PAYDAY 3 is one of the most anticipated cooperative titles of this 2023 that will allow us to enjoy alone or accompanied by friends (or other players) a lot
The official Steam page for Deep Silver and Starbreeze’s PAYDAY 3 game has been updated to show the use of this ever-controversial third-party DRM.
Why are we still preordering AAA digital video games from multi-million dollar corporations?There is no incentive to preorder AAA video games anymore - long gone are the days of midnight launches for physical games.
Cyberpunk 2077
Returnal
Forsaken
The Lord of the Rings: Gollum
Fallout 76
Grand Theft Auto: Definitive Edition
The Last of Us Part 1
No Man’s Sky
Etc. ad nauseum
All of these games came with a half-assed apology from the publisher and how “this wasn’t their intention”. Yes, it was absolutely their intention. They released a knowingly broken game and charged us full price for it. They already got our money and laughed because they know we’re too stupid to do anything about it and that they’ve trained us well with “fear of missing out”.
How many times do us gamers need to get burned by video game publishers until we learn our lesson?
Stop rewarding and encouraging their predatory behavior. Opt out of this abusive practice by not preordering and voting with your wallet. Let them earn your money, so “they can feel a sense of pride and accomplishment”.
It really depends. There are some fan-fucking-tastic games that I did preorder, like FFXVI, Metro Exodus, SF6, TLOU:2 (I didn't like the story, gameplay + graphics saved it for me), Zelda: TOTK, Elden Ring... the list goes on.
It's a DRM scheme to protect against piracy. Over the years I saw more and more shitty titles use Denuvo on release because God forbid someone steal their cash grab. A lot of titles that are of quality usually do not see the need for Denuvo.
Therefore, nowadays, for me Denuvo serves as an indicator of a potentially shitty release. They slap Denuvo on top of it so that they can pump & dump.
Maybe I'll buy the game when it's on sale, but for now I am too skeptical, especially since slapping additional DRM on an already DRM'd game (it's multiplayer only and always online, unlike previous parts that allowed offline play) does not make any sense to me.
Edit: Seems the below statement was factually incorrect. Oops!
It's a very obnoxious and heavy-handed approach to anti-piracy measures. It slows down games, kills framerates, gives users a whole host of other performance issues, and just makes the experience worse overall. It's a product that doesn't even seem to care to improve, because they make their money from publishers, not the people who buy and play the game. Many people hate it, and I believe it's absolutely justified.
Denuvo in particular causes performance issues. And drm in general just gives the paying customer an inferior product when the pirates will just just get the better version.
There have been instances where it worsens performance. My computer is mid tier-ish at this point (3070, i7 10700k) and I haven't noticed any poor performance from games running Denuvo (latest I tried Dead Island 2). It's likely worse performance loss on older systems, but those older systems probably can't run new AAA games well as it is.
I think most people don't like the fact that it takes a while to crack games running Denuvo, so they're not able to be pirated for that time.
Denuvo has become a very strong indicator to me that not the game devs are calling the shots during development, but the Excel-sheet-business-suit-monkeys are.
Only some business-fool would look at a proposal to buy that piece of performance-guzzling crap and go "Hey, then everyone who'd be a pirate otherwise will buy my product and spend money in muh cash shop, that's totally worth the investment", ignoring the immense drawbacks for paying costumers.
especially in a frickin' coop-shooter where piracy will never be as big of a deal because people want to play together with others on your frickin' servers anyway....
Yeah, I don't get it -- the game is essentially online-only (not sure if you can play with bot teammates like the previous titles, but that wasn't too enjoyable anyway). Why pay for Denuvo as well unless you're out of touch?
Overkill blew all their money with that WW2 spin off. And it crashed so hard there was a John Cleese shaped crater where it hit rock bottom.
They were only able to make Payday 3 with significant external investment. So basically, PD3 is going to be a gutted and whored game since those investors will get significant say what goes into the game. Denuovo just being the most obvious right now.
You're right. And even disregarding always online and/or GaaS elements if it's anything like the other two PAYDAY games there is pretty much no reason to play it offline. It is a co-op game through and through.
Adding DRM to a co-op game is one of the stupidest things you can do. The only thing I can think of that would be worse would be adding DRM to a game that is already always-online.
If you do your authentication with online servers properly it is virtually impossible to get the full experience by pirating anyway so the only thing you're doing by including DRM is taking performance and convenience from paying customers
The main point of co-op games is to play with friends. In order to do that, you (usually) need to connect to the games official servers, which you can't do on cracked games (for the most part) which makes DRM pretty pointless. It prevents you from enjoying maybe a lazily thrown together campaign and it's more of an insult than anything else.
Plus, it's also worth mentioning DRM hurts paying customers by causing reduced performance in-game and also inconveniencing them.
Fwiw, Denuvo is actually really hard to crack. There's like one well-known person who is capable and she's incredibly unlikeable. Agreeable sentiment though; Denuvo sucks and harms legitimate consumers (arguably more than it inconveniences pirates).
The price of this game makes it one you should definitely be a patient gamer on. Not only will you save a ton of money but it'll probably be Denuvo free eventually too.
It'll be on game pass so I'll probably still test it out, but I really don't get why a Payday game would need anti-piracy measures since the whole point is to play co-op
Agreed. I gave up on PD2 because their update scheme involved reinstalling the goddamned game every couple of weeks. Massive pain in the ass for a hotfix.
One can surely run his own server for payday 3 to connect to. I'm not really knowledgable about game hacking but I guess a DRM will make this more difficult.
The whole point of Denuvo (and any DRM in games) is to prevent modifying the running code. Unless there's some kind of official modding system, there will be no way to inject DLLs or do anything else invasive to the running game.
Good implementations of Denuvo have such a minimal impact on the quality of the game experience that I tend towards optimism when I hear this kind of news. That said, bad implementations of Denuvo cripple the game in a way that previous horrible DRM schemes could only dream of. I'm not planning on playing Payday 3 (I never had any fun with 1 or 2), but I hope that this is the former situation for its fans.
The main problem lies with the fact that the game already is online only, so adding denuvo feels a bit like a fuck you sign from the publishers. And adding the fact that payday 2 thrives from the modding community makes it hard to know if modding will be possible and encouraged by the devs with payday 3
DRM takes away from development budget (it isn't free). If they are charging me for the experience, I don't want to fund something that, best case, detracts from my experience using the product. If there were an actual argument that the drm would prevent developer losses (I'm willing to ignore the overwhelming data suggesting piracy, in fact, leads to increased profits), I'd be somewhat sympathetic, however this is an online only, co-op game that requires server handshakes. There is not even a hypothetical benefit to invasive DRM, so why would I agree to pay for it?
As usual, any announcement of Denuvo in a PC game is met with immediate ire, ostensibly from the gaming community. But you already knew that Denuvo doesn't affect performance unless it's configured to make an extreme amount of checks, and it definitely doesn't ruin hard drives. You wouldn't share reactionary misinformation would you?
Be honest. You just hate that pirating the game is going to be more difficult.
We don't already know it doesn't impact performance, we don't know what checks it will make, and we don't know that denuvo ACTUALLY impacts sale numbers by convincing those mean old pirates to buy their game.
That’s what reviews are for. If the game runs poorly, don’t buy it. Whether the bad performance is caused by Denuvo is irrelevant to my purchasing decisions.
There have been good and bad implementations of Denuvo. It’s disingenuous to pretend all games go one way or the other when there are so many examples of both. Supposedly review outlets like Digital Foundry will soon get access to protected and non-protected builds of new games so that they can directly measure any performance impact.
Calling people shills is really shitty behavior. All you’re doing is inciting conflict, not contributing to any rational discussion.
we don’t know that denuvo ACTUALLY impacts sale numbers by convincing those mean old pirates to buy their game
But we do know it improves sales, that's why every game publisher that can afford it is using it. They have years of data to prove it. What do you have?