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Bypassing Denuvo in Hogwarts Legacy

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Re: Bypassing Denuvo in Hogwarts Legacy

#51

Post by mavamaarten »

gambiting wrote: post #46
redder23 wrote: post #25

The so-called "rumors" that Denuvo kills performance are not rumors. It's just not true ANYMORE. Older versions impacted performance heavily, but later on the performance impact became negligible.

I used to work at Ubisoft during the whole controversy about Denuvo killing performance in one of the recent Assassins Creeds - all I can say is we've done extensive investigation into this internally, as well as worked with Denuvo to assess these claims and they were just not true, but of course the court of public opinion has spoken so nothing we did or said could have changed it at that point.

There were some cases where there was a noticeable impact, there's quite some benchmarks out there that show a clear difference in FPS and frametimes. But it always seemed like a borked implementation to me, rather than a problem with the product itself.

Re: Bypassing Denuvo in Hogwarts Legacy

#52

Post by noname120 »

Double_a_92 wrote: post #47
lordgrenville wrote: post #9

Pity most of the interesting information is missing because of legal concerns.

Yeah kinda pointless read. It's basically "I did a thing... somehow".

And he didn't prove that he actually did it at all. I will trust him on that given his reputation but the information in the article is so vague and basic that if we solely rely on that thin evidence literally everyone can claim the same.

Re: Bypassing Denuvo in Hogwarts Legacy

#54

Post by the_mitsuhiko »

bdw5204 wrote: post #45
armada651 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's actually pretty effective unlike most other PC DRM schemes. I wonder how much that has to do with the actual technical merits of this DRM scheme compared to older DRM schems. Piracy as a service problem has mostly been solved on PC by now, so there's not a lot of incentive to crack games anymore. Most of what Denuvo does has been done by other DRM schemes before, VMProtect has been used by DRM schemes before D…

It is most likely due to Denuvo being harder to crack because it is a widely hated DRM. Pirates probably want to crack it on principle. I don't think most of the pirates actually care that much about whether people download their releases. They just want the credit within the scene of cracking something that's hard to crack or leaking something before street date. For-profit pirates would be an exception to this but…

> Denuvo is also an exception to piracy as a service problem being solved because it is widely hated even by non-pirates.

Maybe in an abstract Reddit community kind of way. For paying end users I doubt Denuvo comes up much. It works behind the scenes and is pretty reliable.

Re: Bypassing Denuvo in Hogwarts Legacy

#55

Post by autoexec »

bdw5204 wrote: post #45
armada651 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's actually pretty effective unlike most other PC DRM schemes. I wonder how much that has to do with the actual technical merits of this DRM scheme compared to older DRM schems. Piracy as a service problem has mostly been solved on PC by now, so there's not a lot of incentive to crack games anymore. Most of what Denuvo does has been done by other DRM schemes before, VMProtect has been used by DRM schemes before D…

It is most likely due to Denuvo being harder to crack because it is a widely hated DRM. Pirates probably want to crack it on principle. I don't think most of the pirates actually care that much about whether people download their releases. They just want the credit within the scene of cracking something that's hard to crack or leaking something before street date. For-profit pirates would be an exception to this but…

> If pirates rendered it ineffective, companies would not be using it for their games but preventing piracy is worth the backlash as far as they're concerned.

There sure is a lot of very ineffective/broken non-Denuvo DRM out there, but companies continue to include that too. I doubt it's being done to stop piracy (even if only temporarily), but I wouldn't doubt that they think they're getting their money's worth. https://www.techdirt.com/2024/01/19/ubisoft-says-it-out-loud...

Re: Bypassing Denuvo in Hogwarts Legacy

#56

Post by autoexec »

the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #54
bdw5204 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is most likely due to Denuvo being harder to crack because it is a widely hated DRM. Pirates probably want to crack it on principle. I don't think most of the pirates actually care that much about whether people download their releases. They just want the credit within the scene of cracking something that's hard to crack or leaking something before street date. For-profit pirates would be an exception to this but…

> Denuvo is also an exception to piracy as a service problem being solved because it is widely hated even by non-pirates. Maybe in an abstract Reddit community kind of way. For paying end users I doubt Denuvo comes up much. It works behind the scenes and is pretty reliable.

> For paying end users I doubt Denuvo comes up much.

Unless their games run slowly, or they can't install a mod/fan patch, or they want to play offline, or they hate having some third party snooping around on their devices and collecting their data.

Re: Bypassing Denuvo in Hogwarts Legacy

#57

Post by raspyberr »

torlok wrote: post #53
snvzz wrote: post #28

Denuvo is why I do not own this game. And Denuvo will be why I pirate it, should I get tired of waiting for the vendor to remove that crap.

You can also just not play it.

Don't worry. If he pirates it, he won't be depriving anyone else of playing it. No one will miss out.

Re: Bypassing Denuvo in Hogwarts Legacy

#58

Post by gambiting »

mavamaarten wrote: post #51
gambiting wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to work at Ubisoft during the whole controversy about Denuvo killing performance in one of the recent Assassins Creeds - all I can say is we've done extensive investigation into this internally, as well as worked with Denuvo to assess these claims and they were just not true, but of course the court of public opinion has spoken so nothing we did or said could have changed it at that point.

There were some cases where there was a noticeable impact, there's quite some benchmarks out there that show a clear difference in FPS and frametimes. But it always seemed like a borked implementation to me, rather than a problem with the product itself.

All I'm saying is that at ubisoft this kind of issue was treated very seriously, not least because if we found out Denuvo was making our game look poor it would put the entire business relationship in jeopardy. We've devoted significant engineering resources on our end to investigate these reports(and yes, we have seen the benchmarks people have done), and no one was able to reproduce this with Denuvo enabled and Denuvo fully removed from the game - obviously we were able to make internal builds where Denuvo was not even present at all, and those builds performed exactly the same as those with Denuvo enabled.

All I'm going to say is that the benchmarks you see online are for pirated versions of the game where the binary isn't the same as the official patched product, and that has various implications beyond our product or Denuvo.

Re: Bypassing Denuvo in Hogwarts Legacy

#59

Post by badsectoracula »

the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #54
bdw5204 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is most likely due to Denuvo being harder to crack because it is a widely hated DRM. Pirates probably want to crack it on principle. I don't think most of the pirates actually care that much about whether people download their releases. They just want the credit within the scene of cracking something that's hard to crack or leaking something before street date. For-profit pirates would be an exception to this but…

> Denuvo is also an exception to piracy as a service problem being solved because it is widely hated even by non-pirates. Maybe in an abstract Reddit community kind of way. For paying end users I doubt Denuvo comes up much. It works behind the scenes and is pretty reliable.

I am a paying user and i actively avoid games with Denuvo - there is even a curator on Steam that marks games that use Denuvo, which is helpful for doing exactly that.

The reason is simple: i want to have access to the games i bought regardless of Steam and when i buy a game there i also make a separate offline copy for my own archival. Denuvo - or any DRM really - makes that impossible. Fortunately most games (like pretty much all indie games, which are what i mainly buy these days) have no DRM at all on Steam and the few that do make enough of stink for me to know and avoid them.

So yeah, Denuvo is reliable for making me ignore a game (until it is removed at least - amusingly enough that'd often be after a bunch of patches have been released and the game had a bunch sales/price drops)

I'd probably buy a game with Denuvo if i REALLY wanted to play it (e.g. i bought Prey 2017 despite Denuvo) but i'd do that only after the price has dropped to "sandwich levels" (e.g. i bought Prey 2017 at a handful of dollars). Note that i also put money where my mouth is and when a major game that i want to play is released on GOG (which has DRM-free games) i do buy it full price or close to full price.

Re: Bypassing Denuvo in Hogwarts Legacy

#60

Post by pizza234 »

codetrotter wrote: post #5
wincy wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was going to say Lies of P was cracked, but turns out they just removed it from their game. It was up on piracy sites the same day. I wonder why this happens? Does Denuvo cost a lot of ongoing subscription money for a developer or something? I’ve noticed this happens a decent amount.

Every graph I’ve ever seen of video game sales from people who distribute via Steam etc typically has an initial spike if they caught on and got featured, and then a few spikes for things like holiday sales. Maybe the devs of the game you mentioned decided that after the initial spike had passed, and they are in a long tail period, it is cheaper to remove Denuvo. Or they just used Denuvo to protect the game during ea…

re: performance, the submitted article has a very interesting analysis of it (at least, in the context of the game that has been cracked).
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