Average Denuvo cracking time is now 75 days

Yes.. I said that? You linked the one reference for the very thing I referenced as known to be bad...

Is there any significant difference between the 2018 and 2019 versions?

Also, online multi-player games tend not to get cracked, because then you'd just get banned.

> It is still profitable to add Denuvo for game publishers, because most sales happen in the first week.

This is one of those "false wisdoms" which get perpetuated by DRM industry, very similar to creative accounting to calculate monetary losses due to piracy.

The numbers don't and never did really support this conclusion (even inside the industry). My first hand experience shows that DRM is pretty much about ass-covering between publishing industry and distribution channels - basically so everyone in the chain can say "we did all we could and added this amazing Denuvo thing that's certified by our amazing legal department as completely secure!" and concede the fault for percieved "lost sales" to someone else in meetings with management and board.

For Denuvo they have been better lately at implementing the checks in a way where it does not interfere with performance or if it does, it is very difficult to detect.

But for DRM overall and Denuvo there are numerous issues, and thanks to the "make a game and forget it", principle they games continue to suffer from bad implementation. In particular games with the older iterations of Denuvo continue to have performance issues.

To expand upon this, the older a game continues to have DRM the more problems become apparent. For example just recently in December, where Disney's decision not to renew Securom caused legal owners Tron:Evolution to have their game stop working.[0]

Who knows what fate all those expensive Denuvo titles have in store for them, but we probably have a fair idea. Due to the resources needed to bypass more difficult DRM, often the updated version of the game will remain uncracked and that could make it possibly unplayable for the average consumer if things go south.

[0] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20191204/09531743504/disne...

That seems unlikely. If there were truly so many games nobody cared about then the underlying studios would go bust and stop applying DRM to anything, then fall out of the stats. Also these schemes aren't free so obviously the game companies cared enough to apply it.

For cases where these schemes have cracks days after release, it has historically meant the game was in the hands of crack teams quite a way before the release, usually due to corrupted insiders somewhere in the supply chain. DRM/anti piracy schemes are much more than the software you see on your computer, and the good ones have traitor tracing functionality so corrupted insiders can be found and fixed.

BTW 75 day lifetime for a DRM is about perfectly optimal. It looks like Denuvo have really hit it out of the ballpark if these stats are accurate.

Game/movie sales are very spiky. People wait for cracks but not very long. Most sales are within the first few days. A DRM that lasts even a week can be easily profitable for the firm using it as many will break down and buy the game rather than keep waiting. After a few months sales are reduced to a trickle and nobody cares if it gets hacked at that point.

The thing that most people miss about DRM is that not only is it very temporally dependent but being too strong is just as bad as being too weak. Due to the sales curve if your game DRM takes two years to crack despite huge attention from adversaries, then that implies you engaged in massive overkill. That almost certainly (in the PC space) means you wasted time that could have been spent on the game, or did things that hurt compatibility or would reduce sales in other ways.

The exception is when you have one DRM scheme for everything, like in games consoles. Then of course the cost of a break is much higher and the ROI of unbroken DRM is much higher. But the same principles still apply. For instance, cartridges were historically harder to clone than DVDs, and commodity DVD drives were less secure than the rest of the consoles, but the winning consoles used commodity storage tech anyway and accepted the reduction in security. It's all about ROI.