Hey everyone, today I want to talk to you about Greenheart Games, the developers of Game Dev Tycoon and the upcoming Tavern Keeper (which will be using Denuvo).

When they released Game Dev Tycoon, they uploaded a tampered with version of it to pirate sites, trying to find proof of how much piracy affects sales, while also calling piracy stealing, which is factually incorrect.
Then they claimed they are victims of piracy and how over 93% of people pirated the game instead of buying it. After that the game ended up being a massive success selling millions of copies, but until this day they continue to play the victim.

As seen here, they are really deluded though, and they still think they are the victim at this point.

"But you released your first game DRM-free and it was a success.

We had an extraordinary amount of luck with our first game. It is highly unusual that a first game is successful. Many games fail, whether they use DRM or not." Great explanation for the use of Denuvo, right?

Then they proceed to claim that piracy harms sales, and there is no way it helps sales. That's despite this study that the EU didn't publish because it's not in favor of the narrative that piracy impacts sales negatively, proving otherwise. You can download that study here[cdn.netzpolitik.org].

Then, in the same forum post, they also claim that Denuvo only requires being online after the first install and when making hardware changes, which at first I thought they just don't know any better. But in the meantime there has been a lot of evidence suggesting they are most likely actively lying about everything. They also claim people complain about Denuvo requiring an internet connection at all times, which is false, because most people don't actually think that. It's just another attempt to paint the people that dislike Denuvo as uninformed lunatics.

"Denuvo requires me to be always-online.

Denuvo does not force a game to be ‘always-online’ - It requires a single online activation upon first start (similar to Steam itself). Once activated you can play the game offline as any other single-player game on Steam in offline-mode. You might have to go online again if you make big changes to your hardware configuration."

Since then, they've been creating multiple threads on the forums, supposedly to allow people to talk about Denuvo and them to justify it. They keep deleting any posts that are critical, that show proof of Denuvo creating issues, or posts that ask for numbers showing Denuvo does anything for sales and it's not just a money dump. Then every once in a while they delete the entire thread and create a new one.

There are hundreds of posts on the subject and they've been actively banning people and deleting posts that don't fit their narrative.

Here[imgur.com] they claim the game won't run at 60 FPS and how we shouldn't even expect 60 FPS.

They also deleted the post someone made showing they can't play the demo because of Denuvo: here is the deleted post[imgur.com]
Then when questioned about it, they claimed that's out of the scope of the thread (what?): here it is[imgur.com]

I won't go through every single thing they wrote but just check out the forums, before they delete more posts, and you'll see they are actively lying left and right and censoring every post that shows data of Denuvo having any negative impact.

It's very clear they are doing everything in bad faith, and they hate their customers as much as Funcom.

Also worth mentioning that lukaself wrote multiple polite and well worded posts and they keep gaslighting him pretty much, and continously giving non answers to him and everyone else.

Coe from the Shitlisting Service group also posted an announcement about them, please check that out too, he's going through many things I didn't mention here. Check that announcement here.