When people try to defend denuvo because at best 'doesn't change anything' but what does it add? That company is spending money and dev time to implement something that has 0 value to paying customers and you think that is good?
I did say 'at best', some rare cases of good implementation benchmarks show almost no performance degradation but those are the best cases and somewhat rare
I could maybe see an argument being made in favor of having these kinds of security measures for the first month after release to protect sales, since it's usually the period in which most sales are secured; devs do need a sustainable income after all. But that would also necessitate ignoring the potential performance degradation resulting in a poor first experience for players, and many publishers just leave it in for the lifetime of a game, which is a disaster waiting to happen (as seen here).
Overall, I think piracy is mostly a pricing issue above all else. With AAA titles getting increasingly more expensive and being released in broken states, it's not surprising that people don't want to spend $70 on a game that they might end up hating and opt to "demo" the game first. Refund policies can help alleviate the issue, but are hardly a silver bullet, with games inserting tons of fluff at the beginning to ensure you exceed the playtime threshold.
Either deliver the games you promise, or price them according to what's actually there, and I'm sure the majority of gamers would be content in paying full price. DRM only serves to increase friction for the honest people paying for your games.
The only devs who could maybe benefit from sales protection are precisely the devs who can’t afford to utilize it. Namely indie developers who actually see all the profit directly, instead of having been paid up front.
I get what you're saying about devs needing income but devs already got paid for making the game. All revenue after goes to executives who had little to nothing to do with making the game and I know some people could argue that if the company doesn't make money then the devs will be out of a job but that's a BS propaganda argument. Even when games make record profits teams get let go. Fuck blizzard.
It's not necessarily that it's tricky to crack (it's certainly not easy, don't get me wrong), but that there's no point for a couple reasons that combine:
To crack a game you have to redo it any time there's a major release of the game, such as DLC/expansion/major bug fix. The reasons for this are numerous and outside scope. But it takes time.
Most crackers can only do so many games, so they often wait until most or all major additions are out.
Denuvo is expensive and operates on a yearly license
Most game studios only license Denuvo for those first few update cycles when they get the most sales and then remove it themselves because of the cost
That means many don't even bother trying to crack Denuvo because they just can wait it out. It's a resource balancing game on both sides.
Yes, and the word going around is that the biggest cracker of Denuvo has been out of the game for a while. So Denuvo games aren't being cracked at all.
There are many forms of DRM, but as much as Denuvo sucks, it's probably the most effective nowadays.
That day or 2 is where the biggest sales numbers come from because people are too impatent to wait that long to throw money at a broken buggy microtransaction shit show.
And tbh it doesn't look like they are particularly wrong
But also? That kind of makes a huge difference. Story time (so obviously anecdotal and grain of salt and...)!
Way back when there was this series called Mass Effect. All us PC gamers were pissed off that Bioware were traitors who had abandoned us and never wanted to play that xbox shit. Until there was a port of the game to PC and we all needed it in our veins.
Mass Effect PC was one of the first (?) games with activation model securom as a DRM model. And the Scene Group who cracked it first did a piss poor job and the game would crash once you finished the tutorial and got to the starmap. But, because it was the era of multiple Scene Groups vying for power, nobody wanted to be "second" to crack a game.
So the various message boards were full of people complaining and eventually a good many of us pirates just drove down to Best Buy and bought the game because we needed it NOW!!!!
I want to say it was properly cracked within a week? But that was still, likely, very significant sales. Largely for the same reason that publishers/devs pay for day one influencer streams and the like. That is the peak of marketing and when you get all the impulse buys who didn't pre-order.
There were some pretty strong rumours the starmap crash was intentionally built into the game, specifically to create this effect. If that's true, it's genius, but it seems rather unlikely.