A Letter from Our Producer

[Kalvothe]

Greetings RiME Community!

Your patience is exemplary. After a long and storied journey, RiME is finally available on PC, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4. We’d like to thank each and every one of you for your continued passion throughout development, and the kind words you’ve sent our way after release. You’ve been an energizing force through some tough times, and no amount of thanks we could give would be enough. Thank you.

First, I’d like to introduce myself. My name is Cody Bradley and I’m the Lead Producer on RiME for team Grey Box. If you played Grey Goo, you’re probably familiar with these letters. If not, no worries. I’ll give a brief preamble.

We like to do these letters from the Producer to provide additional transparency into what’s going on with our development teams. Tim does an excellent job trying to bridge the gap between our fans and the team, but sometimes it’s better to get the message from the source.

With that said, we’re receiving a handful of reports from players experiencing performance problems on the PC. While these reports are not universal or even a majority, we do want to make certain we address them quickly. Two of our core values at Grey Box are quality and community, and we would be remiss to ignore the pleas of even one person who was unable to play our game.

During development, we go through several cycles of compatibility testing on the game. This basically means that we’re moving from PC to PC swapping out hardware and evaluating how it performs. While we try to be as thorough as possible, it’s incredibly difficult for us to cover every permutation of motherboard, graphics card, RAM, processor, and hard drive out there.

That means the next few days are critical to addressing the performance concerns. If you’re having trouble, we need you to please report to our customer service team at http://support.greybox.com and provide them with as much information as possible. Over the next few days they’ll be analyzing all of the reports and looking for patterns between hardware and the settings being used. From there, we can inform our development team where to start looking for issues.

With that said, we’ve already had some luck with diagnosing a few problems. AMD RX 580 cards appear to be having trouble in general, and our team is looking into what the cause might be. Additionally, the NVidia 1080s are having problems with SSAA anti-aliasing. Switching to another option may help. We’ve also had users report that switching the VSync setting to Double Buffering significantly boosted performance, especially on 900 series NVidia cards.

We know this can be frustrating (we share in that frustration), but we’re confident that with your assistance we can resolve these issues in the next few weeks.

On the subject of Denuvo, we understand that this is a very sensitive topic for gamers. Know that we did not make the decision to include it lightly.

The fact of the matter is that we looked at the piracy rate on games that were very similar to RiME, and it scared us. At the end of the day, our obligation as a publisher is to protect our development team’s intellectual property to the best of our ability. Right now, Denuvo is our only effective option.

The only thing that Denuvo is currently doing for us is checking to make certain that Steam’s (or Origin’s) DRM is still attached to the game. There is a small performance hit associated with this, but at this time we do not believe it is causing the problems that are currently being reported. We might be wrong. We’re monitoring the situation.

It has always been our intention to remove Denuvo in the event of a crack. Based on other titles, we expect the protection to last two weeks, maybe three at most. We have no intentions of patching a new version of Denuvo in at that time.

That’s more or less the skinny on things for the time being. We’ll be continuing to monitor things as the situation evolves. If you have questions, please feel free to reach out via the medium of your choice. We’re busy right now, but we’re going to try our best to get to everyone.

Thank you for your patience and for all of the feedback so far.

Best,
Cody Bradley
Producer - Team Grey Box

[Skexer]

>There is a small performance hit associated with this, but at this time we do not believe it is causing the problems that are currently being reported. We might be wrong. We’re monitoring the situation.

> tl;dr we didn't give a damn about performance and aren't even sure what Denuvo does to our game and didn't properly QA test

Imo, You couldn't have shot yourselves much better than you did. The high price coupled with Denuvos negative reputation itself is an argument for not buying the game and ironically for crackers to try and break the drm.

A lower price without a superfluous DRM would certainly have been a detractor for piracy. A 15$ game with no DRM is less enticing to crack and more of an easy decision to buy.

I for one would probably not buy the game for this much and coupled with the performance issues it's doa at the moment. Hope that denuvo fee was worth the lost sales to you guys.

[Mike]

Originally posted by Skexer:

A lower price without a superfluous DRM would certainly have been a detractor for piracy. A 15$ game with no DRM is less enticing to crack and more of an easy decision to buy.

I really don't understand.. here in Brazil its R$ 55,00, which is around $ 16 but i've seen people saying it's $30 out there, is it really true?

[Zappieroth]

Yes it is.

[Kaldaien]

It's truly a sad day when a developer has to justify or apologize for using Denuvo :-\ The fact that you have to explain what Denuvo does is equally unsettling. The people you can reach through precise explanations like this already know that Denuvo's limited to protecting DRM.

For all the trouble I've had with the anti-Denuvo community, I'd say don't let them bother you. They're loud and annoying, but (mostly) harmless.

[◠⊙◡⊙◠]

Everspace w/o Denuvo: 70,710 ± 7,840 owners
Vanquish w/o Denuvo: 53,431 ± 6,815 owners
Rime w/ Denuvo: 3,410 ± 1,722 owners

Checkmate

[凹口凸口凹口凸]

Originally posted by Skexer:

>There is a small performance hit associated with this, but at this time we do not believe it is causing the problems that are currently being reported. We might be wrong. We’re monitoring the situation.

> tl;dr we didn't give a damn about performance and aren't even sure what Denuvo does to our game and didn't properly QA test

Imo, You couldn't have shot yourselves much better than you did. The high price coupled with Denuvos negative reputation itself is an argument for not buying the game and ironically for crackers to try and break the drm.

A lower price without a superfluous DRM would certainly have been a detractor for piracy. A 15$ game with no DRM is less enticing to crack and more of an easy decision to buy.

I for one would probably not buy the game for this much and coupled with the performance issues it's doa at the moment. Hope that denuvo fee was worth the lost sales to you guys.

Why you complain? You dont even have this game. Nobody whines about steam drm for some reason (because its easy to crack ofc), only about denuvo.

[Zappieroth]

I don't care for Denuvo or any of it, As long as ill always have access to my game I don't care for the internet connection part thing (if that is actually true) Cus I always have internet.
And personally never had a problem with it so I can't speak from experience what could possibly be bad about it (though I have read bad things)

But yeah I own Vanquish as well and it's not becuase Denuvo that I would or would not purchase a game.
It's dependant on how it runs how it looks and how it plays.
If all that is good and the game is fun then you have no complaints from me.

This game however does not do such a great job at the performance department and that is probably also why it has such low sales.

[beerland]

Originally posted by Dariuas:

The only thing that Denuvo is currently doing for us is checking to make certain that Steam’s (or Origin’s) DRM is still attached to the game. There is a small performance hit associated with this, but at this time we do not believe it is causing the problems that are currently being reported. We might be wrong. We’re monitoring the situation.

Ah the good old giving paying customers a worse experience because of pirates. Good reason for me to not buy it, I'll just wait till it gets a huge discount and when denuvo is removed.

If you think denuvo convinces many pirates to buy it all of the sudden... haha. Those days are long over and by giving paying users a worse experience you are losing out on even more sales. Good job!

[Zappieroth]

Once a pirate always a pirate ARGHHH

[aquapendulum]

It sure is easy to defend Denuvo when you have top-grade Internet and never have to deal with the hassle of the lowly plebeians.

But what do I know? I'm just one of those lowly plebeians. Just a lower class that the elites spit on for not having the kind of infrastructure that they have. It's obviously our fault.

I should know my place and settle for my filthy Denuvo-less games.

[HideoKoncima]

Thanks guys.
Btw, I have 1080, and also with TXAA, the situation isn't much better...
I already reported to Customer Support

[Kaldaien]

Originally posted by aquapendulum:

It sure is easy to defend Denuvo when you have top-grade Internet and never have to deal with the hassle of the lowly plebeians.

But what do I know? I'm just one of those lowly plebeians. Just a lower class that the elites spit on for not having the kind of infrastructure that they have. It's obviously our fault.

I should know my place and settle for my filthy Denuvo-less games.

It takes all of 400 ms to activate a Denuvo game even on dial-up. I really don't know what you think Denuvo is, but it's clearly not that.

[aquapendulum]

Apparently somebody in this thread is trying to rewrite history and telling me that this is not the work of Denuvo: https://twitter.com/aquapendulum/status/839688043183267840

Boy, being an elite sure doesn't improve your memory, huh?

[Kaldaien]

Originally posted by aquapendulum:

Apparently somebody in this thread is trying to rewrite history and telling me that this is not the work of Denuvo: https://twitter.com/aquapendulum/status/839688043183267840

Boy, being an elite sure doesn't improve your memory, huh?

Again, the speed of your Internet connection has nothing to do with that. I'm going to write you off as a troll and have a conversation with someone more reasonable. Good day :)

[monbou13]

So roughly yesterday you say it's "to protect the experience of the game" or something, and now it's about sales? Can you please just implement whatever DRM you want without complains or explanation? You're embarrassing yourselves to no end here.