How many times do we have to teach these companies this lesson? Anti-piracy DRM never stops pirates, it only causes harm to legitimate paying customers. Pirates get the objective better experience playing a game with DRM removed because they not only get the game for free, but it performs better than the version people pay for. Why pay money for something that is objectively worse than getting it for free?
Nobody's teaching these companies any lessons. They keep using Denuvo because it works, and the games keep selling because the number of people actually bothered by it is pretty small.
Source needed for it actually working to reduce piracy. It's possible, but I'm gonna need sources since we know from history that simply providing a better product does more to increase sales and reduce piracy than anything else. People are willing to pay when they get their money's worth. The ones that don't, weren't going to pay anyway, so there's no actual lost sale.
It just makes the bean counters feel better and help justify their position.
Denuvo specifically is only cracked consistently by like three people. A turbo racist, a trans woman, and a dude who only cracks the newest sports games.
The fact that there currently is no one cracking Denuvo? Empress was the only one cracking and posting new denuvo releases and they've been completely silent for months(possibly over a year? I forget). The only other people cracking denuvo lately are a DRM developerdoing so for the challenge(and not releasing the crack, because they're a DRM dev...) and like one other guy cracking much older versions of denuvo.
That only goes to show that that most of the people capable of cracking a game aren't privy to most pre release channels. First day buyers and pre order simps most likely wouldn't pirate the game at all.
Yep. Most people have no spine, or even care about it. Whatever, I can waste my time and money on other games. It's not like there's a lack of them out there, even outside of Denuvo, EA & Ubisoft.
I think most people aren't even aware of the different forms of DRM and whether or not their games use them. For the majority of players, there's no discernible impact to their experience so they have no reason to question any of it.
It usually takes a long ass time for denuvo games to get cracked if at all.
Last I checked there were only two people cracking denuvo, one who only likes football games and one really crazy lady.
Also the lack of piracy is most important for publishers around launch and that's reflected in denuvo's pricing which IIRC increases substantially after a year or two (this is a fairly recent change)
So more games have started to remove Denuvo after a while after launch.
Before they changed it, I believe the publishers got to keep Denuvo at no extra cost if they didn't change the game or something but now it gets more expensive the further from launch you go
It's wild, I'm one of those patient gamer types but there are certain games that I'd make an exception for and buy as soon as they came out, and Civ has been one of those games as far back as I can remember. But this is gonna be the first one I'm not going to bother with. Between this and the absolutely bonkers price, I really can't justify it. Maybe in a few years when the Denuvo is removed and you can get the full thing for like $40 or so, but no way am I paying $167 CAD for the full edition on day one.