Denuvo says its new kernel-level anti-cheat driver is minimally invasive - Denuvo find a new reason for people to hate them

[Ozzigy Osbourne]

The fact these companies are not only still getting away with these shenanigans but actively doubling down on them is astounding. I really doubt there's any hope of salvaging the situation now because the whole industry is a decade past fucked and every attempt to push back against the horrifying anti-consumer practices is drowned out by the droves of preteens that buy it up anyways.

 

[BananaSplit]

I do wish there was some mandatory rule for publishers to remove Denuvo some months or one year later after the release of the game. It annoys me when some older PC releases from 2017 or 2018 still have this crap.

The fact these companies are not only still getting away with these shenanigans but actively doubling down on them is astounding. I really doubt there's any hope of salvaging the situation now because the whole industry is a decade past fucked and every attempt to push back against the horrifying anti-consumer practices is drowned out by the droves of preteens that buy it up anyways.

What bothers me the most are people on Steam forums trying to defend Denuvo by claiming nothing is wrong or the performances issues are a myth. I still did notice a noticeable difference when DMC5 or RE2make got the Denuvo protection removed, like the games booted faster and I had less stuttering/framedrops in general

 

[Marissa Moira]

I do wish there was some mandatory rule for publishers to remove Denuvo some months or one year later after the release of the game. It annoys me when some older PC releases from 2017 or 2018 still have this crap.



What bothers me the most are people on Steam forums trying to defend Denuvo by claiming nothing is wrong or the performances issues are a myth. I still did notice a noticeable difference when DMC5 or RE2make got the Denuvo protection removed, like the games booted faster and I had less stuttering/framedrops in general

The truth is, that they are right in a sense that some users won't get denuvo performance issues. On very high end machines nothing happens. So yes anything to let people strut their CPU Numbers Dick is going to be something worth arguing over, you're not shelling out a few grand just to keep quiet about something.

Also Denuvo won't go away because company shareholders and higher ups demand some form of protection. Shareholders are not the most technologically literate. You need to appease the desire for short term quarterly profits.

Another part of the reason why Denuvo can get away with stuff is that there's no competition. There's a market for protection programs out there and they have a monopoly that nobody is challenging. They can get contracts signed with developers to exclusively use their software at a specific discount which helps keep them in business.

But creating consumer friendly anti-piracy software is a bit of an oxymoron. Anti-piracy has been more successful through hardware measures than software. You want the most sucessful form of anti-piracy? look up Primal Rage. To this day they cannot get it to run arcade accurate because the boards and chips were all custom and the code was as well because it had a shitload of checks required for shit to run. They've tried to track down members to the team to get through issues, but not enough documentation exists and people only knew little bits and pieces and not a full portrait of how everything was set up. That's how you do anti-piracy measures proper, you have to make it a labyrinth. The overall coding is heavily dependent on the custom hardware, if only one thing is out of place the game will have a slew of errors. No emulation program has been able to properly replicate it due to the specific hardware dependencies in the game.

 

[Duncan Hills Coffee]

Doom eternal runs even smoother without Denuvo:

I remember when id removed Denuvo, they claimed that the performance drops weren't because of Denuvo but because they accidentally screwed something up while optimizing the game for the patch. As much as I love id, that just reeks of bullshit because Eternal was already well-optimized. It seems to me that they were trying to cover Denuvo's ass because there was definitive evidence that Denuvo was actively making the game run worse.

 

[Carpenter Trout]

I remember when id removed Denuvo, they claimed that the performance drops weren't because of Denuvo but because they accidentally screwed something up while optimizing the game for the patch. As much as I love id, that just reeks of bullshit because Eternal was already well-optimized. It seems to me that they were trying to cover Denuvo's ass because there was definitive evidence that Denuvo was actively making the game run worse.

I agree, but I think that id was saying it because of Bethesda. Either because someone higher up told 'em to, or because of the already much (and well deserved) hate Bethesda already gets,imo.

The fact these companies are not only still getting away with these shenanigans but actively doubling down on them is astounding. I really doubt there's any hope of salvaging the situation now because the whole industry is a decade past fucked and every attempt to push back against the horrifying anti-consumer practices is drowned out by the droves of preteens that buy it up anyways.

Eh... GaaS also shows how bad the industry is now. Indie would be the future, if some devs wouldn't be so up their asses.

You want the most sucessful form of anti-piracy? look up Primal Rage

Also Rainbow Vegas 2,ubisoft had to use a crack in order to sell it on Steam

 

[Agent Abe Caprine]

Think a lot of Denuvo defenders are just covering their ass. They seem deathly afraid of even sympathizing with pirates. In reality, no one worth speaking to cares. Even the feds don't care about some kid pirating long out of print games.

There's GaaS indies. For awhile, Path of Exile was this. Indie can be just as bad as the rest of the industry. It just has better PR thanks to the dark age of gaming that was the early 10's.