• Irdeto's Denuvo Cites Huge ‘Losses’ For AAA Game Not Using its Anti-Piracy Tech
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https://torrentfreak.com/denuvo-cites-huge-losses-for-aaa-game-not-using-its-anti-piracy-tech-181108/ https://torrentfreak.com/denuvo-cites-huge-losses-for-aaa-game-not-using-its-anti-piracy-tech-181108/ In a statement issued by Denuvo owner Irdeto (the latter acquired the former earlier this year), the company states that it tracked pirate downloads of an unnamed ‘AAA’ (big budget, major studio) title during the first few days after its release. Without Denuvo protection it was quickly cracked and made available on P2P networks and from there, pirates did their thing. “Irdeto tracked the downloads of a major sports title on P2P networks after the title, which did not include anti-tamper protection, was cracked on the same day of its release,” the company says. “During the first two weeks, Irdeto detected 355,664 torrent downloads of the illegal copy of the title. Given the retail price of the game, this puts the total potential loss of revenue from P2P downloads at $21,336,283.” Irdeto highlights the first 14 days following release as the most critical for such a game, claiming that up to 80% of sales take place during the period. An impressive 50% of those sales take place within the first four days, the company adds. It’s worth noting that while Denuvo games are often cracked very quickly, it’s definitely not uncommon for protection to stand up to the first two weeks of attacks. Denuvo can usually hold off crackers for the first four days, so these figures are obvious marketing tools for a technology that has been somewhat diminished after various cracking groups began taking its challenge personally. But just in case Denuvo only manages a single day of protection, owner Irdeto suggests that the effort is worth it – even dropping down to the importance of standing firm for an hour. “The research also found that the first day of release alone is crucial for the protection of a AAA title, as 12% of the illegal P2P downloads occurred within the first day of the cracked copy appearing on the P2P networks (and a substantial number of these in the first hour),” the company adds.
Ask for them how many of those people who downloaded it were actively interested in purchasing it. They will then stutter and sputter to justify their figures. I am a game developer. DRM is useless in most situations and even in situations where it wasn't completely useless, what you're preventing is a nominal loss. This is as dumb as the RIAA charging people with hundreds of millions of dollars of fines and penalties because they count each download as a 'lost transaction' when absolutely at least a portion of those downloads came from people who 'purchased the music but wanted it in a different format' or 'bought the CD but lost it and still want to listen to the song'.
There's no way to accurately predict whether sales are lost or not on both sides. There are actual cases of Piracy nearly killing companies but its not big corporations, its smaller developers who desperately need those sales. The studies that have stated that piracy actually boost sales are just culpable to the same logical/mathematical failings and assumptions that studies against piracy are as well.
It's absolute bullshit that pirate downloads are counted as retail losses. If someone was looking for a pirated copy they were never going to buy the game in the first place.
Of course they would make statements like this, to sell it to big budget companies.
Present such cases where they were able to accurately identify pirates who wanted to purchase the game but pirated it and separate that user bucket in a credible and logical fashion that withstands the sniff test from pirates who simply wanted to play the game for free and had no intent to ever purchase it.
I remember the RIAA tried to sue Limewire for $72 Trillion in damages in 2012. At the time there was only $60 Trillion in the world. Anti-piracy groups are fucking delusional.
I'm saying that we can't point to specifics but beyond a reasonable doubt it is entirely possible, and actually there are methods to actually get a decent sample size. You put in certain codes that activate nonmaliciously like the Pink Scorpian or the Pirate Hats. You can then, through forum and steam forum posts asking about it gather a reasonable assertion.
You can't guarantee with any level of certainty that your data then reflects the reality of the situation. That you can't "point to specifics" is the entire problem with asserting that you 'know what the situation is'.
this reads just like a boilerplate justification against voter fraud, just replace voter fraud with pirating and pirates with illegal voters. their method relies on a lot of assumptions, including the idea that people who pirate games have the means or goal to buy said games to begin with.
I thought the consensus was that most people pirate when buying is made difficult?
These statistics are useless to anyone but stockholders. This specific topic has been discussed ad nauseam.
Piracy downloads are as much retail losses as someone who watches a display movie in walmart.
This basically reads like a snakesoil salesman. Cite a bunch of bullshit ailments that coincide with certain symptoms, and sell them a faulty ass "cure".
"uhhh we have losses because uhhhh use our stuff uhhhh"
pirates fall into two categories: a. people who want to try the game before paying for it b. people who were never going to pay for the game in the first place and never will group a actually end up increasing sales and group b were never a sale in the first place and this will never change as a fact despite what anti-piracy groups might advocate for
Being able to "test" SR1 in this manner is what led me to buy it. Sometimes time/feature limit demos aren't enough.
And I have no idea how many downloads you even count as, even with your confession, thus the general problem. We can't bucket the pirates into 'would've bought the game but pirated due to convenience' and 'pirated and had no intention of buying the game' because they are anonymous. I can't even reliably trust that your self-admitted confession is even legitimate as you might, similarly, be just trying to back that issue - which, again, is the problem. We have no empirical means to back anything -- so asserting that 'pirates are costing you huge amounts of money' is a statement that simply can't be proven -- and so DRM is useless.
most of the people I know who pirate shit have enough cash to probably build multiple good gaming rigs, but the games they pirate are so throwaway to them that they can't be bothered to spend 60 euros on something that lasts less than a full day of gameplay I kind of hate pirating aswell, but the pricing of video games and general shitty anti consumerist crap of garbage DLC, day 1 locked DLC, microtransactions and all of that shit, has more than once put me off from buying a good few games. Another thing would also be the not that big time to complete it, and last but not least, every single company and their dog now have launchers like Origin and Bethesda.net, last of which will probably put me off from buying Doom Eternal because STOP MAKING MORE LAUNCHERS
The fact that they didn't disclose what game they watched makes this statement bullshit. Plus Denuvo is at a point where it can be cracked very fast.
Nearly all CDs on my collection are still sealed and I downloaded them in order to preserve them. I really wish they'd offer a digital coupon instead so I wouldn't need to go through these hoops. (Also jeez, buying music is a pain in the fucking ass to do legally, I have to go through a lot of bullshit to own my music and it's retarded)
Piracy is literally the entire reason I ever bought Factorio. I'd kind of heard of it before but I had a chance to pirate it and though "well it's not too big so it's worth trying I suppose" and bought it a few hours later. And that's not the first time that has happened either. Same thing happened with La-Mulana and one or two other games I'm spacing at the moment. They were games I was vaguely interested in but not enough to take any risks on, or in Factorio's case I'd heard the name but knew little about it. So piracy is the entire reason I even gave them a chance.
It's a hassle that the biggest way for me to try video games these days is just pirating the thing before buying it. There have been quite a few times where i bought a game after trying it because of piracy.
Why do some people adamantly refuse to acknowledge that there are some gamers who would prefer to get a game for free, but might pay if piracy is inconvenient or unavailable? Like, you don't need to buy the 'every piracy is a lost sale' line, but the idea that there's nobody who would grudgingly pay money for the latest hot release if they can't pirate it is so incredibly unlikely that I can't imagine you seriously believe it. People pirate for all sorts of reasons- some translate to lost sales, some don't.
Or the time the RIAA tried suing a dead woman who didn't own a computer.
I pirated the most when I was a teen/college student, when I literally couldn't afford to buy games. I figured it was victimless, because I literally couldn't buy the game otherwise on my budget, and I wasn't depriving someone of something since I wasn't stealing, just pirating. I'd generally buy things on sale of course, but if something was expensive with no sale in sight, I'd go online and find it. Still, I felt like the companies deserved the money for their products (unless the game was garbage but at that point I uninstalled it and treated it like a demo). Now that I'm an adult with a stable income, I don't pirate; I've even gone back and bought the games I pirated. Totally anecdotal, but still, I think people are generally honest, and would only pirate because they can't afford it or can't get it. There will always be people hard-wired to steal, and likewise people who will pirate even when they have no justifiable reason not to (they have the money, time, convenience, quality, etc. but pirate anyways). But in general, treating every pirated copy as a "lost sale" is disingenuous. Likewise you can't treat every pirated copy as a potential sale either. I think getting data for this is basically impossible unless you seeded out an actual full game as a pirated copy, but had a survey upon launch that asked people why they pirated the game (and mention it's completely anonymous, with third parties from the piracy community verifying it). That way you'd get data on how many people pirated it and why. You could even put that survey in the main game and ask users who had pirated it in the past why they bought it. I think people would obviously be skeptical but it really would be the only way to get hard data on this kind of thing.
On top of that, most of the problematic piracy is stuff like illegal resellers in Asia. You might argue that poor people wouldn't be able to afford legal copies anyway, but it certainly deprives official retailers of opportunities to sell a legal copy. Teenagers pirating games because they can't afford them aren't really Denuvo's target. In any case, it's naive to think that all piracy is victimless. It might not impact big companies much, but smaller studios have definitely died over it.
if someone figures out how to steal anything from a target store without repercussion, they aren't going to grab the things they get in their weekly shopping trip
The people who pirate typically are those who are too poor to afford to buy it in the first place or who want to "trial" the game.
As a game designer, I literally had to stop reading from tears of laughter at the notion of a game selling well because DRM and not because it was well made and presented well.
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