Irdeto's Denuvo Cites Huge ‘Losses’ For AAA Game Not Using its Anti-Piracy Tech
54 replies, posted
No, The RIAA Is Not Asking For $72 Trillion From Limewire (Bad R..
DRM maker is making up statistics to sell more of their DRM.
I find it more bullshit to think that there are no people who would buy game that they would otherwise pirate because theres no cracks for it and they want to play it very badly
Doesn't matter if it would be 10% only 5% or even 1% of total buyers, on the grand scale its still losing out on big profits
If Game Devs implement DENUVO properly instead of putting it on game frame then there should be no performance impact at all except some at loading times
God forbid game devs from wanting their works to be bought instead of illegaly acquired
I barely play any new games because who has the time or money to be playing every new AAA game thst comes out?
Im happy waiting for sales or monthy services like Humble.
So you're saying that I'm still harming my legitimate customers' experiences while doing nothing to the pirates who bypass the whole thing?
Sure sounds like I'm offering a superior experience to those who pirate the game.
I'm sure all three people who notice an extra couple of seconds of load time the first time they ever start up the game (and never again) will be highly offended and driven to pirate future releases.
How long do you spend waiting in checkout lines, compared to shoplifters?
In what world do you live where the number of people who will boycott a well-reviewed game on account of Denuvo is enough to matter? It isn't this one, judging by the success of games like Doom.
Don't forget that it's pirate websites that have historically driven most of the complaints about Denuvo, based on hearsay, rumors, and outright lies.
At this point the only legitimate complaint about Denuvo is the possibility of it failing in the future. You spend more time waiting for anti-theft devices to be removed from the clothes you buy than first-time load delays from Denuvo.
They're pitching to the suits, who are usually dumb as shit when it comes to video games.
The argument to include DRM to begin with is both rather petty and not backed by any empirical data other than 'but Pirates exist!'
Yeah? And what's the empirical data on that, given your insistence on evidence-based measures?
Customers who have bought the game, thought that it had Steam's typical DRM on it, and requested a refund.
And how many people did you get doing that, compared to overall sales?
Also, nothing you've said is wrong, per se- but I've been on the other side of the house and worked with the actuaries, the people who make a career out of statistical analysis, and seen the analyses that mathematically support DRM for first-week sales. If you think the publisher-side argument for DRM comes down to 'uh common sense yeah', I guess you either haven't spent much time in-industry or haven't worked for any decently-sized studio.
More than 0, which I can prove, unlike the amount of 'lost sales we couldn't recover from piracy' which I can not.
It all comes down to guesses. Nobody can actually track these downloads with any real reliable accuracy. You have to instead simply assert 'our tracking is good enough that we feel alright with asserting that our tracking was valid and this thing we assert occurred happened'. If your data is junk, your model is junk. Garbage in: Garbage out.
Yeah, that's why publishers hire people who literally do this kind of analysis for a living, not random gamers on the Internet who offer armchair arguments for why nobody would ever pirate who might have otherwise bought.
It was an unanswered question twenty years ago when publishers didn't have the resources to do any real analysis. Now you can spot when a crack was released, based on a sudden dip in sales records cross-referenced with an actuarial model that factors in time zones and social media traffic- before even torrent news sites pick up on it.
Like I said, if you're an indie dev, then for you going DRM-free is probably the right call. But don't assume that just because you don't have any better evidence that nobody does.
Also a large percentage of our overall sales on both Star Ruler 1 and Star Ruler 2 and the expansion Wake of the Heralds are all wrapped directly into Day One sales, let alone Week One.
Pretty funny how you continually misrepresent my statements about publishers' in-house financial accountability teams as coming from fearmongering DRM salesmen, the turn around and assume my statement about uninformed Internet opinions (ie this thread) is talking about you.
Maybe try some reading comprehension and then reply.
No, what's really funny is assuming that those people who are being paid to tell the publishers what they want to hear (that they will have zero/less piracy) will tell them what they don't want to hear (that they can't actually prove lost sales enough to justify the DRM the publishers want them to purchase because they're paranoid).
For me, I used to pirate shit a lot back when I was 12, and access to digital media was a lot less convenient. It was hard to find movies I wanted to watch and music to listen to because convenient on demand streaming didn't exist. Now, I'm more than happy to rent a movie on google play/amazon prime for a couple bucks if they have it. Yeah, I could torrent it, but it's just so much more convenient to pay. I think the music and film industries have probably lost billions of the last 10 years by not putting every single film and song they can possibly digitize on streaming services.
It's still hard to find foreign stuff; particularly japanese movies and music because of how outdated japanese attitudes towards business are
What a lovely, completely fabricated hypothetical scenario.
You know what the suits actually love to hear? 'We don't need to give a cut to these parasites'. It's not Denuvo reps making that call, as much as they try to market their wares, and it's not middle managers making off-the-cuff reactions either.
In my experience it's been literally the opposite: shareholders don't want to spend more than absolutely necessary, and any expenditure to boost sales has to be rigorously supported. Whether they spend more on actuaries than they save with DRM, well, that's another story.
It is, in fact, the entire story.
Until said parasites come in with exploded figures and doom-and-gloom prophecies like the article in the OP where 'you will lose huge amounts of money to piracy, our data says so'.
This has not been my experience almost anywhere in the industry; granted, I've only worked with Playful and rubbed shoulders with Gearbox outside of the nine years in my games studio. Even if it were, I would think that 'rigorously supported' would thereby include 'do you have actual data or do you not'. They do not. Therefore, it should be unsupportable. If it is unsupportable, why, then, does EA and other large publishers continue to do it? Because of the above second point I just made along with 'well we have to do something about piracy'.
The only thing that Denuvo can maybe help with are first week sales, but even then, probably not much.
Also, saying pirates fit into two camps is really inaccurate. Piracy can happen for a multitude of reasons. Yeah, people like "free games" or they may want to demo the game first, but not everyone who pirates is strictly just a pirate. Some may have money for one game but not another, but they really don't want to miss out on a new game when it comes out. Some may even pirate games that only have Denuvo out of some sort of weird principle. Some may only pirate games by one developer or one publisher out of another weird sense of principle. Some may only pirate single player games because the experience is exactly the same regardless of if you spend $60 or not.
Hell, I'd go so far as to say most of the people who pirate games aren't even strictly full on pirates, more selective pirates. Even then, those selective pirates could even become potential consumers of the game they pirated, due to enjoying the game and/or even seeing it on sale.
I think publishers and devs are underestimating just how many of us have a policy to never pay more than a certain amount for a AAA game. My personal limit is 30€. I know that seems low to some, but anything but CoD reaches that price within 6 moths to 3 years. Then there are key resellers (where some are more legitimate than others) who often offer 33% or more off of upcoming titles. We exist and we're penny pinchers. I think AAA publishers should be more concerned with winning us over, than harassing pirates into buying, because it's about as retarded as beating a dog to train it. It's not going to happen ever. There's gonna be no goodwill, no loyalty and therefore no shorthand between developer/publisher and potential customers. That shit trickles down to the active community for their games, their internal culture and of course their post-release content delivery programmes and how greedy they'll be. This is exactly how Gearbox won everyone over with the base Borderlands 2 release only to lose just about everyone upon announcing a second season pass to fuck their audience into paying up once more.
Also. There are a lot of us that don't blanket boycott Denuvo for the simple reason that we don't gamble the full price on the game working and we wait for reports. In my opinion, yes, it needs to go. But on the other hand, i think people are on their own when they keep blindly pre-ordering titles with Denuvo, gambling on it not being cancerously obstructive. I find it hard to sympathise with such self-abuse. It's not that hard to hold off for a few months. We already had incentive to do so for the past 10 years due to patches for unfinished releases and so on.
I think we need to have a central list detailing the individual games' implementation of Denuvo, what its' specific implementation entails and its impact, so we can separate the standard bad impletentation from the truly cancerous ones.
TL;DR: You ask me, Gamers are engaging in unhealthy consumer behavior patterns and pointing the finger at everyone else when they get burned by their instant-gratification thirsty purchasing habits. I'm sorry, but while DRM is definitely a philosophical malpractice by Publishers, Engaging in ADHD style gaming culture is retarded. no one says you have to be there at launch week. You choose to, the consequences are yours.
It's not about getting those trillions, its about ruining their lives forever and setting an example.
the latest Denuvo game just got cracked 3 days before launch
https://i.imgur.com/VBTSdrn.jpg
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