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Comment by wincy | Hacker News Reader

I was going to say Lies of P was cracked, but turns out they just removed it from their game. It was up on piracy sites the same day.

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.

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I believe Denuvo charges for access to the activation servers. [0] While the pricing structure has likely changed, for most game companies the long tail end [1] of the sales doesn't justify continuing. For example, Square-Enix(Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest) removes Denuvo 6 months into a release. For a counter-example, Atlus(makers of Persona/Shin Megami Tensei) are known to never purposely remove the protection.

[0] https://www.techpowerup.com/275158/denuvo-drm-pricing-struct...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_tail?useskin=vector

With Atlus games you can just emulate it for switch better than it runs on the original console.

Denuvo claims to have a solution to that as well, but to date it hasn't actually shown up in any games. I kind of hope at least one publisher bites just because I'm curious to find out what horrors they've cooked up to make emulation difficult.

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...

It could be they are just waiting for the switch 2 to really focus on it. Somebody mentioned how atlus never removes denuvo and also aren't releasing persona 3 for the switch, but will release it for the switch 2.

From a digital historian perspective, I do like the idea of DRM that is just there temporarily to ensure the fat-head of sales before being removed... especially when there's an economic cost spurring companies to not keep it around indefinitely.

The flipside of that is companies not bothering to remove it and ceasing the payments to denuvo effectively making the game not exist anymore until someone is able to crack it, and very few people seem to be able to do so. Not that much of a stretch when you look at the amount of abandonware we have.

Every graph I’ve ever seen of video game sales from people who distribute via Steam etc typically has an initial spike if they caught on and got featured, and then a few spikes for things like holiday sales.

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.

Also "X removes DRM" is an opportunity for a news cycle that could result in new sales.

I'm not sure how common that is, but I've definitely bought 2 games after the "removed DRM" event. (Basically allowing me to play on Linux in pre-steamdeck times) I'm aware that lots of people don't care.

Sure lots of people don't care, but if you save money on DRM subscription fees and see a tiny bump in sales it could be worth the tiny amount of dev time. Assuming you set it up to be easily removed ahead of time.

re: performance, the submitted article has a very interesting analysis of it (at least, in the context of the game that has been cracked).

A side effect of temporary DRM is the decreased incentive to crack it. Sure the "street cred" is still important to some people but if you just wait a few months it will be gone.

Yes, Denuvo has recurring costs to the developer, it's not a one time payment.

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.

It's always funny when they go to the expense of licensing Denuvo but then accidentally release a DRM-free version one way or another. The other classic blunder is to release a free demo version with an executable that is complete enough to play the data packages from the full version of the game if they are swapped in. That's what "demo bypass" means in the Reddit table.

My (unnamed) favorite was an indie game that you could download with no payment required, but that would prompt you for a key at installation time. If you had 7zip installed, you could just hit context menu on it, do "extract all", click on <game name>.exe and there it was, the full version with no key required.

I think it’s because piracy at launch is the most important. Stopping it right at launch is key. Also I do believe it’s a subscription.

The devs removed Denuvo from Lies of P because they accidentally leaked an unprotected version. Basically the same is if it was cracked. No point to bug customers with longer loading times and the bloat that comes from D.

Denuvo is awful on Linux since switching proton versions causes an activation to happen.

You’re limited to 3 or 5 activations per day.

What I saw in a YT video related to piracy [0] was that game companies remove their DRM after the game has been effectively pirated, since it doesn't really matter anymore, and cost them money + worse experience for paying end-users.

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 ^^

[0]: https://youtu.be/_Fu4pE46-zM

They aren't super public with their cost structure, though it appears to generally be a monthly cost for publishers. Most games remove Denuvu after about a year if it's going to get removed. Some of the bigger publishers may have better deals though as titles never remove it, even after multiple years and no new updates.

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