Denuvo Wants To Convince You Its DRM Isn't 'Evil' (arstechnica.com) 77
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Simply mentioning the name "Denuvo" among some gamers is pretty much guaranteed to get you an instant, strong reaction. Just look at the comment threads underneath any Ars article covering Denuvo and you'll see plenty of complaints about the DRM-enhancing anti-piracy technology. Irdeto, the company that acquired Denuvo in a 2018 purchase, doesn't generally make a habit of commenting at length on this reputation (or its secretive DRM schemes) in the public press. So when Irdeto Chief Operating Officer of Video Games Steeve Huin agreed to defend his company publicly in an exclusive interview with Ars Technica, I jumped at the chance to talk to him.
Huin stressed to Ars that he sees Denuvo as a positive force for the gaming community as a whole. "Anti-piracy technologies is to the benefit of the game publishers, [but also] is of benefit to the players in that it protects the [publisher's] investment and it means the publishers can then invest in the next game," he said. "But people typically don't think enough of that." "Whether people want to believe it or not, we are all gamers, we love gaming, we love being part of it," he continued. "We develop technologies with the intent to make the industry better and stronger."
[...] While the Denuvo name has become practically synonymous with its "anti-tamper" DRM technology, the company now hopes it can be just as well-known for its recent anti-cheating efforts. Denuvo's anti-cheat technology works on "some of the same principles" as its anti-tamper DRM, Huin said, but is aimed at maintaining code integrity at runtime rather than just when a game is loaded. "The core is the same, but the function of what they do is different," he said. Because of this difference, Huin allowed that, unlike Denuvo's anti-tamper DRM, the anti-cheat product could have "a very low impact" on a game's performance. "Less than one percent is the metric we use for validating," he said.
Huin stressed to Ars that he sees Denuvo as a positive force for the gaming community as a whole. "Anti-piracy technologies is to the benefit of the game publishers, [but also] is of benefit to the players in that it protects the [publisher's] investment and it means the publishers can then invest in the next game," he said. "But people typically don't think enough of that." "Whether people want to believe it or not, we are all gamers, we love gaming, we love being part of it," he continued. "We develop technologies with the intent to make the industry better and stronger."
[...] While the Denuvo name has become practically synonymous with its "anti-tamper" DRM technology, the company now hopes it can be just as well-known for its recent anti-cheating efforts. Denuvo's anti-cheat technology works on "some of the same principles" as its anti-tamper DRM, Huin said, but is aimed at maintaining code integrity at runtime rather than just when a game is loaded. "The core is the same, but the function of what they do is different," he said. Because of this difference, Huin allowed that, unlike Denuvo's anti-tamper DRM, the anti-cheat product could have "a very low impact" on a game's performance. "Less than one percent is the metric we use for validating," he said.
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He's not wrong. Here are the usual excuses people come up with to steal games and music:
1) I can't afford X, where X could be $1, so I'll steal it.
2) I wasn't going to buy it, but I'll go out of my way to steal a copy so I have it.
3) It's not available in my country and since I'm entitled to everything I want, I'll just steal it.
Steal in this sense is like wage theft. Work has been done, but not compensated for.
But yes, now mod me down. Let the hate flow through you.
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Also publishers often steal the game anyway. Wanna play Disco Elysium? Go ahead, pirate it. The devs had their game and IP stolen by the publisher and are on record saying go for it.
And then there's abandonware. Does it really matter if I "steal" a copy of Panzer Dragoon Saga? Am I stealing when I play the fan game recreation of Sonic 06 with the bugs fixed?
Support your devs, *especially* the indies. I'm old, I'm way, way t
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DRM is something suites demand get put in games so they can tell their investors they're doing something about the 10m downloads they see on pirate bay and pretend those are all lost sales just waiting to be reclaimed.
Indeed. It also is used when people mistakenly believe that nobody can live without their content. It is by now well established that making copying harder reduces profit for the ones doing it. First, it does not even necessarily result in more profit in the short term. People may a) not bother and b) stay away specifically because of the DRM and c) DRM is expensive. And second, if people pirate your first game, they may well buy your second one. Not all of them, but exposure is good and long-term results i
Re:Nope (Score:5, Insightful)
So they dislike copyright infringement. Ok, fair enough. That doesn't justify punishing all the paying customers by shoving this unwanted garbage on them.
Many other game makers find it quite lucrative to restrict their anti-piracy efforts to ones that don't enrage their customers, such as using Steam, making it "naturally" an online game, or just asking nicely. If they can do it and succeed, you can too!
Re:Nope (Score:4, Insightful)
Many other game makers find it quite lucrative to restrict their anti-piracy efforts to ones that don't enrage their customers
Don't currently enrage their customers. Denuvo knows that people are outraged, they just want people to stop doing that.
Allow me to refresh your memory: people found out that the Quake 3 demo was spying on them -> outrage! But it's shiny, so... Now every game spies on them -> barely a murmur.
Turbo Tax required activation -> outrage! How dare they demand that I ask permission to install a product that I purchased! But then Half Life 2 did it, and it's shiny so...
They removed LAN play from Call of Duty, to force people onto their servers -> outrage! We will boycott [reedpopcdn.com]!
Diablo 3 required continuous activation -> outrage! That's worse than regular activation somehow! But it's shiny so... Wait! It sucks! Ha, a victory for principles! We totally stuck to our guns there, now lets all buy Diablo 4.
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Quake 3 demo? The one that came out in 1997? What kind of spying do you think it was doing? Call of Duty can still be played on a LAN. Diablo 3 is an online only game. And wtf does Turbo Tax needing activation have to do with HL2? Nothing you said makes any bloody sense
Re:Nope (Score:4, Informative)
I don't know about current versions of Call of Duty, I haven't played any since the first game, but that was the reason for the boycott that I linked. Or maybe that was about player-run online servers? That might have been it. Either way, the point remains the same.
Turbo Tax was the first significant instance of consumer software requiring activation. It caused outrage at the time, and the CEO excused it with something like, "This is the future." and was treated with much contempt. Then Half Life 2 came out, and required activation, and gamers decided to put aside their principles in order to play Half Life 2.
Diablo 3 is a single player game which requires a continuous network connection. You can call that "online only" or you can call that "continuous activation" but this, like the others, was a source of outrage which resulted in a lot of rationalization on the part of players who wanted to be principled but who didn't want to sacrifice anything or do anything at all in order to preserve those principles. Fortunately, the game wasn't good enough to set a precedent.
All of these are examples of players drawing a line in the sand for the sake of high-minded principles, and then blithely stepping over that line the moment they found it to be inconvenient. I thought this was clear, I don't know what about this you were unable to follow. Maybe it was only clear in my head. At any rate, all of this is a counterpoint to the parent's suggestion that Denuvo should stop doing things that players think are bad. Clearly, it doesn't matter what players think is bad.
I also thought it was funny that the parent held up other methods of copy protection as positive examples, like Steamworks DRM and forcing players online (as Diablo 3 did). These were at one time widely considered to be contemptible things, now being treated as virtuous.
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Many other game makers find it quite lucrative to restrict their anti-piracy efforts to ones that don't enrage their customers
Don't currently enrage their customers. Denuvo knows that people are outraged, they just want people to stop doing that.
Obviously, they want to keep their flawed business model going. After some experiences, Denuvo is now an immediate "will not buy" for me, and that will not change ever again. The only thing they can do to get back into my good graces is to die and go away.
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am not so sure when it comes to books:
for example there are a lot books, some pretty expensive, where you can't get a (decent) preview anywhere.
then there are some are in PDF format only.
i have no reservation in trying to find out if said book is worth the risk of buying it .... if the content is good, even having the PDF, i usually end up purchasing it. ... mostly because i like a physical copy of things, don't like reading content from a screen.
PDF only books tend to be rubbish again and again, and I am c
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Which games haven't been cracked yet?
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So none of them? Gotcha thanks.
Re:Nope (Score:4, Interesting)
I dont know about this line of reasoning.
For me, personally, it looks more like this:
There is demand for a product, and there is X amount of finite resources to exchange for that product. (Where this X amount, dwindles more and more each year, due to market forces that reduce consumer discretionary budgets)
If there is simply insufficient resources to exchange for the product, no matter how much it is demanded, the production of that product is unsustainable, and or, non-viable. The individual or company producing that product cannot continue, and production must cease.
If there is *PROFIT*, by definition, that threshold has not yet been reached.
If there are competitors to the delivery or production of a product, this competition drives down the price through supply side economic factors, by diluting demand.
Copyright, by its nature, serves to secure a monopoly on the production or distribution of a product, specifically to thwart this dilution, and to increase or set a fixed price.
Due to this being a defacto monopoly on distribution or production, the terms of copyright were specifically intended to be of limited duration, the limits there to, were specifically intended to ensure a 'modest, and workable' largess for the producer, so that this largess can be utilized to create more products. It was never intended to be used to generate endless largess, or to milk the market on the long chain forever.
Modern copyright terms have been incrementally extended over the past century, to such a point that this is essentially what occurs, in contravention with copyright's initial design or purpose.
Due to this incremental change over time, producers now feel entitled to that endless largess generation, bank their production budgets around that endless largess production, complain when they fail to meet the expected margins, and point fingers at everyone but themselves when this occurs.
At the same time, incremental capture of regulatory apparatus by the managerial classes of society has seen to the slow and steady increases in largess of their respective firms, at the continual and steady reduction of such by their employees, This curve is very damning, and very noticeably decoupled from inflation, such that actual spending power of the lay public has been dwindling consistently and computably for at least the past 50 years.
In the past 10 years, there have been strong market indications that these trends CANNOT continue, as there is insufficient market liquidity (financial resources in the total market) to sustain such tactics. The largess of these large entities is greater than the national budgets of many nations, some even when combined together, while the people they produce products for (Presumably), become less and less capable of purchasing them, at the fixed rate prices demanded via the copyright terms, that have been so extended. Such market indicators include, but are not limited to-- sharp reductions in home ownership, stark reductions in attendance of higher education, stark increases in average consumer debt, sharp increases in percentage of income to cost of rent ratios, and many more.
In the face of these trends, the ready ability to circumvent the fixed pricing paradigm comes into play. Software (and media) Piracy thus serves the long overdue function of reducing net market costs for these products, through (illegitimate) addition of suppliers (eg, pirate groups) to the market, diluting supply, and thus driving down net product value indicies through that dilution.
The usual math that gets involved with supply/demand economics comes into play, as pirate offerings, despite what Pro Media pundits may claim, are not in fact, FREE. They come with a number of BADs assigned with them, such as risk of being strapped with statutory damages, the risks of lost productivity or utility of their computer or media platform through viruses, the risk of lost time through falsely named uploads, and a bevy of other BADs.
This leads the
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And none of these excuses actually effect a company's bottom line. The studies have been done. Fighting piracy in these ways always ends up costing companies more money than they could possibly recoup.
You could make a game 100% pay whatever you want with zero DRM and make way more money than any game with DRM - as long as it's a good game.
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And on the other side: I have the money, would buy it, but then I find it has real problems because of the DRM. Hence I simply walk away, in particular from Denuvo crap. That is _worse_ than pirating it, because a pirated copy is still exposure.
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Steal in this sense is like wage theft. Work has been done, but not compensated for
We have a civilization built based on work. The work of many generations. A lot of much more important people never get perpetual compensation either.
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1) I can't afford X, where X could be $1, so I'll steal it.
If they have enough to afford a hardware platform to run that software I doubt $1 would cause them to acquire the IP without payment. Some other reason is operative. Can you think of any?
2) I wasn't going to buy it, but I'll go out of my way to steal a copy so I have it.
If they don't want to buy it, see the answer to point 1.
3) It's not available in my country and since I'm entitled to everything I want, I'll just steal it.
If it's not available in their country, then even paying for it is a violation of their countries laws. Payment in that circumstance is simply an admission of guilt. I can imagine any number of reasons people would avoid leaving a large clue about their actions. Can yo
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You should look at online poker. They've had a technology called "Bartender" that makes sure nobody is seeing or hearing other people's down cards. (Cards that were not yet or never flipped over... origin of the phrase "You've got to pay to see the cards.")
Extending this concept to other games makes sense to me... who's going to fund an online game where it's who cheats who wins.
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Extending this concept to other games makes sense to me... who's going to fund an online game where it's who cheats who wins.
As far as I can tell, just about everyone provided that your definition of cheating includes paying the game publisher money to win. My definition of cheating definitely includes that.
Re:Nope (Score:4, Insightful)
They could convince me if they DRM expired and left the files open after a decade. Otherwise...no. It is my current position that nothing with DRM deserves copyright protection. If the stuff will never go into public domain, then it doesn't deserve copyright, and I don't believe that there is any legal justification for it. (Note I'm not claiming the laws as written and interpreted by the courts accept this argument.)
The entire purpose of copyright and patents is to ensure that creative works become available to the general populace. When this isn't done, their justification fails.
Defective by Design = Evil (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes it is EVIL, and its discrimination. (Score:1)
DRM also acts as a form of illegal discrimination that actively discriminates against people with disabilities that are protected under the ADA.
This form of discrimination is illegal.
Blowing Smoke for the most part. (Score:3)
DRM (Score:3)
I don't play class A titles any longer because of DRM. Thank you Denuvo for sucking.
I don't care about the DRM debate (Score:4, Insightful)
But Denuvo actively destroys game performance and in many cases pirated games run faster/smoother than the legitimately acquired ones. It really doesn't matter what Denuvo is or does. It could give blowjobs and generate pictures of puppies for all I care. It remains evil for what it does and shouldn't be in games.
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As the saying goes, "DRM == defective by design."
You obviously do care. And so you should.
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You obviously do care. And so you should.
No, what I'm saying is I don't care about anti-cheat or anti-piracy measures, ... providing they don't negatively impact the game. Denuvo does which makes it shit. Put DRM in as much as you like, as long as the game works when I want to use it and doesn't drop frames you're good to go.
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However, they do impact negatively ... by design.
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Another similar term - "Planned obsolescence."
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Not really. Obsolescence depends on what someone does with DRM. I have games that have DRM from the early 00s, they still run just fine.
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Remember.... software is licensed, not given to you.
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That's why I prefer GPL and especially AGPL software.
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Which video games would you recommend that were released as GPL or AGPL from day one with professional-quality visuals? (Doom wasn't GPL from day one.)
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Sorry, but I tend to play Alpha Centauri, and occasionally Civilization CTP. Neither are open, but they don't require a hub on the web to play. I bought them about 20 years ago, though.
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Vega Strike https://github.com/vegastrike [github.com]
Pioneer https://pioneerspacesim.net/#s... [pioneerspacesim.net]
Both in the same category of space combat/trading simulators because that's what I'm interested in. There may be many others that I'm not aware of.
Any form of DRM is broken by design. (Score:5, Informative)
What DRM does is it creates major problems:
- It slows down the games.
- it makes them crash more.
- It removes your ownership of the games. You are not in control anymore.
- it is so broken that you cannot play some old games anymore: for example SecuROM games cannot be played on Windows anymore as the DRM got blacklisted because of its vulnerabilities.
- it makes your computer less secure and more prone to crashes: most of the DRM now creates kernel driver that integrates into PC systems that should not be tampered with
- It makes you locked in into Windows: for example you cannot play most Denuvo games on Linux with WINE (i.e. using SteamDeck)
- If DRM is not supported anymore the digital release that uses it becomes useless. You cannot play it.
So what do we have? DRM has *no* real positives and tons of negatives. Yeah, great technology.
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Indeed. I have by now _not_ bought several games because of this crap. Piracy does not matter. Piracy does not turn into sales because of DRM. But DRM keeps people that would buy away and DRM makes games more expensive.
can they make it an system wide app that updates i (Score:2)
can they make it an system wide app that updates it self and does not need the game dev to update it?
can they make updates free to the game dev so they can do them?
Re: Any form of DRM is broken by design. (Score:2)
Punish the Innocent (Score:1)
It's a toxic brand (Score:2)
As such, isn't it a bizarre business decision to roll out a different product, in this case anti-cheat, under the same toxic name?
As a gamer, denuvo is toxic to me because it's been blamed for performance problems by publishers who have stripped it from their games. As a PC owner, it's toxic to me because I don't like installing something I suspect could be a new vector for malware. As a consumer, it's toxic to me when games that have been out for a year or more, which I consider buying on sale, still requi
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even though my understanding is the best it's ever done is delay a crack by a couple of months.
Seems it's gotten much more effective: https://www.reddit.com/r/Crack... [reddit.com]
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It's emotional (Score:4, Insightful)
That's what Denuvo is selling here, not really to the devs I imagine but the publishers and the suits.
A warm blanket that quells that feeling of disgust they get when the idea of someone getting something they didn't earn kicks in. That feeling is enough to override all the downsides it might cause and the fact that in the end it tends not to matter anyway as the games chances of getting cracked eventually is pretty much 100%.
On top of that is the cost to integrate it into the game, weed out any performance problems, extra support time to deal with customer issues related to it (i remember GameSpy causing tons of problems) as well as the money they pay Denuvo for the privlege of using their product in the first place which I have to imagine is like a 6-figure sum for a AAA title.
Now none of this excuses piracy, support your game devs, even the big guys if they make a product you enjoy, but has there ever actually been a product that was genuinely good that lost money due to piracy? They are clawing for theoretical money they feel they are missing out on. It's the perfect ploy, you can't prove it worked one way or another!
Sorry ... (Score:1)
but if your DRM software is crashing a game because VSCode or Notepad++ is running in background then your DRM software is broken.
These names.... (Score:2)
Re: These names.... (Score:3)
Because it will make you like laxatives.
Too bad (Score:1)
Steeve Huin is a stupid little bitch. Anyone who believes Denuvo has any positive benefits is complete moron who deserves to be set on fire.
Necessary tech, terrible company making it. (Score:2)
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Well, I have never pirated a Denuvo game. I have bought one a few times only to refund it because it ran terribly and I am now staying away completely.
I somehow doubt that is the effect they are aiming for.
Re: Necessary tech, terrible company making it. (Score:1)
Evil assholes claim not to be evil assholes (Score:2)
Yes, very convincing. I probably have by now spent more than $500 less on games because of Denuvo. I also have refunded games made significantly worse because of Denuvo.
ProTip: Pissing of paying customers is not a good business strategy.
Owner of asbestos mine... (Score:5, Funny)
That tracks (Score:1)
Villains also often see themself as the good guys.
DRM itself is neutral (Score:2)
It's the way DRM is used that is evil.
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DRM is not neutral, it's inherently evil because of its power to enforce user-hostile walled-garden computing. There is no positive use for that. Denuvo has treaded dangerously close to producing a practically-functional DRM system that is theoretically breakable but practically unbreakable, and that would be the worst invention in the history of computing.
HAHAHA! No! (Score:2)
On top of the software treating you like a criminal where as the pirates don't have the performance issues.