Currently not a single Denuvo game released during 2024 has been cracked, and more games released during 2023 remain uncracked than those that were. It's actually pretty effective unlike most other PC DRM schemes.
I wonder how much that has to do with the actual technical merits of this DRM scheme compared to older DRM schems. Piracy as a service problem has mostly been solved on PC by now, so there's not a lot of incentive to crack games anymore.
Most of what Denuvo does has been done by other DRM schemes before, VMProtect has been used by DRM schemes before Denuvo. It just seems that Denuvo is more aggressive with online verification than previous schemes.
I don't think most of the pirates actually care that much about whether people download their releases. They just want the credit within the scene of cracking something that's hard to crack or leaking something before street date. For-profit pirates would be an exception to this but I doubt they're very prevalent because most people are pirating to avoid paying.
Denuvo is also an exception to piracy as a service problem being solved because it is widely hated even by non-pirates. If pirates rendered it ineffective, companies would not be using it for their games but preventing piracy is worth the backlash as far as they're concerned.
they don't care about who downloads what, but you'd better believe that the market hype drives the attention and sets the rewarded merit for accomplishing the crack.
Maybe in an abstract Reddit community kind of way. For paying end users I doubt Denuvo comes up much. It works behind the scenes and is pretty reliable.
Unless their games run slowly, or they can't install a mod/fan patch, or they want to play offline, or they hate having some third party snooping around on their devices and collecting their data.
The reason is simple: i want to have access to the games i bought regardless of Steam and when i buy a game there i also make a separate offline copy for my own archival. Denuvo - or any DRM really - makes that impossible. Fortunately most games (like pretty much all indie games, which are what i mainly buy these days) have no DRM at all on Steam and the few that do make enough of stink for me to know and avoid them.
So yeah, Denuvo is reliable for making me ignore a game (until it is removed at least - amusingly enough that'd often be after a bunch of patches have been released and the game had a bunch sales/price drops)
I'd probably buy a game with Denuvo if i REALLY wanted to play it (e.g. i bought Prey 2017 despite Denuvo) but i'd do that only after the price has dropped to "sandwich levels" (e.g. i bought Prey 2017 at a handful of dollars). Note that i also put money where my mouth is and when a major game that i want to play is released on GOG (which has DRM-free games) i do buy it full price or close to full price.
Could you let me know which curator it is? I'm also actively avoiding any game that uses Denuvo, so I'd certainly find such a curator useful.
Denuvo has often been the cause of these issues and less technical players will usually direct their annoyance at the game publisher (which is ultimately the right place) but they won't know to attribute it more directly to Denuvo itself.
That some platforms more aggressively inform you about these facts is very appreciated. Same applies to some rootkit anti-cheat software.
There sure is a lot of very ineffective/broken non-Denuvo DRM out there, but companies continue to include that too. I doubt it's being done to stop piracy (even if only temporarily), but I wouldn't doubt that they think they're getting their money's worth. https://www.techdirt.com/2024/01/19/ubisoft-says-it-out-loud...
I wonder why this happens? Does Denuvo cost a lot of ongoing subscription money for a developer or something? I’ve noticed this happens a decent amount.
Maybe the devs of the game you mentioned decided that after the initial spike had passed, and they are in a long tail period, it is cheaper to remove Denuvo.
Or they just used Denuvo to protect the game during early time when most sales happen and they removed it because they want better performance and also they want people to be able to play the game 20, 50, 100, and 1000 years from now.
In the case of Lies of P though, the developers accidentally included a debug build .exe without Denuvo in an update, only afterwards was it actually removed entirely because there was no point in including it anymore.
[0] https://www.techpowerup.com/275158/denuvo-drm-pricing-struct...
https://irdeto.com/denuvo/nintendo-switch-emulator-protectio...
There is precedent for that kind of thing, Wii emulation matured early enough that a handful of retail games had code specifically intended to frustrate running them in Dolphin. They abused some details of the real Wiis L1/L2 cache which aren't simulated by Dolphin, and couldn't be without adding an unreasonable amount of overhead.
https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2017/02/01/dolphin-progress-rep...
You’re limited to 3 or 5 activations per day.
The guy in the video makes the point that: Game is released --> paying users suffer the lower perf caused by DRM while pirates crack it --> pirates succeed, company removes DRM, paying users benefit from improved perf ^^