Comment by lousken
18 hours ago
I would hope publishers would take note and remove it, having hundreds of megabytes of junk in the executable is just wasteful to put it mildly
18 hours ago
I would hope publishers would take note and remove it, having hundreds of megabytes of junk in the executable is just wasteful to put it mildly
Denuvo is there to prevent piracy within the first 90 days of release. Something like 60 to 80% of a game’s revenue is during that period. They don’t care that it’s eventually cracked, and they absolutely do not care about performance.
> Denuvo is there to prevent piracy within the first 90 days of release [...] They don’t care that it’s eventually cracked
Ah, so Denuvo is always removed after ~90 days after release, as there is no point for them to keep it there?
Not strictly after 90 days, but Denuvo is usually removed after the peak sales period for a game. It's really at a publisher's discretion when to remove it, as the sales model for Denuvo is that you have to continue paying for it on a subscription basis to keep it active.
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Denuvo is sold as a subscription to developers, and it is often removed 6–12 months after release.
Yet I have a bunch of games on steam wishlist which I've been waiting for years to buy.
The stopper is of course denuvo, which they keep renewing the license of, for no good reason.
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A number of publishers have retroactively added Denuvo to their older games, inexplicably.
Any list?
With the hypervisor method they get 0 to 1 day protection
Then DRM should automatically remove itself after that period. Copyright durations should also be adjusted to that same time frame.
The bigger problem with Denuvo is that it appears to significantly impact game performance as well
It can, but that seems to be more related to poor implementations by the game devs, and not inherent to it. There are plenty of examples of games with Denuvo that still run fine (give or take your opinion on whether the presence of DRM is inherently "impacted performance").
If many of your users misuse your tool, that's a design problem not user error
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Isn't Denuvo actually implemented in a game by the DRM developers, though? I remember reading that they have a process where the game dev sends Denuvo an unprotected executable, who adds the DRM to that executable and sends it back.
Thus, I believe the poor implementations are directly the fault of Denuvo.
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The games run terribly on release because they have Denuvo, and then when the sales volume no longer justifies the licensing costs of Denuvo, the devs strip it out and sell it to the players in patch notes as "optimizing performance."
Someone else mentioned GTA getting more aggressive copy protection out of nowhere. It's not out of nowhere. With GTA6 ads out for a while, sales of GTA5 are up as people either play it for the first time or replay it. Sales going up means they can justify copy protection.
Denuvo has layers upon layers of obfuscation that inflates nearly every instruction and function call, extra code execution that does nothing to throw off someone trying to follow code execution paths, and constant moving around where the game stores stuff in memory, again, to throw someone off watching via debugger.
It's pathetic because one company has been almost entirely responsible for people needing to buy faster and faster CPUs and GPUs trying to eek out more and more performance. CPUs, GPUs, memory - all of it has gotten enormously faster, we have more cores, etc. Despite all that, every new game barely runs at 60fps.
Do you really believe that year after year game developers and game engines get worse and worse at performance? Of course not.
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The evidence for this supposed performance hit is basically zero.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07NMuobVVwQ
This channel has many comparison videos like this one.
Loading times and 1% or 0.1% low FPS are usually hit the hardest and those stutters are the most immersion-breaking.
False. There's lots of side-by-side recordings of Denuvo and non-Denuvo versions of games on YouTube clearly showing that Denuvo does impact performance.
I would hope that users would just refuse to buy games that use Denuvo and similar malware. I do, but I know most users don't care.
Why would they care for a few hundred MBs when the games are in the 10s of GBs?
CPU cache space for code is much smaller than GPU memory for models (and the former is more important for performance since many CPU operations like pipeline parallelism are latency bound, not compute bound).
This. Why spend extra on x3d cpu when you can have a reasonable game size (not that it has large enough cache anyway)
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Remove DRM and let buyers suffer less? Crazy talk.