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Denuvo wants to convince you its DRM isn’t “evil”
(arstechnica.com)
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this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023
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People who were around for the Sony DRM rootkit scandal will always be against DRM. I was one of those people, while I agree there is a right to protect your software, it often comes at a loss of performance, protection and/or privacy of the end user.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootkit_scandal
Yes, and you have to weigh the loss of performance and/or privacy on a case by case basis. What bothers me is that people take cases where DRM strongly impacts the experience of the thing, and apply it as a general argument against DRM, when that is not an argument against DRM, but an argument against using that particular piece of software.
I'm kind of tired of DRM headlines in my feed. Whether a game has Denuvo or not doesn't actually matter when purchasing a game. What matters is this: is the game fun? Does the game pass the bar of acceptable performance? Discussions around DRM are mostly a distraction and a diversion from things that actually matter.
The common stance against DRM is not the "entitled" part, but to be able to keep playing it even if the companies involved are gone. For games with Denuvo or other DRM there are things like these to consider:
With games that have no DRM you have none of the above concerns.
I am vehemently opposed to Denuvo because I have personally compared the Denuvo protected product VS the cracked product and the performance impact of Denuvo was nothing short of horrific.
My paid experience was worlds worse than the experience of those that chose not to pay, and there is no legal way for me to get that same experience. To be clear, not all games are impacted so badly but many are.
Having said that, if a developer wants some form of DRM on their game because they (wrongly) believe not having one will affect sales then I do believe they should have a right to do so. I just think that there should be a legally mandated time limit on how long they are allowed to do so. 12 months from release seems fair. After 12 months, you have moved most of your units. Sales after this point basically come down to special offers and how well you support and maintain the multiplayer portion of your release.
I would personally choose to wait the 12 months until I can actually own the game, and as a sort of litmus test for the long term viability of the franchise. If there is still a significant playerbase after 12 months then it's probably worth my money.
Yeah, I do believe some of the Denuvo implementation might be good or improved overtime, BUT, I don't trust publisher or developer to remove it before they moved on to next project. (see some of the capcom games that was on GFWL example). So I just wait until they removed it or buy on different platform(PSN/Nintendo) that I trust won't vanishes or stop support down the road. It is very tricky for consumer the more "3rd parties" is involved in your purchase.
You know these are valid concerns, and I have two thoughts about this. The first is that I don't understand how this doesn't also apply to Steam or Epic Games or any other basic storefront (except GOG of course). I see a lot of headlines about Denuvo but none about Steam. People seem to selectively apply their hate in this matter.
The second thought that I have is that I agree that this is a problem, but I don't see any other way around it. This is just the trade off of getting AAA games. These are big, complex pieces of IP that require millions to hundreds of millions of dollars of investment that the company making them has to recoup. To ensure that you actually get paid, you have to have DRM. Companies wouldn't shell out the millions of dollars on DRM unless it was proven to actually work. As I see it, if you like AAA games you just gotta weigh the cost on a game by game basis.
Most GOG games ship entirely free of protection, it's kind of their thing. As for steam, getting around the online checks is trivial.
The issue is ownership of the goods you bought. If the barrier to ownership is slight, I don't have a big issue with it. Denuvo is a serious barrier and has serious impacts on performance.
Steam is a platform used to sell games and DRM is optional. Denuvo itself is a specific type of DRM that people have experienced issues with the most whether it is interruptions to offline play or 5 activation limits. It's why the specific DRM is being focused on that has been the most draconian of the other DRM that exists, since it has been the most frequently disruptive over less overbearing DRM.
There were three points in the post you're replying to. Not all Steam games have DRM; I'm going to assume we're talking only about games using the their DRM:
TL;DR 1: It's not as much of a concern for Steam as it is for Denuvo.
TL;DR 2: Steam is a storefront, and it's expected that their sales percentage would cover DRM costs for the game. This is a concern for Denuvo, but not really one for Steam.
TL;DR 3: Steam DRM is regularly complained about in this regard.
I dislike Epic , so I'm not the person to give them a reasonable defense/discussion - you'll have to find someone else for that.
To Epic's credit it has led to DRM free copies of games like Arkham Knight that didn't exist before. Of course it seems like the person would disapprove of that with an impression that they prefer denuvo to be uniquitous.
Steam has the stance that it will "release" a version where you just get valid license from the game you purchased and downloaded before they shutoff service should it belly up in the end. Epic does not really have the same thing announced anywhere, but I'd assume similar thing.(Note, Epic has more net worth than Valve, they can afford to shut EGS and still provide EOS/license check almost indefinitely even if they stopped selling games on EGS as a platform.) And it's why steam has that 3rd party DRM tag/block on games.(I wish EGS has this tag or information as well)
Denuvo is quite different however cause:
I think steam and epic would have bot that buy and patch out the game's DRM like day 1 after release, they don't care cause majority of their user won't bother downloading shady program from a shady website. The publishers however care and thus we have this issue of them "trusting" Denuvo to shield them from piracy during launch window.
I still vote with wallet and generally only buy single player game after they removed Denuvo or just buy those on PSN, cause I trust platform to last longer than Denuvo.
Funny how you mention performance as something than matters when claiming nobody is allowed to take a piss at denuvo, when denuvo is known to hamper performance in some cases.
With them insinuating that not wanting DRM means people are entitled and selfish in other posts and underplaying incidents where Denuvo has been problematic I'm wondering if they are associated with Denuvo. They'd of course deny it since what company wants to make headlines for that, but I'm getting the impression Denuvo is something they want to be ubiquitous.
But the way performance is framed by anti-Denuvo folks is that it is linearly correlated with enjoyment. This is not so. What I care about (and I will definitely give that this is subjective and depends on the individual) is that a game runs at 4k/60 on my computer at low/mid settings. If it runs faster than that, my enjoyment of the game isn't increased. If it runs worse than that, my enjoyment is decreased.
So if the game passes that bar with DRM, it doesn't matter to me if it would be faster without DRM. If DRM is the thing that causes the game to go below that bar, then I have a problem with DRM. But that is almost never the case.
Game working when you expect it to is pretty important. Imagine getting a car and finding out it is overly sensitive to having to have the right climate to be able to use.
Only area where that doesn't really apply is for rental services like streaming or game pass, which in that case does make sense why it would have DRM since it's just part of a subscription.