Average Denuvo cracking time is now 75 days
iscracked.info
iscracked.info
Some people even wait until the game appears DRM-free on GOG, because of this.
PC Gaming may be mainstream now but in its nerdier days awareness of cracking was quite high... and I imagine it still is among demographics that cannot afford to plunk down $60 for the latest whatever-they-want
A lot of young people (or people in middle-income countries) can scrape together a few hundred bucks for an entry-level gaming PC, but would find a $60 game to be prohibitively expensive. IMO the move away from demo versions and physical media has substantially incentivised piracy - if you can't try before you buy and can't resell your game, you're less inclined to hand over your hard-earned cash for a game that you might hate.
You'd be surprised how many people with iPhones shoplift clothes worth much less than $60
When I was younger I could barely afford a gaming PC and certainly didn't have very much money for games, and I knew a lot of other people in my boat. I lived for the bargain bin (and later, Steam Sales) and it was still not enough
Technically Denuvo is not a DRM, it's an anti-tampering system. This is not just a matter of wording - nobody complains about Steam's DRM, so it's not about DRMs, it's about a specific product.
Having said that, Denuvo performance loss is minor. It's quite amusing that in one case, a patch which also included its removal, decreased the performance: https://www.pcgamer.com/uk/rage-2-patch-removes-denuvo-but-p....
Regarding the crashes, there's much hearsay around. However, in absence of rigorous examinations, there's the benefit of doubt. In my opinion, it's not buggy in itself (I've played several games with Denuvo, and they were working fine), rather as the general bug risk of adding extra functionality to software. As the article above points, "[...] that would imply Denuvo checks constantly running within the main game loop, which would make no sense.".
All in all, defining Denuvo as "this DRM stuff causes a lot of problems" is definitely a mischaracterization, although it's not clear if "this DRM" refers to Denuvo, or DRMs in general.
I have seen evidence that heavy DRM (Denuvo I think, specifically) caused increased loading times.
Apart from that, every time someone tries to prove there is any other difference with any measure of scientific rigour they find no statistically differences.
Loading times obviously varied per game, but the differences for most games were pretty significant.
But for DRM overall and Denuvo there are numerous issues, and thanks to the "make a game and forget it", principle they games continue to suffer from bad implementation. In particular games with the older iterations of Denuvo continue to have performance issues.
To expand upon this, the older a game continues to have DRM the more problems become apparent. For example just recently in December, where Disney's decision not to renew Securom caused legal owners Tron:Evolution to have their game stop working.[0]
Who knows what fate all those expensive Denuvo titles have in store for them, but we probably have a fair idea. Due to the resources needed to bypass more difficult DRM, often the updated version of the game will remain uncracked and that could make it possibly unplayable for the average consumer if things go south.
[0] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20191204/09531743504/disne...
How many of these cracks actually fully get rid of denuvo? I'm not familiar enough with current developments, but most DRM patches I've seen didn't actually get rid of the DRM.
Like, everything gets cracked at some point, that's not a failure. Denuvo holds up for months, and games are like movies in the sense that the opening week is really important, then everything trails off from there.
https://iscracked.info/is-star-wars-jedi-fallen-order-cracke...
For cases where these schemes have cracks days after release, it has historically meant the game was in the hands of crack teams quite a way before the release, usually due to corrupted insiders somewhere in the supply chain. DRM/anti piracy schemes are much more than the software you see on your computer, and the good ones have traitor tracing functionality so corrupted insiders can be found and fixed.
BTW 75 day lifetime for a DRM is about perfectly optimal. It looks like Denuvo have really hit it out of the ballpark if these stats are accurate.
Game/movie sales are very spiky. People wait for cracks but not very long. Most sales are within the first few days. A DRM that lasts even a week can be easily profitable for the firm using it as many will break down and buy the game rather than keep waiting. After a few months sales are reduced to a trickle and nobody cares if it gets hacked at that point.
The thing that most people miss about DRM is that not only is it very temporally dependent but being too strong is just as bad as being too weak. Due to the sales curve if your game DRM takes two years to crack despite huge attention from adversaries, then that implies you engaged in massive overkill. That almost certainly (in the PC space) means you wasted time that could have been spent on the game, or did things that hurt compatibility or would reduce sales in other ways.
The exception is when you have one DRM scheme for everything, like in games consoles. Then of course the cost of a break is much higher and the ROI of unbroken DRM is much higher. But the same principles still apply. For instance, cartridges were historically harder to clone than DVDs, and commodity DVD drives were less secure than the rest of the consoles, but the winning consoles used commodity storage tech anyway and accepted the reduction in security. It's all about ROI.
Also, online multi-player games tend not to get cracked, because then you'd just get banned.
I think that's another way of saying they're too hard to crack properly, i.e. the servers can always detect cracked copies of the game because the modifications aren't perfectly disguised.
The other line graphs have basically the same problem.
Meanwhile, pie charts are infamous for being abused to show things that don't actually add up to 1, but in this case they're actually being used fairly appropriately.
Average cracking times are still way above 30 days which is the most crucial period.
The back story is that at some point VMPSoft was suing Denovo for buying a single license of VMProtect and then using it to roll out their own DRM system. It was a complete LOL really. They ended up settling out of court.
Denuvo state themselves that it only protects for certain period not infinitely so probably it is just hackers not releasing cracks immediately due to multiple possible reasons:
1) legal action if published got his 2-3 months when sales are at peak they are less likely to go after the crackers
2) games are often released very buggy thanks to online patching available, so they just wait for games to stabilize as not to update cracks weekly
3) less demand for cracks due to steam and sales, I feel like people wait for sales or prices to drop off in general
New releases are big money. The biggest money.
It'd be nice to see them formally acknowledge this by republishing DRM-free copies after 90 days.
On the other hand, you seem to be missing the number of people just sick of DRM and all the hoops it makes you go through before actually being able to play a game. Some people may just start pirating games because the hoops of running a cracked version are easier than the hoops of running a legit version with all the DRM restrictions. Or they may just give on games altogether and decide to spend their valuable time and money on something else entirely.
So adding DRM may just as well be a net negative for game publishers.
I don't have the data to say which is correct, but just assuming that DRM is profitable because most sales happen in the first week, before a crack is available, seems a bit too simple.
Before it’s cracked they will probably buy it because of how excited they are and FOMO
For me Buying a 60-80$ AAA game (I was a teen in the early 00s) by earning 5$ from time to time mowing the lawn or washing my dad's car was a hard sell. Even when I started working retail at min wage (7$), it was still a hard sell.
I'm always shocked by the frequent assumption made by people in the software world that game/movie studios don't know what they're doing financially, despite decades of experience and being the world's biggest entertainment businesses. Of course they know.
This is incorrect.
This is one of those "false wisdoms" which get perpetuated by DRM industry, very similar to creative accounting to calculate monetary losses due to piracy.
The numbers don't and never did really support this conclusion (even inside the industry). My first hand experience shows that DRM is pretty much about ass-covering between publishing industry and distribution channels - basically so everyone in the chain can say "we did all we could and added this amazing Denuvo thing that's certified by our amazing legal department as completely secure!" and concede the fault for percieved "lost sales" to someone else in meetings with management and board.
Which means that one day the crack should be released within the first week. I guess, then game studios have to rethink their DRM.
Also, don't forget that game reviews are relevant near release, and that is when Denuvo is still enabled which impacts performance.
However, technology website Ars Technica noted that most sales for major games happen within 30 days of release, and so publishers may consider Denuvo a success if it meant a game took significantly longer to be cracked
The game will become unplayable after a decade or so if/when Denuvo decides to shut down it's servers. Lots of MMO's from early 2000's are already in this state. DRM like Denuvo is a disaster for long term preservation of games.
I can take a movie from 1940 and watch it today with minimal effort, but the same can't be said for games. It's already difficult with rapidly shifting computing landscape (eg. try playing NFS Porsche Unleased on a Win10 PC), shit like Denuvo just adds insult to the injury for some hypothetical gain which might not even be real.
Which is even more of a reason for a publisher not to remove it. Opens the possibility to do re-releases in the future.
First of all, a lot of Denuvo games no one cares about, either due to low popularity or because they aren't very different to the older, cracked version. These are a dozen of games that add times in the multiple hundreds of hours, warrantlessly.
Second, cracking groups often voluntarily hold off on cracking games so that they are already updated by then. Often for multiple weeks to a month, where you see the crack to be on yesterday's update.
In reality, I'd estimate cracking times to be around one or two weeks, with some high profile, usable at launch games to be cracked in hours.