing this PR blitz because they see a downturn in their revenue coming as game developers start to cut costs because of the current economic situation. It started with layoffs and next they are going to look for other expenses that they can do without.
For the sake of argument - any anti-tampering solution is reflected in the end price of the product and doesn't bring anything good/positive for the consumer. Also, the argument that it protects the product from piracy is also flawed: The Witcher 3 sold about 10 times more after CD Project removed the protection - people pirated the game, but the sales exploded. People who don't want to buy a game will never buy it with or without DRM...but those who want to try the product before buying (to make sure it's worth it), will end up buying it even if they pirated it to try before buying. Piracy is a necessary evil, created by the industry itself with it's toxic anti consumer practices. If a product is good, people will buy it - end of discussion!
a little thing Luke, the 2 hour time window for refunds isn't good anymore. specially for AAA games. it takes longer than 4 hours to just finish the freaking tutorial in games nowadays. so by the time you get to the meat, you can no longer get your money back.
The issue is crossplay !! Every console player who’s played gta , cod , fifa , Fortnite in cross play has played a match /round against some hacker from the pc side 🤷🏻♂️. Its rife
Let me guess, the paper looks at (estimated) sales numbers rather than actual revenue? I don't buy games with Denuvo, which in practice means I buy it half a year to a year later on a winter or summer sale at a 50% discount. Dragon's Dogma is a good example of that. Big fan of the franchise, but I haven't touched it yet. Without Denuvo, I would have bought it full price after the first patch.
The requirements of the game now serves as a gatekeeper against piracy. If you can afford a 4080 graphic card, you can afford black myth wukong.
Denuvo very often is a big hit on performance.
The other day I tested the "performance demo" for Black Myth Wukong and guess what? It ran better than the actual game because of denuvo.
It may not big the biggest hassle for people with "master race PCs" but if you're on a midrange PC or worse every bit of fps counts to having a better experience.
"WIN OVER GAMERS" hell no
Piracy also helps people from poor countries to get access to software they otherwise wouldn't be able to purchase which can be crucial to education and creation of specialists. Talking from experience ... Basically Denuvo trying to keep poor people from playing video games.
All this talk about piracy and that it causes losses is just an excuse to steal players' money. Because when you buy a bad game, you cannot get back the money you collected for that game because a good game sells itself.
@@salemme4800 True. Especially true given how scammy some studios are these days when trying to sell their games. People who can't afford your games WON'T buy them if they have Denuvo regardless lmao. At the end of the day it's only hurting the players who pay money for their games.
@@NoName-ym5zj Look friend , I've been in the gaming business for over 20 years, and every year it gets worse than the one before, games get more expensive and their quality is below zero, games sell for over $70, then they're marketed as the game of the year, and in the end they're flops, which means you've lost all your money.
Out of all the people I know I think I have seen people pirate more on jailbroken consoles than people who use steam. I have one buddy who pirates as a demo, and everyone else just waits for a sale if they cant afford a game.
truth be told: Games are spensive! like, i'm brazilian, games here are almost half my salary, what the hell! so yeah, when a game just abuse the pricing, you can bet your ass i will pirate it!
on the other hand, if a game is a really good one, who might want me to pay the game, but i'm concerned about if this is worth it, i will pirate it, play the game to test (like i did to Batman Arkhan Knight, for example) then if i realy like the game, i buy it! (like i did to batman)
Games nowadays are not that friendly to the consumer, they want to suck up our money like the government and f the government! they never did me any favors! and so the game execs!
If you go back and watch any Resident Evil 8 gameplay footage from the version before they removed denuvo, the game skips a frame 99% of the time an enemy die. And it literally tanks 1/3 of the framerate in Monster Hunter World before they remove it. No matter how many "tests" they did with their bloatware it will never convince me that it doesn't affect game performance.
I did actually in the recent few years pirate a few games, it was all Ps4 games that I already have and I wanted to try how well they run on my computer, I put a couple of hours in them but did not keep them as I prefer to have my games on Steam or GOG, I have been tempted to pirate games more because the last couple of years have been a nightmare economically, I can't afford games.
Hopefully things are looking up and I can get a few games I have been wanting for ages as I do prefer to pay.
The only way to get on a gamer's good side, is making a good game. That's all. We want good games!! We are gamers!
Gabe is right, most people dont even know how to pirate software, even if they wanted to. Wasnt there a statistic a few years ago about how much software (not just games) actually gets pirated... i think it was around 3-5% or so. My cousin always buys all his games legally on steam/epic, but then stil "pirates" the games, because he doesnt want to play with all these enforced things like: always online and microtransactions in single player games, DRMs and especially all the fkn launchers. Ironically the effort companies put into all the messures to prevent piracy just anoys people and drives even more into piracy 😂
According to a 2022 survey, 4% of UK gamers play only pirated titles. 12% enjoy a mix of legal and illegal content, and the majority (83%) exclusively play games from official sources. (Source: Statista)
@@sealsharp ah nice thank you
Why do I feel like the gaming industry is slowly separating from the gaming community.
13:00
I think that once they saw that their removal would be used to generate possibe hype they saw their image as hugly important. Its not actually about gamers they are worried more tripple a games will pull veilgaurd
Maybe a Denuvo waifu pillow might fix their image.
I don't even have time for the games i already own yet alone the games i want to buy.
And they think i have also time for pirating their games?
That's simply delulu.
DRM is punishment for paying customers.
Punishing the people who buy your games is a bad thing… and pushes them away when other means 🏴☠️ give a better product. Gabe was right that piracy is a service issue. Steam itself can be a minor form of DRM, and most people don’t care if it is because it has no negative impact.
Those who don’t like that many games have the Steam DRM (they can be DRM free), have a great alternative like GOG to use (more publishers need to support it, but given they like Denuvo I don’t see that happening lol)
Denuvo asking the baby inc treatment LMAO. They should have stayed quiet and keep doing their sheananigans in the back as they always did. Now they got the spotlight, there is no coming back