Capcom's Steam Deck Verified Games are being made unplayable with new DRM that only punishes paying customers
Capcom's Steam Deck Verified Games are being made unplayable with new DRM that only punishes paying customers
Patching in new DRM years after launch seems unlikely to impact pirates, but actively harms legitimate users who play on Steam Deck or mod games they paid for.
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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
Well, read at your own risk LMAO
That was wild. It went from 50 to 100 fast!!
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.
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.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.
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.
The Dead Space remake hasn't been cracked for example. And there'd be a lot of interest i guess
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/
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.
Yeah... But in some cases it avoid piracy and as long as that happens although not great at least there is a purpose but most if not all of this games have already been cracked.
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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.
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...until the stores decide to stop offering them.
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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.
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It is an inherent problem with DRM, because if there was no DRM there wouldn't be a possibility of this happening.
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DRM doesn't purge itself automatically. I don't know how to spell it any clearer but if the problem is that DRM continues to exist, and it is solved when DRM is removed, then DRM itself is the problem.
And I speak as someone who lost my official purchase of Tron Evolution to outdated DRM.
I don't think you are arguing in favor of cracking groups, as much as I'm appreciative of them.
I think you're misunderstanding things. You trust these companies to do what is best for the consumer. That's not how the rest of us, or the companies you're defending, consider things. Their interest is in the bottom dollar. If screwing you makes a buck, they'll do it. Trusting them to do the right thing is a major player in enshittification.
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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.
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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.
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Well, no. I was happily buying my games on discs and cartridges and my movies on DVDs and tapes and my music in CDs. If they're going to swing around, tell me I'm buying digital licenses and I can no longer do the legal things I used to do it's them who owe an explanation.
I have no idea why you feel the need to shill so hard for these things, but it's clearly not sticking. You're putting the onus on the customer and, as a customer I get to just say "no, screw you" and keep buying physical media instead. It's a shame that more people don't, but it's pretty obvious that having them take over my computer to limit what I do with my purchases is damaging to me, and I don't have to like it because you say so.
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I make a living off of media creation and have for over twenty years, across multiple mediums and in different capacities. Some of the stuff I've worked on has been DRMd and some has not.
The financial benefit coming my way has not been dependent on DRM at any point to any extent I can discern. You want to impact "the right to financially benefit from their creations"? Fix the fact that companies can just hire a creator to work for hire and own all their output in perpetuity with no requirement for additional compensation and indeed no IP rights staying with the people doing the actual work.
If you're gonna high horse me with the morality of financially compensating creators you better be talking about the actual creators, not the corporations keeping the bulk of the revenue.
We're all waiting for an example
no negative impact on paying customers'.
I think you meant "on the paying customers' experiences"
