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Comment by fefe23 | Hacker News Reader

Denuvo "copy protection" is so universally loathed by PC gamers that several publishers have ended up removing it in updates to their games, for example Mass Effect Legendary Edition.

https://www.nme.com/news/gaming-news/mass-effect-legendary-e...

Note how getting rid of Denuvo also saved about one gigabyte (!!) of disk space.

Denuvo slowed some games down so much that playing online with a cracked version is considered cheating.

I am baffled they are still on the market. If I find out that a game comes with Denuvo DRM, I will not spend money on it. In times where GPU prices are daylight robbery and most people are paying with old hardware, I can't understand why game publishers would deliberately cripple performance of their games. Don't they talk to the developers to find out how much money it cost to optimize the last 10% fps out of the game in the first place?

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At some point Denuvo was basically a repack of VMProtect [0] (made by a small Russian software company) as the core of their protection "technology". This would've not been not a big deal if they weren't using a SINGLE retail license of that software, a license explicitly prohibiting this sort of white-labelling. And prior to that they were in negotiations with the VMPSoft to develop a custom solution for them. The negotiations didn't go anywhere due to the quoted project cost, so Denuvo bought a license and went ahead anyway [1].

Talk about irony. Ethics, piracy and all.

They got sued for that and eventually settled.

[0] https://vmpsoft.com/

[1] http://rsdn.org/forum/shareware/6733058 (in Russian)

Oh man, I hit this with the PACE/iLok DRM company in the early 2000s. I was working on a contract with a company that wanted to add support for it to their products. It wasn't working properly for me during development, so I ended up contacting PACE and the following things happened:

1) They sent me a bash script to run on my system (this was on macOS). The script basically went to the root of my hard drive and listed every single file on the system. I told them I could not send them the output because I had data from other companies in there that was under NDA. They were kind of shocked that I read the script and looked at the output.

2) They wanted me to use GPG to cryptographically sign something. When I pointed out that this was for commercial work and we hadn't paid the licensing for using it in a commercial product, they basically hemmed and hawed and said, "Oh that doesn't matter. There's nothing they can do about it."

So yeah, I don't really have a lot of respect for DRM companies, as they all seem to do the very things they're trying to stop others from doing.

Any chance you could point me to (preferably English) sources for this? "Major DRM company caught pirating software" should make for hilarious evidence in piracy/DRM/copyright debates.

Here's an article on it. https://torrentfreak.com/denuvo-accused-of-using-unlicensed-...

The official word from the company is that the post is wrong and that DENUVO had the right and always will have the right to use their software: https://vmpsoft.com/20170606/vmprotect-and-denuvo-gmbh/

That's a post-settlement statement made 3 months after the original post, which wasn't retracted. Also the company and the original poster are one and the same. It sure looks like they "came to an understanding" that was then sealed with an NDA.

The post on RSDN is the source. Its author is the VMP developer.

The thing about these anticheat/anticrack companies is that they all are founded by previous crackers.

they hire crackers currently too, see mrexodia

Developers remove Denuvo after n months because they have to pay ongoing fees to make use of it, and the majority of their sales (when they're most worried about piracy) will be at release. It's just a cost savings measure.

> I am baffled they are still on the market.

Given the long mean time it takes to crack Denuvo games currently. I'm not surprised, it keeps games out of the pirate market long enough that by the time it's cracked the game is old enough that it's probably already at a reduced price.

Your totally valid point aside, GPUs have cratered. There’s actually a glut of them now. The 3090ti price was recently cut in half and the rumor mill is the 40 series was over provisioned based on crypto demand which has now also cratered, so there will be a lot of stock on the market. Now is a good time to look at upgrading if you haven’t in a bit.

X070 prices are still like double what they were 5 years ago. This isn’t a crater yet. I’m not surprised they’re having difficulty moving the extremely expensive cards to non-miners, but x090Ti cards were never really about practical gaming.

Cratered compared to the INSANELY high prices over the past couple of years, not compared to historical, pre-crypto, GPU prices. Things are improved, but still not back to nominal levels.

Everyone keeps saying that but at least where I'm at that's not the case by a longshot. It is better, yes, but still terrible.

This generation is completely dead to me, maybe next one.

I want to get a gaming desktop PC right now.

The extreme anti gaming-community behaviour of the last three years by Nvidia have convinced me to wait more. Prices are still insane.

I prefer to wait, may be for another year, and see these companies suffer a bit, and lower prices more.

I also hope Intel gets their drivers up to spec and becomes a third worthy contender.

Summer is almost over anyway, and university is a month away. I can wait until next summer.

While that might be true prices are still above MSRP from 2 years ago while distributors have full warehouses and arent budging.

Anecdotally, the moment new Doom eternal brought it on, I demanded a refund with a clear indication why I submitted it. I am paying for this. And no, I do not care one bit that an executive can't buy a yacht this year if I have to suffer for their crappy decisions.

But that is the thing.. you have to be a conscious customer. You can't just say 'oh, i guess everyone is getting screwed; on average i am being screwed less; so i win..'.

The only appropriate response is, and I am not using profanity lightly:

'No. Because fuck you that is why.'

I accept I am a minority, but I also was raised in different era and have patience that comes with age.

> I am baffled they are still on the market.

If we have learnt anything, its that Nintendo couldn't care less about customers experience and solely on their IP protection. So Denuvo will have a client for life now.

I don't even see Nintendo removing this protection in later updates after the big sales peak.

Nintendo hasn't committed to using it.

This is just an announcement that the DRM SDK exists for companies to add to their games, not that it would be included in any specific games, Nintendo 1st party or otherwise.

Okay thanks for clearing that up, I couldn't read the actual article as its timing out.

They remove it because most sales are done in the first month.

I audibly scoffed when I read “As with all other Denuvo solutions, the technology integrates seamlessly into the build toolchain with no impact on the gaming experience.”

It's an industry standard to use Denuvo to protect the first few weeks from launch, when majority of sales happen for a game. Once the dust has settled many companies quietly remove it from their games.

I think it was the Dying Light 2 devs who openly admitted this being a standard practice when the game launched.

cripple performance is a strech, there was some cases in the past of that but it's not the vast majority of games.

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