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But this hasn't been officially confirmed yet. Afaik.
Anyway, the first game had it and there was no effect on performance. Ran like a dream. So even if Denuvo's here, I doubt it'll have an impact on performance.
I have yet to meet someone who can mention the great many benefits that Denuvo has to offer the consumer. Keep in mind that not suffering a noticeable loss in resources is not a benefit.
The benefit is not Denuvo; it is Frontiers games, that are actually very enjoyable.
They have Denuvo, that's a fact. Frontier decided so and we have to either live with it or boycott their games. Denuvo can cause performance issues, but all of these games, that I have played so far, ran smoothly. VERY smoothly actually, even on my older laptop.
So you'd boycott them for no real reason. Making this whole thing irrational and thus, a phobia.
This. For some reason, people expect that in the gaming world specifically, commerce should be an entirely one-sided affair. Only the consumer is supposed to benefit. That's simply not true. If there were no benefit for game developers, there'd be no reason for them to make games. Indeed it would be impossible, as their employees would all quit and look for a job that actually lets them buy food.
Developers are passionate about their work. Sure. I won't pretend that's not true. But artists are also passionate about their work, and they ask money for commissions. Engineers are passionate about their work and they make a ton of money. Doctors are passionate about their work, but few and far between are the doctors who work for the benefit of the public with little to no pay.
And then that brings us to Denuvo. Like any form of DRM that's existed over the decades, Denuvo exists to protect early sales, which are crucial for a number of reasons. Exposure, staunching the bleeding of funds during production, investor enticement, etc. The first week also tends to be when hype is at its highest and people are most likely to buy.
Now all DRM gets cracked, but Denuvo happens to be notoriously hard to crack. According to what I've heard, it usually takes about two weeks to get through it. Impatient people willing to pirate the game might do so on day one without Denuvo. With Denuvo, they're more likely to actually buy the game. It's that simple.
Forget the consumer. The job of doing what's best for the consumer falls entirely on the consumer. You make your own decisions as a prospective buyer. DRM exists for the benefit of the developer.
Does it improve sales? Well, judging by its constantly declining adoption rate these past five years, there's not much indication it does and if a publisher wants their legitimate customers to shoulder the cost of their beliefs, it's their job to convince the skeptics. In the words of Marcin Iwinski, I don't think you can force potential customers to buy your products, only convince them to do so and Denuvo does not offer any incentive in that way, does it? Who wants to buy a game only because the publisher has traded some of its carrots for a bigger stick?
“The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates.”
Gabe Newell - Moderately successful guy.
Everything points to adding more DRM being counter-productive compared to tried and true levers against illegitimate consumption: quality, affordability, convenience. (Sources in this post). It is widely observed that if you build an emotional bond based on a relation of trust with your customers, they tend to feel bad about pirating your products and buy them as soon as they can... on the other hand publishers upholding dated anti-consumer practices such as online DRM, MTX, day 1 DLC and other buzzword-acronyms tend to elicit the opposite reaction and generate more piracy the more they push back.
Let's look at this rationally: does Denuvo fix any of the most common reasons given for piracy? how does it convert pirates into payers? Does it give cash to people who don't have the money to buy the game? Does it convince anti-DRM people to suddenly stop caring? How does it push gamers who wanted to try before they buy to buy before they try? Does it make the game available in regions where it's unavailable legitimately? Does it remove censorship in games? Does it install the internet in countries where it isn't widely available (half the world is still under 50% equipement rate[en.wikipedia.org])? You get the point.
Tl,dr: Adding more DRM does not fix piracy.
Those are the people Denuvo holds at bay. Specifically, the ones impatient enough to go buy it. Besides that, it's a deterrent that makes pirates have to work to put the game out for free. Is it annoying to have to fish for your keys every time you enter your home? Yes. Is that lock going to stop a determined criminal from breaking into your home forever? No. But we still put locks on our doors.
Honestly, a lot of what you've said, luka, is conjecture and assumption framed with certainty. The closest any of your links came to efficacy data was the first one, and that's not verifiable. It's just as likely that declining adoption rate is due to development annoyances or a personal preference for image over security on the part of a given publisher, as it is that DRM isn't actually protecting sales.
Now you're absolutely right that you can't force consumers to buy something. (Unless you're the government.) And does Denuvo provide incentive? No, but that's not its purpose. Its purpose is to deter piracy. The incentive is provided in the features and quality of the game itself.
For interest's sake, let's talk numbers.
Out of 50,000 polled, around 35% of gamers pirate games. Interestingly, the lion's share of that figure by far comes from America, whose poor are better off than the middle class of less developed nations and whose internet coverage is nigh ubiquitous. The UK, another nation with similar figures, is second on the list.
Going down to reasons for piracy... "Can't afford" is its own answer, so we can surmise that "too expensive" simply means the respondent can pay the asking price, but doesn't feel the price is worth it. In a sense, this is simply refusal to pay.
Therefore, we can essentially group "refuse to pay" and "too expensive" into one bar... and in so doing, we'd find that bar the highest on the graph by far. This of course is assuming all answers are honest. Also interesting is that DRM is one of the lowest reasons given across the board. The same is true of publisher issues. So we can surmise that not a whole lot of pirates are driven away from a purchase because of bad faith or DRM.
So the essence of my argument is... Greed drives most people to piracy. There are plenty of exceptions, but the majority - even if by a small margin - are motivated by greed. Interestingly, greed tends towards impatience as well. If you're the type who wants something enough to get it illegally, chances are you're the type who wants something right now too.
Let's assume all 50,000 respondents were prospective JWE2 buyers. Let's say around 55% of them would pirate the game due to greed (refusal to pay or not worth the price). Let's say even 40% of those are impatient enough to buy the game if a cracked copy isn't put out within a week after launch. We're talking 11,000 sales - $660,000 the company would have otherwise lost.
Meanwhile, the article states that DRM never drove more than 20% of respondents in any country to piracy. So let's err towards the high end and assume 15% of our 50,000 wait for the crack specifically because the game decided to use Denuvo. This also comes to $450,000 worth of lost sales.
In other words, the company could well be looking at a net gain of $210,000 it wouldn't have otherwise earned by simply implementing DRM, according to an estimation drawn from the numbers in this article.
If we were to extrapolate this to a million buyers? Two million? We could be talking net gains in the tens of millions of dollars.
Edit: The figures are actually lower, I'm tired and applied the math to the whole 50,000 rather than just the portion that pirates. But the percentages aren't; it's still a net gain.
The simple existence of large publishers advocating for DRM-free products and publicizing excellent financial results in both AA and AAA markets - such as Devolver, Coffee Stain, Double Fine, Larian, InXile, Paradox, Supergiant Games, CDPR and Valve (Yes all their in-house games are DRM free, surprised me too the first time - Source here[www.pcgamingwiki.com]) - makes arguments against easier to support compared to the obstinate silence of the rare proponents of online DRM and related middleware. It's only logical: In the highly competitive environment of video games development, between two products of equal qualities, why would informed customers choose the product that gives them less control over their purchase and afflicts them with limitations?
All kind of content producers over the years have been aware of it - from the wise words of Neil Gaiman to the snappy realism of Vincent Cassel: affordability, quality, availability are the best levers against piracy. Any hurdle between the customer and its purchase is more than likely to be a liability hindering the sales, making adding an online DRM a fool's errand.
The point being, the burden of proof is on the publisher. Personally, I feel a bit of transparency would help alleviate most, if not all of the concerns about Denuvo... How often it does require to check online is at the liberty of the publisher but is never disclosed for instance - (Making the game functionally always online since you don't know when it will check next - Shortest I've seen being every two hours). Also, having to assume the publisher/developer will still be there to remove it when the license expire or the servers go down - rendering the protected software inoperable - is not a bet I'm ready to take with money that should be reserved to playing games and having fun without having to think of long-term consequences. Although long-term retention is one of the major selling points of the PC, out of 239 games released since 2013 only 67 have removed it, despite factually having long outlived its hypothetical usefulness against illegitimate consumption.
All this, as a reminder, for still no proven gain for any party involved but the company selling that solution... profiting off the fears and beliefs of shareholders and decision-makers - making the product worse as a result at worst - wasting precious development resources, at best.
Publishers, and more generally users of strong anti-piracy solutions, despite their often-professed concern about piracy (and their apparent willingness to spend a lot of money to track and combat it), have mostly not been willing to participate in independent efforts to measure its impact. It's fine to not care about DRM but there's no sense in defending it. Let publishers bring proof it's useful if they want their customers to shoulder the weight of their beliefs and convince skeptics to buy their products.
Tl,dr: Before making assurances Denuvo doesn't do much bad, one should take care that it actually does good in the first place.