Average Denuvo cracking time is now 75 days • Hacker News Board

Re: Average Denuvo cracking time is now 75 days

#51

Post by thu2111 » Sat, Jan 04, 2020, 12:47 PM UTC

fxtentacle wrote: post #44

OriginalNebula wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about FIFA then?

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.

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

I think that's another way of saying they're too hard to crack properly, i.e. the servers can always detect cracked copies of the game because the modifications aren't perfectly disguised.

Re: Average Denuvo cracking time is now 75 days

#52

Post by thu2111 » Sat, Jan 04, 2020, 12:51 PM UTC

pieno wrote: post #9

qazpot wrote: post #2

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

You are assuming that everyone purchasing a game, would not purchase it if they could download a pirated version. Call me naive, but I like to think that a lot of people that have the money to purchase a game in the first week, would still purchase it even if a cracked version is available. Just look at the billions of revenue earned by Spotify and iTunes before it, even if most music is available on release date (or…

Games publishers have all the data you're talking about and much more. They've all mostly experimented with either no DRM on game releases or very trivial DRM, and have models that can predict quite accurately these days what investment into a protection will yield what sort of return.

I'm always shocked by the frequent assumption made by people in the software world that game/movie studios don't know what they're doing financially, despite decades of experience and being the world's biggest entertainment businesses. Of course they know.

Re: Average Denuvo cracking time is now 75 days

#53

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jan 04, 2020, 1:08 PM UTC

Certhas wrote: post #25

tomc1985 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect that number is far lower... like 95% PC Gaming may be mainstream now but in its nerdier days awareness of cracking was quite high... and I imagine it still is among demographics that cannot afford to plunk down $60 for the latest whatever-they-want

Awareness of cracking is high, but if you own a PC that can play these games you can afford 60$ to pay for the game. Or you can just wait a little and get one of the millions of games on Steam for approximately no money.

[deleted]

Re: Average Denuvo cracking time is now 75 days

#54

Post by auxym » Sat, Jan 04, 2020, 1:16 PM UTC

rangibaby wrote: post #14

pieno wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are assuming that everyone purchasing a game, would not purchase it if they could download a pirated version. Call me naive, but I like to think that a lot of people that have the money to purchase a game in the first week, would still purchase it even if a cracked version is available. Just look at the billions of revenue earned by Spotify and iTunes before it, even if most music is available on release date (or…

Don’t forget about hyped up kids, they spend months posting to forums and Reddit about how (new game) will be the best thing ever. Then once they get a chance to play it are disappointed since it is impossible to live up to the expectations they have built up in their mind, then immediately move on to the next big thing. Before it’s cracked they will probably buy it because of how excited they are and FOMO

Kids also don't have much money to buy games, and have lots of free time to figure out how to pirate them. Maybe some of them can convince their parents to buy it for them.

For me Buying a 60-80$ AAA game (I was a teen in the early 00s) by earning 5$ from time to time mowing the lawn or washing my dad's car was a hard sell. Even when I started working retail at min wage (7$), it was still a hard sell.

Re: Average Denuvo cracking time is now 75 days

#55

Post by lousken » Sat, Jan 04, 2020, 1:30 PM UTC

I have about 200 games in my library but not a single one with denuvo. With denuvo it you aren't buying a game, but just a permission which can expire at any moment and it's gonna be up to the developer if they want to fix it or not.

Re: Average Denuvo cracking time is now 75 days

#56

Post by sp332 » Sat, Jan 04, 2020, 1:31 PM UTC

username90 wrote: post #13

qazpot wrote: post #2

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

So why not remove the DRM after the first week then?

Doom removed it after four months. https://kotaku.com/denuvo-explains-why-doom-dropped-their-an... Rime removed it after the DRM was cracked. https://www.pcgamesn.com/rime/rime-denuvo-removal Rage 2 and Hitman 2 also removed it after a while.

Re: Average Denuvo cracking time is now 75 days

#57

Post by oliwarner » Sat, Jan 04, 2020, 2:04 PM UTC

I think it'll still deliver what publishers want until that number's under a week.

New releases are big money. The biggest money.

It'd be nice to see them formally acknowledge this by republishing DRM-free copies after 90 days.

Re: Average Denuvo cracking time is now 75 days

#58

Post by the_mitsuhiko » Sat, Jan 04, 2020, 2:15 PM UTC

username90 wrote: post #49

the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s the benefit for the publisher to do that?

DRM often creates bugs and performance problems for users, so removing it makes users happy.

If they see it’s the cause they can decide. From that i can tell there is very little evidence that Denuvo causes problems if well implemented so i doubt there is much incentive to remove it.

Re: Average Denuvo cracking time is now 75 days

#59

Post by klyrs » Sat, Jan 04, 2020, 2:22 PM UTC

naniwaduni wrote: post #4

I think it a grand irony that the only graphs on this page that aren't barely-interpretable depictions of category error are, of all things, the pie charts.

It's so bad; the curves are hurting my eyes... my favorite part is where the curves get clipped to a suddenly straight line. That only seems to happen when the numbers are the min/max of the data range. Whoever wrote this fitting algorithm needs to be drawn, quartered, and fashioned into a pie chart macabre.

Re: Average Denuvo cracking time is now 75 days

#60

Post by jdietrich » Sat, Jan 04, 2020, 2:25 PM UTC

Certhas wrote: post #25

tomc1985 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect that number is far lower... like 95% PC Gaming may be mainstream now but in its nerdier days awareness of cracking was quite high... and I imagine it still is among demographics that cannot afford to plunk down $60 for the latest whatever-they-want

Awareness of cracking is high, but if you own a PC that can play these games you can afford 60$ to pay for the game. Or you can just wait a little and get one of the millions of games on Steam for approximately no money.

You can put together a competent gaming PC for about $400 these days. Buy a refurb business desktop with a fourth-gen i5, add a GTX 1650 and you can run pretty much any game at 1080p on medium settings.

A lot of young people (or people in middle-income countries) can scrape together a few hundred bucks for an entry-level gaming PC, but would find a $60 game to be prohibitively expensive. IMO the move away from demo versions and physical media has substantially incentivised piracy - if you can't try before you buy and can't resell your game, you're less inclined to hand over your hard-earned cash for a game that you might hate.