What? ALL DRM only punishes paying customers.
Not necessarily. All DRM punishes paying customers, but some also punishes pirates. Very few games with Denuvo ever get cracked, instead the publisher removes it after a while because Denuvo charges a license fee as long as its in your game. E.g. the Hatsune Miku game on steam hasn’t been cracked in the two years it’s been out. So there’s an argument for using it, even if it’s a flawed one.
But these games already went without DRM for years. They’re long since cracked. The only purpose this DRM serves is to make it harder for paying customers to use mods. Not pirates, they can keep using the same mods they’ve always used. This is literally for the purpose of degrading the experience of paying customers. That’s what they mean by “only punishes paying customers”.
Very few games with Denuvo ever get cracked
I was under the impression that all the major Denuvo games got cracked within the year they launched if not the first couple weeks? Maybe there wasn’t the right attention for that game?
Do you know of a place that tracks that kinda thing? I’m pretty curious now about the statistics of release to cracked.
There is basically only one or two people involved with any sort of denuvo cracking, someone named Empress and another I can’t remember.
Ugh, fucking Empress. What a transphobic piece of shit that one is.
That name just sounds narcissistic
You should see the rants they leave with some of their releases, like the nfo for Hogwarts Legacy
Omg what does it say
There’s an r/crackwatch, with a pinned list of Denuvo games.
For example, in 2021, only 7 games released with Denuvo were cracked (out of an approximate 30). In 2022, only one. There was only one cracker in the world who was any good at breaking Denuvo, and Denuvo hired them, so it almost never happens anymore.
(Be careful when reading the crackwatch updates, because they mark ‘denovo removed’ the same colour as ‘denuvo cracked’, you have to read the notes)My mistake, they stopped doing this a little while ago.Hogwarts legacy came out last year with dunovo and Empress cracked it in something like a few weeks. Whoever made that list just stopped updating it.
One success does not put the lie to the idea that there are few successes.
The most recent update to the list was literally less than 1 hour ago. Of the 229 games that have been released with Denuvo since 2020, <30 of them have been cracked. 119 of them had the Denuvo eventually removed by the publisher.
Empress was essentially the only person who cracked Denuvo with any regularity, and even they only succeeded at a few games, and only extremely popular ones (because they worked off a donation scheme). I use the past tense, because Empress works for Denuvo now.
Wait, what’s the dif between denuvo removed and cracked?
“Denuvo removed” means, like I said before, the publisher stopped paying the denuvo license and voluntarily removed it from the game themselves.
Well, when the game is essentially running in a virtual machine with an address translation layer that scrambles the backing memory every few minutes you’re lucky the game even runs. Good luck trying to decipher that hell. A few guys have done it, I remember the one dude ranting on Twitter about trying to crack Borderland’s 3 back around launch.
And then the follow up which was that Denuvo was basically adding a ~30fps overhead to the game and everyone was initially blaming the devs for releasing unoptimized garbage.
Gabe had it right, piracy is a service problem. And my motto has always been if the game has some garbage like Denuvo, then you couldn’t even pay me to take a copy. Not worth the headache.
Denuvo was basically adding a ~30fps overhead
I’m very surprised when I read an announcement that id software were removing denuvo from doom eternal. The game was running very well on weak hardware I never suspected it has denuvo at all. After denuvo removal, I tried running the game again and didn’t notice any difference in performance. Maybe id software is an exception here and they worked some magic with their denuvo integration.
Doom Eternal actually released without Denuvo by accident, they quickly patched it in but the unprotected exe was already available for all so if you played it on day 1 you actually played it without Denuvo.
I didn’t play it day one though because I’m, uhm, a patient gamer.
It’s cause Vulkan is so optimized. You can run the game with Ray tracing and still get like 200fps
One major strength Denuvo has is actually it’s legal team, they have gotten a lot of cracking groups to stop working on it with legal threats. Empress is the exception because she is in Russia and absolutely batshit insane. The software itself is hard to crack but not overly so, it’s mostly done by bypassing and masking the executable as having a legit license and thus allowing it to launch.
I still very much remember a very very early denuvo that broke my fucking CD burner. Since then I’ve avoided them like the plague and check every game before I buy it.
I know that it has gotten better and “only” costs performance nowadays, but the hate I have for that company is still there.
We’re talking about a rhythm game with a smaller audience then, say, Binding of Isaac. I’m guessing yeah, it might not be a prime target for cracking.
I guess you’d start with a dupe check or pre db site to see what known Denuvo games have a cracked version, and when it came out. Example: https://predb.me/
The Dead Space remake hasn’t been cracked for example. And there’d be a lot of interest i guess
Not anymore, Hogwarts Legacy was just cracked, almost a year after release, but EMPRESS is only one person, there are several games releasing with denuvo every year, my friend is still waiting for a crack to Stranded Alien Dawn but since it’s a smaller game it’s not even on their radar.
Most denuvo games you are seeing on sites, if you go to the crackwatch twitter account, you’ll see it’s just the devs themselves removing denuvo since they probably didn’t want to renew the contract for a game that already sold for an entire year.
Hogwarts Legacy was cracked ages ago. It was cracked in under a month.
Then I was fooled by a new repack, doesn’t change the fact that the other recent denuvo games are still uncracked like Dead Space Remake, Resident Evil 4, Star Ocean Second Story R, Wild Hearts, Hi-Fi Rush, etc, it’s over, they won.
Nah, they haven’t won. All they’ve done is make people wait till they’re cracked, which they will be. Most people aren’t going to buy the games just because they’re not immediately cracked, they’ll just wait.
Worth noting that RE:4 was cracked day of release.
Doomerism is bad in all forms, do not give up
Hogwarts Legacy was cracked in less than 2 weeks after launch iirc. Public release of the crack was a few days later.
Hogwarts legacy was cracked in under a week…
it’s true that empress is unreliable and basically the only source of cracks, but when she does do it, it doesn’t take long.
It’s pretty frustrating that I had to buy a different version of fallout 4 to use serious mods, just because the Xbox app adds an extra layer of DRM.
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Not really. There’s plenty of DRM that has no negative impact on paying customers’.
At an absolute minimum, the DRM prevents me from easily making a backup of my legitimate copy, which I am otherwise entitled to do.
So yeah, by definition DRM has a negative impact on paying customers.
The backups are stored on the same place you downloaded it from.
…until the stores decide to stop offering them.
At which point they can decide to remove the DRM
Can, but might not. Companies are not notorious for spending effort on products they are abandoning. The only reason they do it with Denuvo is that it charges them a subscription for as long as it’s implemented.
I mean of course they probably won’t, but again that is a problem with implementation and not an inherent problem with DRM.
No, that’s where the service provider’s backups are stored. I don’t have the ability to make my own. That’s a huge stretch and very tortured logic. And even if I went for it, by not being able to make backups at my pleasure I’m still being impacted, so… still, by definition, a negative impact on the paying customer that people pirating the same media don’t have. They just Ctrl C Ctrl V that stuff.
Yeah that’s a huge stretch my guy. What exactly do you (or anyone else, for that matter) need a backup for that you can’t simply download from the distributor?
If there’s another device, you can install Steam on it and copy the file over locally.
You can also freely copy all of your game save files for backup to restore on another installation.
Because it shouldn’t be on me to ask for permission to do stuff with my software that I bought.
Maybe I’m too old, because I remember when I bought a disk and I just copied it and used that. Which is legal, by the way.
Well, alright, I don’t need to remember too far back, because I was ripping some movies today. Which, again, fair game. I paid for them, I get to use them. I shouldn’t have to explain to you, Valve, Netflix or anybody else why I want to back up the thing I bought.
I shouldn’t have to explain to you, Valve, Netflix or anybody else why I want to back up the thing I bought.
If you want to make an argument as to how DRM hurts you, inherently, you do need to explain it. You can’t just show up, go “nuh uh” and expect anyone to be convinced by that.
We’re all waiting for an example
no negative impact on paying customers’.
I think you meant “on the paying customers’ experiences”
At the time of this post both the game and proton had been updated and the game was working again.
Adding DRM to a two year old already cracked game is still an insane decision, but the problem of it breaking the game was fixed relatively quickly.
It’s an long-term decision meant to kill modding. Having to seek a cracked version for modding isn’t a problem for some users, but it’s an imposing thing for users on average. It makes it less likely that your average user will attempt to engage with mods, which reduces the audience for mods, and that in turn makes mod developers less likely to develop them.
It’s about strangling the life out of modding communities slowly.
Which is incredibly stupid since mods prolong the lifetime of a game’s value
The problem is that game companies are no long interested in prolonged lifetime they can’t directly monetize. Who cares that mods add a decade of additional sales if people are modding costumes instead of buying them from the cash shop.
And this sort of attitude is making me wonder if it’s still worth buying from these companies.
Who cares that mods add a decade of additional sales if people are modding costumes instead of buying them from the cash shop.
Indeed, people seem to forget but modern monster hunter sells cosmetics, they have a financial interest to not let you mod the game to change skins.
If the skins they sell are higher quality than the ones available with mods, then people will buy them anyway.
If the mods are making those skins available for free then that’s probably a copyright infringement issue (assuming the assets are only made available once purchased, and that they’re not just available but disabled) that should be handled with a DMCA takedown.
If the mods are making their own content available for free but the mod content is lower quality than the paid skins, then the people who don’t purchase paid skins as a result will be far more limited. The bigger the quality divide, the lower the impact.
If they can’t compete with free cosmetics then that speaks to a lack of quality on their part.
The games that I love the most more than any other are games that have a good modding community. Factorio, skyrim, minecraft, hoi4. It just creates content that the developing company doesn’t have to do and the consumer gets to experience.
I don’t understand why some publishers of singleplayer focused games are against modding.
I understand that it could impact other players experiences in a multi-player setting. And I support any game developer segregating modded clients from vanilla. What I can’t wrap my head around is why some try to ban modding all together. If a player ruins or enhances their experience with mods, it’s on them, not the developers.
IIRC, it’s from a Street Fighter tournament scandal, where one particular player had a nude Chun Li mod installed. The tournament didn’t know about it, the player forgot to disable the mod ahead of the tournament, and nude Chun Li was broadcast to the entire banquet room full of viewers (and everyone streaming online) because they had the game projected on a giant screen.
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I’ve purchased it but haven’t installed it yet… I wonder if I can refund it.
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Lmao, this is months after they released a steam deck focused patch for Monster Hunter World that made it run on the deck, World was suddenly being played by several people again, congrats capcom for the fumble.
Digital rights management - who’s rights? Certainly it’s not in my best interest.
Digital restrictions management.
More like digital wrongs management.
This is why I primarily shop at GOG. There are almost no other storefronts left that promote DRM-free games.
But they don’t promote linux platform.
That’s true, they don’t. But they’re at least open enough to allow community efforts on Linux like Heroic.
It’s a missed opportunity.
Is it? Linux gamers are not exactly a huge demographic. I’m quite okay with being able to use Heroic Games Launcher for games, no need for official support.
the beauty of no DRM is that if a game runs fine on wine (and I’m sure most games in GOG will) then you can just install them.
GOG lost my trust with the Hitman situation, and lashing out at customers that were leaving reviews detailing the situation.
https://www.eurogamer.net/hitman-gog-release-sparks-drm-row-review-bombing-accusation
They also sneakily updated the page to mention the DRM after people had bought the game.
There’s an updated article that includes GOG’s follow-up to that situation: https://www.eurogamer.net/gog-pulls-hitman-from-its-own-store-admits-it-shouldnt-have-released-it-in-its-current-form
Dear Community,
Thank you for your patience and for giving us the time to investigate the release of HITMAN GOTY on GOG. As promised, we’re getting back to you with updates.
We’re still in dialogue with IO Interactive about this release. Today we have removed HITMAN GOTY from GOG’s catalog – we shouldn’t have released it in its current form, as you’ve pointed out.
We’d like to apologise for the confusion and anger generated by this situation. We’ve let you down and we’d like to thank you for bringing this topic to us – while it was honest to the bone, it shows how passionate you are towards GOG.
We appreciate your feedback and will continue our efforts to improve our communication with you.
All this because Capcom heard that a Street Fighter tournament participant was using a nude mod for Chun-Li. Just blacklist him and move on, let me keep my flashlight lasers on dropped materials in MH:W please.
I imagine it’s about prevention rather than discipline in their eyes. I’m not defending the idea (who cares if we see chun li naked? There is much worse on the internet) but I don’t think blacklisting the player would assuage their fears of it happening in the future.
No, that’s the actual reason.
While this is awful for a company to do and I’m 100% against drm in games in general I do think the steam deck issue is being overblown. Valve quickly put out a proton update that fixed compatibility on steam deck. The game works fine now.
Only because it’s a game big enough for the relevant people to take notice. A smaller game would just stay broken, due to some suit’s whims. This practice needs to end.
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Thank you! I really hate super ambiguous gaming acronyms, that even as a gamer myself, I either can’t understand or have to rack my brains to figure out. It’s really bloody annoying!
I also hate SAGAs, and I also have to RMB trying to FIT. Agreed it’s RBA!
Do you even gmaul in osrs or are you a d2h scrub?
Under what circumstances would you even be comparing a dragon 2-hander with a granite maul?
Its because of staking mostly, but pvp more generally. The gmaul can kill almost instantly, but its high risk high reward since if you don’t manage to get the instant KO you’ll get out dps’d by more usual damage options.
Because its partially luck based people liked to use it to gamble in the Duel Arena, betting on the outcome.
PVP was never my area but I looked up the gmaul spec and it makes sense, I just don’t see where the d2h comes in. Is it a ‘more usual damage option’? I thought people used like abyssal whips
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People are lazy. And that is very annoying.
Monster-World Hunting
This hunt just went interstellar
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When you say MWH, did you mean MHW, as in Monster Hunter World?
From the article…
As reflected in the official patch notes for Ver.16.0.2.0 of Monster Hunter: Rise on Steam
MHR isn’t MHW, but I think you’re still right.
This article isn’t true
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Removed by mod
I feel you, I can’t play unmodded skyrim because the quests and plots are so paper thin I just lose interest after a few hours, but it’s a great sandbox for modders to play around in and I’m enjoying my run as a monk with an entire unarmed perk tree.
I just bought Skyrim, 10 years or so after its initial release. Only because of the 60 000 mods on Nexus. I am playing it now with 400 mods installed and after a bit of configuration I am quite happy with it.
and after a bit of configuration
Ah, so you haven’t actually dived into Skyrim modding yet. /s
The old joke is that once you get into Skyrim modding, you spend more time modding the game than you actually spend playing it. You don’t know frustration until you hit your first “why tf won’t my game launch” brick wall and have to disable mods one at a time to figure out which one is the offender. Even worse if it’s one that requires more complex installation, like animation mods.
OK I lied a bit it is about 50 - 50. But today I will play - just after I have adjusted the enbseries.INI :-)
I’ll never pay for another capcom game but you can be damn sure that doesn’t mean I’ll never play another capcom game.
Good work you old dipshits, shooting your long time fanbase instead of doing literally anything else
So, I don’t know how to put this, and I don’t this actually isn’t true . Not sure how this blew up, but yeah.
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Is the DRM already out? I assumed this was for some upcoming update they announced but I haven’t had any mods break, including the light pillar mod which I thought Capcom’s DRM was supposed to prevent. Even just 3 or 4 days ago someone went in and one shot a monster.
It’s on rise
I’m at work so I can’t do deep dive searching, and honestly I will probably forget about this by the time I get home, but there are other people I follow who report on this stuff, unfortunately only in podcast format, who have also talked to modders in person. All of them say mods are fine. Take that for what you will.
Maybe people should stop supporting these companies. I know saying it for the 729,631st time won’t change anything, but all I’m gonna say is I don’t have issues with Capcom, EA, Ubisoft, or a few other studios, because us simply 🌠 dont play their games 🌠
I have issues with Ubisoft even if they make shitty games I don’t play. (I’ve played older titles but have since quit supporting or playing the ones I have), since the company is still preying on whales, children and gamers who are less savvy about dark patterns. Ubisoft also still continues a toxic work environment in which the upper management preys sexually on the clerical staff and then works to bury any scandals and silence the victims. And I’d regard that as offensive and bad for the economy even if it was happening in a fissile fuel rod manufacturing company I never personally engaged with.
Ubisoft, and much of the gaming industry generally is really awful across several compound practices. I mean EA and Gearbox have the same kinds of developer abuse climate and they routinely crunch and do massive layoffs even though both practices make their games measurably worse.
That said, Capcom has been a problem for a long time, and I’ve ceased getting or playing capcom games over a decade ago. But I hope it tanks and stops taking money from gamers who don’t know better.
This is why I only play unlicensed Tengen games on my NES. R.B.I. Baseball, Gauntlet, and Pac-Man are really all I need and I like their cartridge shape better anyway.
Damn. This is why my recent steps in Steam, after seeing a good sale is: does it have Denuvo? Do I need to install a separate launcher? Is the discount worth it?..
