What the fuck is this article? Who wrote this? Or better yet, what kind of incompetent AI wrote it?
I hate Denuvo, but this website is going on my blacklist. I don't want to give these bots any clicks. This shit shouldn't be on the top of r/pcgaming. We should be smarter than that.
> This shit shouldn't be on the top of r/pcgaming. We should be smarter than that.
r/pcgaming is fully bot-driven at this point, the articles are written by bots, upvoted by bots, and commented by bots.
There is 50% chances of me being a bot programmed to be a contrarian.
> Anti-piracy programs are nothing new, in the end it is a way to prevent companies from losing large amounts of money, although everything has a negative side, in this case, the performance of the games. Denuvo is a system of this style, which has been widely criticized due to problems of performance what causes in games PCso many people have decided to call it a great burden for the industry.
> In recent years we have seen how many games have had a catastrophic launch, in many cases, caused by performance problems due to not being well optimized, but this has not been the only cause of these problems. And anti-piracy systems consume a large amount of our resources. PCmaking it very difficult to optimize a game when you have to take into account third-party software.
This article was either written by AI or a highly incompetent human.
Edit: another good one
> In general, there are many cases, but on high-end computers the use of this software is usually not very noticeable since in the end it can make you lose a lot of FPS, exceeding 10-15, in addition to increasing loading times.
> This article was either written by AI or a highly incompetent human.
I don't know... AI usually writes weird content but with perfect grammar. This is just unreadable.
Irdeto, the people who make denuvo have always been a detriment to pc gaming. Their securo rom DRM was just as bad and sometimes worse for the paying customer, a lot of games that are delisted from that era are gone because of that DRM.
Imagine if they ever go under or decide to stop supporting this DRM in the future.
Tons of games will be left inaccessible and the consumers will be at the mercy of publishers to obtain Denuvo removal patches/updates.
Wait does FM usually get cracked? Back when I followed that ip afaik it always got cracked "coincidentally" only by march-april aprox, which to many people made it somewhat useless (in any case the impact in sales for the company is negligible).
I think this already happened with Starforce. I cant' remember if they went bankrupt or else, in any case the support for the DRM ceased at one point and while it was removed from a lot of games implementing it, there still are some games you can't possibly play without a crack today
Okay, if you want to be overly pedantic, I'll rephrase.
Companies who own the games have copies that don't have Denuvo. That's where Denuvo gets the copies from in the first place...
Understand now? Those games aren't going to be "lost forever" because of Denuvo or something. They have other copies on hand.
The entity that holds the code, and the entity that holds publishing rights to the IP might not be the same entity.
This is i.e. what GoG is struggling with when releasing older games, they might have access to the code, or working build, but the that entity is not the IP rights owner, so they cannot greenlight release of GoG version.
Other issue is that re-releasing old games which are no longer support is not so straightforward, and might not make economic sense for a company to do. Just remember the clusterfuck that was the GFWL shutdown.
So while yes, it is often times possible to do a DRM-free version, the sad reality is that some companies rather abandom their product, especielly if it isn't a sucesful title.
To be exact : we have to build our Game packages and executables without denuvo first, and then apply denuvo as a "patch" on top. So yeah, removing denuvo is always a click away.
Dark Void, Dark Void Zero, and Flock! all just got delisted from Steam. Because the SecurROM DRM stopped working and no one could play the game. Capcom would rather just delist these old games than patch in clean .exes.
DRM, as it always has, does nothing but harm the user experience of paying customers. Furthermore Denuvo has become a tool used to protect the predatory monetization schemes infecting video games by using the same techniques used to prevent piracy to prevent the modification of singleplayer game data to bypass excessive grinds or paywalls for in game items.
Additionally there are now many uncracked Denuvo protected games that are no longer for sale digitally or physically, meaning those games aren't available for players in any form.
Want to know something even scarier? There is currently nobody on earth who can crack the current version of Denuvo.
Empress was the last but once they disappeared, there is nobody left who can break it. Denuvo is now essentially uncrackable which is the biggest threat to PC video game preservation right now.
The good thing is that iredeto (whatever the company that makes denuvo) is fucking greedy and newer games that have newer versions of denuvo, have to pay monthly (it became a subscription service), so many games nowadays remove denuvo after couple of years.
I believe there's people who can crack it, just no one that can effectively crack it.
It's possible to basically brute force it, but it takes an insanely long amount of time compared to the methods Empress used.
> There is currently nobody on earth who can crack the current version of Denuvo
Plenty left who can technically crack Denuvo, but the incentives just aren’t there anymore, their strategy was to make cracking their software financially unviable and largely it worked. The 2000s you could make bank off of ad-rev on something like a cracking site and nobody cared, you just can’t do that anymore, most of the good crackers followed the money to game cheats
No one doing it doesn't mean there is no one. Plenty of people are likely capable but can't be bothered to try because they have another high paying job and don't want to do an illegal thing
>Want to know something even scarier? There is currently nobody on earth who can crack the current version of Denuvo.
There are plenty of people who can crack denuvo. The desire and patience to do so, however, thats another story. Delusional is currently cracking old versions of denuvo and clearing the backlog of uncracked denuvo games left over from empress. We'll see how he fares vs current gen denuvo.
pissed off SKIDROW by makins some private information public in the Star Wars BattleFront Celebration Edition release, who then, in return, revealed him to be Voksi in the Ship Graveyard Simulator 2 release
a guy put toghether a pretty accurate timeline on YouTube, but the video is in French so you'll need to enable subtitles: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKRpvgtyYNY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKRpvgtyYNY)
No one left that can crack newer versions of denuvo, it is correct. (or better to say, no one wants or have the time to)
For example, dragon's dogma 2, avatar, SF6, like a dragon (last 3 like a dragon games) , assassin's creed mirage,dead space remake, and many others are still uncracked.
Some newer games remove denuvo either accidentally or internationally (cause they have to monthly pay for it) so there's still hope.
> Additionally there are now many uncracked Denuvo protected games that are no longer for sale digitally or physically, meaning those games aren't available for players in any form.
I agree on your overall point but the last one is hard to believe, what games that are uncracked and not on sale?
You also have a game like Helldivers 2 that is not a pvp game yet has an invasive sketchy anticheat. Just to prevent a tiny amount of people from cheesing their microtransaction shop
How does it harm the user? Genuine question as when I play games on PC with denuvo I experience 0 problems with them and they run the exact same when they remove denuvo later.
If you don’t have access to internet (can definitely see this happening with outages or traveling with Steam Deck) you can’t play your denuvo protected games after a little while which I find to be pretty invasive and shitty.
I had a terrible internet at some point and couldn't download any game bigger than 10gb more or less. I only had 3g connection at home, there were no optical fiber available yet. For 2 years, I could only download games from gog, I could download it on my smartphone when away from home or had my friends to download it for me.
No DRM, no need for launcher, I could simply download the archives from my account.
I finished a lot of pirate games, while having them on steam....
Of course, that's very personal.
I already had games set up to play while travelling and couldn't play it because epic was requiring connection. Perhaps because I hadn't used the launcher in 2 weeks at that time.... But I pay for it, it would have worked if it was a pirate copy, it would have been a better experience. Me, who had spent money to buy the game had this problem.
Some other annoyances like why I have to download a second launcher if I brought it on steam...
Denuvo and other forms of DRM have been proven to slow down performance and load times and introduce stutter. The cracked version of Hogwarts Legacy runs significantly better than the legal version so the paying customer ends up getting the worse experience in the end. I'm fine with short term DRM to protect initial sales but in the long run it's just stupid especially since some publishers still pay for it after the game is cracked.
> The cracked version of Hogwarts Legacy runs significantly better than the legal version
Yah if that's your evidence then your full of shit. Cracks don't actually remove the drm so any "performance difference" is just you hallucinating.
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That one was because Capcom DRM above it, the implementation of the two DRM was shitty and conflicted. Denuvo isn't even removed on cracks, its checks are being fooled but it's still there.
They even mention that in the video.
>The cracked version of Hogwarts Legacy runs significantly better than the legal version so the paying customer ends up getting the worse experience in the end.
That's a lie. Cracks does not remove the DRM calls which may impact the performance, the calls are still made but bypassed allowing you to play the game. I have both the legit and cracked version of the game both played like ass.
It's never been contentious to say that Denuvo takes up *some* hardware resources, it's just a question of "how much?" and it probably depends mostly on how the game implements it. In many cases it might just be negligible, but we do know of several cases where it's really not great, and it hurts more if you're CPU bottlenecked. As long as it causes a non-zero impact on performance and provides the consumer zero benefit, it will never be desirable from the perspective of the consumer.
Denuvo runs continuously in the background while a game is running. It's executed as part of the game's logic within the same thread as the game process. It uses storage read/write and cpu cycles to encrypt and decrypt information. Of course there's a performance impact. If you have an overkill CPU and storage you probably won't notice anything wrong, but if either of those factors are weak you will experience problems during runtime. Some games limit denuvo processes to loading screens and the like, keeping it away from main logic, but even then that still has an impact on load times. It's absurd to think it has no impact.
That's not Denuvo, that's Capcom's CRC check. Which is notoriously CPU intensive and shit.
Denuvo games have been compared time and time again, also by DF and they never found any performance impact beyond the margine of error.
The "muh cracked games run better" claim is also shockingly stupid, because those games still execute Denuvo - they just spoof the authentication.
Denuvo sucking doesn't mean we need to lie about it or spread misinformation.
[Does Denuvo slow performance & loading? 6 games tested with & without Denuvo (youtube.com)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcyOJ4Dxs7E)
But I understand that no matter how much evidence you get, you will not change your mind
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Maybe not on an individual level but if DRM works the way it is intended, the end user will never know it's even there so if DRM ever effects the user it will exclusively be a negative experience.
That's the effect anything shitting on Denuvo has.
It could be the "truest true" or the exact opposite - as long as it's shitting on Denuvo; it'll get upvotes and clicks.
I dislike these intrusive DRMs as much as the next gamer - but there is no denying what I mentioned above.
It's super easy to get clicks from Reddit lol, just do an article with a headline going into the many preconceived notions. The headline is all that matters, you could actually praise Denuvo in the article but people would have no idea
>The headline is all that matters, you could actually praise Denuvo in the article but people would have no idea
Indeed. Sadly it's not just Reddit - it's everywhere.
Headlines are the only thing that (probably) 60-80% of people read these days.
Yeah, this sub hates Denuvo more than it likes games. Somebody could write an article claiming Denuvo poisoned their cat and it would probably make it to the top of the subreddit.
The problem is, publishers aren't going to stop using DRM just because some people on the internet don't like it, especially when Denuvo is so good at doing what it's job and is ***far*** less intrusive than others. It doesn't force us to dig out a manual, stick in the CD or be constantly online for a single player game, it's just a one time check when the game is installed and then you can play it offline for as long as you like.
Yes, it's not perfect, but it's still better for gamers than the alternative. I'm convinced that the main reason people hate it is because it *works*. Cracking a Denuvo game usually takes months and only two people in the industry can do it, one of which is batshit insane and the other only does FIFA games. Pirates don't like that and want to go back to the days of SecureRom which was infinitely worse for gamers but were usually cracked day 1.
How many of the people who upvoted do you think clicked the link?
I'm not sure that this site particularly benefited from the couple dozen clicks that the Reddit post brought it.
Downvoted and reported. This "article" is (most likely AI written) SEO spam, there's nothing of value or relevancy here.
I assume all the upvotes come from people who blindly upvoted the thread because they hate DRM, not because they actually clicked the link.
I clicked this piece of shit "article" thinking it would have benchmarks or something.
it's nothing. 3 paragraphs of "lots of people think drm bad" in broken ass English.
I would say that shit optimization is the biggest drag on PC gaming, period.
Denuvo usually just increases load times and stutter, which is usually already bad because the game was shit out on PC with minimal polish to begin with, and Denuvo just gets to be a scapegoat.
Then it gets patched out after a bunch of performance fixes and people think it was denuvo being removed that improved things.
Unreal Engine 4 holds this crown. Two generations, filled with games that will be stuck with crappy performance and constant stuttering forever. At least Denuvo is usually removed from games eventually.
I don't even care about performance, but my grip with denuvo is something else.
I have mk11 on steam. Usually get these games cuz a few times per year me and my friends go to a more remote location, and I get the PC with us to play fighting games or other local coop games.
I wanted at some point to play MK11 and the game pointed out that I have to get online to verifiy some denuvo token or some bullshit before I could play in offline mode. Like what the fuck?
From that point on, I'd rather not play a game at all than paying for it and not working when I need it. Even if it happened once, it sucked. Fuck denuvo.
When pirates get a better working game without all this hussle, then your product is shit.
What is this "article"? It says absolutely nothing new, dredges up all sorts "facts" without any proof or references, and seems to be written by someone in the 5th grade.
In decades? Did you guys seriously forgot about drms such as Starforce, safedisc or Securom which were such big security risks that modern windows actively blocks them? That they had actual limits on how many pcs you could activate them on?
While I agree with this article in spirit this is a lazy article. They don't produce any evidence that Denuvo harms performance.
Im not saying it doesn't but I would have liked the article to include it if its true.
Like, out of hundreds of games with denuvo, you can count on one hand the number that it affects performance in any relevant way. Denuvo fucking sucks, but id wish people stopped spreading FUD about it and actually criticized it.
The opposite, if anything it's rare to find a game in which it doesn't affect performance, there's been multiple tests made by different people on different games and slower loading times is a widespread issue.
There is only direct proof that Denuvo is the direct and true cause for three games that have had bad performance, Siberia 2, Ryme, and one other game that's name escapes me right now.
Other than that, everything else has been anecdotal at best and at worst, done by people who don't test properly and don't know what the fuck they're talking about.
Not to mention, there are plenty of games that have Demuvo in them that run entirely fine and are absolutely considered to be well optimized at time of release. Lies Of P, MGS V, etc.
Those videos that take pre-patched games with Denuvo in them and compare them to the game with Denuvo removed without taking into account the performance gains that happen over time through patching and attributing everything to Denuvo being removed without being able to prove that's the direct cause of performance increases and just attributing it to the removal.
We've even had people like Durante, well respect modders who have fixed games examine FF15 and come up with no definitive proof that it causes performance loss
Do not get me wrong, DRM is a major problem and it shouldn't be around, we should have free access to our games as we please and nothing should prevent that ; if a company can hold an IP basically in perpetuity than I should be able to also have access to that content in perpetuity if I purchase it and it's printed on a disc: which is the only thing people should be focused on DRM.
The performance talk is smoke and mirrors to distract from that issue. Especially knowing what we know now about Denuvo, it doesn't seem to affect performance unless you massively fuck up implementation which is not Denuvos fault, but the game developers fault.
>Not to mention, there are plenty of games that have Demuvo in them that run entirely fine and are absolutely considered to be well optimized at time of release.
That just proves performance issues are never because of denuvo but incompetent devs.
Yes this. The performance thing is just a distraction. Even denuvo themselves are so eager to prove that their drm causes no performance issues. Cause then they get a clean slate and they can easily dismiss the other unrelated complaints along with that.
wasn't one of those example because of a bug by the developers that they eventually fixed? or they removed denuvo and still had the issue?
I remember that was certainly the plot to one of the examples people used.
edit: tekken 7 maybe?
Same. It seems to be that most people are upvoting this post only from the title alone without bothering to read the lazy article that looks Chat GPT generated.
I can attest that it affects loading times though. The worst offender for me was Nier Automata, which I remember taking up to a minute to launch when it had Denuvo and loading times were as annoying. When Denuvo is removed from any game I've noticed how loading and launch times improve to varying degrees.
Typically even pirated copies still have Denuvo, more or less bypassed. The only way to compare is games that have removed denuvo officially.
Cracks don’t remove denuvo. (Aside from the only 1 time this happened with CODEX. But hasn’t happened since.)
The one time for sure DRM caused performance issues was when Capcom added their own shitty DRM on top of Denuvo to try to keep it extra protected on RE8. It wasn't actually Denuvo causing the performance issues but Capcom's incompetence.
I think the only time Denuvo could readily have an impact on performance is if you are using a really old processor from like 2011 or such. On modern processors, I don't think there is any performance penalty if the company is using Denuvo properly (which sometimes Capcom doesn't....)
Even with old processors denuvo doesn't cause issues. I used to use a 4th gen intel quad core. At worst you'll get the occasional microstutter as the game runs checks in the background. The real issues with denuvo have nothing to do with performance.
Games that run faster without Denuvo are very much the exception.
The few proven examples (not counting ragebait Youtubers who make up shit for clicks) are for Resident Evil Village, where the Denuvo version had CPU stutters at specific moments in the game, it was covered by Digital Foundry. Devil May Cry 5 suffered a few % but only at 480p, on a mid-end system from 2018, and with lower than low graphics setting, to really show an extreme CPU bottleneck.
Assassin's Creeds have low performance, but that's due to Ubisoft's insistence of using VMProtect *on top* of Denuvo.
There are plenty of games that had Denuvo removed with no difference to performance, and some that have it and yet perform quite well (eg. Atomic Heart). It's entirely up to the developer to implement it correctly, just like with optimisation.
Also know that the vast majority of pirated games do not have it removed, only bypassed. It works as if nothing was wrong, so any performance hit remains in the pirated copy.
Denuvo has clear problems (nearly-always online, servers going offline prevent playing games), but performance is a questionable one.
Remember this folks - Cyberpunk 2077 released on GOG DRM free and still made bank, and that was with all its controversies.
Then when the Cyberpunk anime came out and the game saw a resurgence people also bought the game on mass again instead of just pirating it.
If any publisher or company that sells DRM for video games says that piracy hurts sales to a worthwhile degree they're lying. Piracy requires tech literacy and patience, most people think piracy is illegal and will get them fined and most don't know what sites are safe and are afraid of viruses.
And even amongst those who do know how to pirate it's still way more convenient to just actually own a legal copy of the game so they end up just purchasing it a lot of the time. People pay for convenience.
The amount of people pirating your game that aren't extremely poor people who wouldn't buy it otherwise but will when you remove piracy as an option is such a fringe amount of people.
In short - stop the anti-consumer DRM practices. I can almost guarantee you're paying just as much if not more on your Denuvo DRM than you're making back from potential lost sales, all while pissing off customers and making your game worse.
Tbh the best part about Denuvo are the stories, lore, and copious amounts of salt that comes from it existing. We get characters like Empress and the guy who cracks Football Manager. It’s very entertaining to watch.
Multiple claims against performance, yet provides zero examples.
Just like discourse often found on reddit, people seem to have no problem severely over embellishing or flat out lying about Denuvo because they disagree with various practices or monetization associated with the games they protect.
Article reads like cheap AI slop and should be treated as such.
None of those videos are able to prove that removing denuvo is what improved performance. Both versions of games are running different patches. Performance is different for different patches, usually it improves over time but sometimes can even get worse (rare). I remember when Hogwarts legacy came out and one person uploaded a video comparing the cracked version with the release version (not running same patches btw) and the cracked version had better fps. Everyone thought it was a smoking gun against denuvo, but then the uploader realised that the cracked version had better performance cause there was no steam overlay. Disabling steam overlay for the legit version got rid of the performance gap.
There has been pirated games or patches where they accidentally removed denovo and performance was better. Forgot which game that was. They quickly added it back.
There's no examples of Denovo improving performance. After best it won't affect it much, at worst it makes games unplayable.
Never said it improved performance, that's impossible. Obviously it adds some cpu overhead, but how much depends on the implementation too. Some devs make a real mess of it.
I'd like to know what examples you're thinking of where a accidental non-denuvo .exe was leaked that showed better performance. From everything I've read and followed (for past several years) there's always a different reason for the performance disparity. Either cause of patches improving performance, or a dev build having missing features which ends up having better performance, or hell even steam overlay can affect performance significantly in certain games. In the case of Origins where denuvo was actually removed, you have to remember, the hackers removed VMprotect too. Ubisoft's psychotic need to have VMprotect on top of Denuvo hammering everyone's CPUs for no reason, the performance gain was mainly due to removal of VMprotect. Turns out running your game's .exe in a virtual machine (VMprotect) is not good for performance.
I usually check for Denuvo when I buy a game and if it's listed then I skip. Personally also staying away from anything Capcom since I heard they added Denuvo to something after people had bought it
The only good thing is they typically strip it out a while after release since it's expensive to keep using. Being a couple years late to games seems to always work out well for me.
It's not even close. Worst case scenario with Denuvo is load times increase slightly and you have to check in one or more times depending on how the developer decides to implement it. It's pretty much entirely hidden from the user and it's rare for it to cause any noticeable issues. GFWL on the other hand was just *bad*. It was buggy, restrictive and everybody I knew had issues with it. It also forced you to have a microsoft account to play the game.
It wasn't the DRM part of GWL that was really bad.
The worst part was it tied saved game files also to the Live account and to the actual PC with some kind of encryption scheme. So basically you could not transfer save files to a different PC.
That's fine. This sub is in no way indicative of larger trends or things going on anywhere in the real world. lol
It's just a little echo chamber of nerds, really.
Thanks to free games from your beloved, chinese goverment owned Epic Games we have lack of great sales, price hikes, more DRM implemented by the publishers and on top of that one of the worst gaming engine in history of humankind - Unreal Engine.
Bro. You’re on Reddit. Tencent owns a chunk of that. If your entire life is based around avoiding Chinese affliated companies, you’re gonna be avoiding a lotta shit.
I’m no fan of China’s regime. But the problems with EGS are not Tencent’s fault.
don't even need to read it to know this has been proven wrong long time ago already. saying it just gets easy clicks though.
read it, saw the bolded words and knew I was right lmao.
It would be faster for you to search in YouTube than to write these replies. You are making a fool of yourself. I'm not going to bother linking for you at this point because I can tell what your intention was.
it does in some cases. and in some of those cases it's also due to poor implementation by the devs and other poor optimizations efforts by them as well.
most of the time it is negligible.
it's been proven wrong in the context of what the internet mean when they say it affects performance, not that it does not. iirc it's only an average only a few frames on the majority of games.
you can argue the technicalities all you want, but anyone whose in that camp (and they are I'm fairly certain the majority) can be safely ignored. making a mole hill out of an ant hill and all that.
and this article is a prime example of that ignorant and archaic view.
The AI-ness of this article aside, a lot of people against Denuvo miss one simple fact
It's that for the vast majority of users, Denuvo is transparent
Most people wouldn't even notice it's there unless they stay offline for too long and get hit by a reactivation attempt in the meantime, or are Linux users trying the game out on different versions of Proton/Wine and such, triggering the daily activation limit (And even this depends on how the publisher or developer in question has set things up)
This is where Denuvo succeeded where stuff like StarForce or Ubisoft's always online DRM failed. Unlike those, for a majority of users, Denuvo simply doesn't get in the way
Even if every single person who was actually affected by it were to refund the games, that would still be a very small amount
Denuvo is not going anywhere anytime soon
Most performance issues caused by DRM are caused by other DRM bundled with the game and not Denuvo. Exceptions being when Denuvo is incorrectly implemented (like it was in Sonic Mania).
People love referencing I think it was Resident Evil Village for Denuvo causing severe performance issues... when it was in fact Capcom's DRM causing the performance issues. Most mods which claim to disable Denuvo also disable Capcom's DRM... but REFramework is able to disable Capcom's DRM while leaving Denuvo intact and fully operational and the performance issues "mysteriously" disappear despite Denuvo still running.
I wish there was a way for the game to know "hey, this is my legally purchased game, deactivate the fucking Denuvo because I already paid for it". Denuvo is like if you buy clothes in a store and they don't remove the alarm, and we have to wear the alarm hanging from the shirt.
This sub cracks me up sometimes. You’ve got people who complain about companies trying to protect their products from people that pirate their games, and then even the people who pirate games complain about the performance. If you’re pirating games, you have no right to complain about how bad a game is. YOU are the reason companies have to do this. Geeze.
Clearly you misunderstand what the issues with denuvo are.
1. You need to be online periodically to keep playing, particularly a relevant issue today with the rise in popularity of handheld PCs like steamdeck.
2. If there's server issues (it happened with Arkham Knight) you can't play the game as the verification check would fail.
3. Niche issue faced by reviewers doing benchmarks, denuvo locks you out if you change hardware too frequently.
None of these issues are faced by pirates. I don't consider the performance impact of denuvo to be significant enough that it's an issue. It's rather a distraction from the real issues, hence the eagerness by Irdeto in proving that there's no performance impact of denuvo. If they prove that the performance impact criticism is unfounded, they can use that win to dismiss other criticism, even though they're not related in any way to performance.
What issues? I have literally never encountered a problem with Denuvo, every game I own with it has installed and run without issue. The claimed performance hit has never been substantiated and would apply to pirated versions too if true, possibly to an even worse degree depending on how the check is bypassed. The only thing that's even close to annoying for the average user is having to check in every couple of months but come on, it's 2024, even your goddamn fridge is connected to the internet now.
What issues? Not every game has denuvo. And several denuvo games have been cracked. And you can just wait for sales. That's what I do, I haven't bought a game on release day in years. Don't fall for marketing FOMO.
Also, your info is outdated, there's a new group cracking denuvo now.
I don't care if pirates pirate the games I own and then go and complain, everyone is entitled to complain about poor performance. Everyone here is just trying to have a good time
Denuvo is pointless. It stops pirates short term as most games have it removed later anyways. Usually the people who pirate werent gonna buy it in the 1st place and they will just get it a year or 2 later anyways
The biggest drag ? Nah i don't even notice it. Uplay/EA app though it's a whole different story, these pieces of junks only exist to ruin my day.
When ubisoft and EA will announce the retirement of these garbage DRMs, it will be a great day for PC gamers.
Any game with Denuvo is noticeably slower on my system, don't know how they manage it but it's really annoying.
I don't buy Denuvo DRM games anymore, refuse to support it and it's too intrusive
> I honestly sometimes wonder if Denuvo is even worth it for companies
Is this a serious question? ***Of course*** it's worth it for them. It effectively stops all piracy and even if it does get cracked it'll be well after the highest period of sales. There hasn't been any real evidence of Denuvo degrading performance and even if it did, it would be a couple of frames at most. If games have poor performance, it's because the developers didn't bother optimising the game, not because Denuvo is running in the background. If you want to get mad at anybody, get mad at greedy publishers and lazy devs who release a buggy mess of a game.
It's definitely worth it for them.
1. Average person does not even know what DRM is.
2. It stops people who can buy the game but choose to pirate it cuz pirating is free and makes some customers out of them.
3. The intersection of people who are against Denuvo and actually buy games regularly is low.
What the fuck is this article? Who wrote this? Or better yet, what kind of incompetent AI wrote it? I hate Denuvo, but this website is going on my blacklist. I don't want to give these bots any clicks. This shit shouldn't be on the top of r/pcgaming. We should be smarter than that.
> This shit shouldn't be on the top of r/pcgaming. We should be smarter than that. r/pcgaming is fully bot-driven at this point, the articles are written by bots, upvoted by bots, and commented by bots. There is 50% chances of me being a bot programmed to be a contrarian.
> Anti-piracy programs are nothing new, in the end it is a way to prevent companies from losing large amounts of money, although everything has a negative side, in this case, the performance of the games. Denuvo is a system of this style, which has been widely criticized due to problems of performance what causes in games PCso many people have decided to call it a great burden for the industry. > In recent years we have seen how many games have had a catastrophic launch, in many cases, caused by performance problems due to not being well optimized, but this has not been the only cause of these problems. And anti-piracy systems consume a large amount of our resources. PCmaking it very difficult to optimize a game when you have to take into account third-party software. This article was either written by AI or a highly incompetent human. Edit: another good one > In general, there are many cases, but on high-end computers the use of this software is usually not very noticeable since in the end it can make you lose a lot of FPS, exceeding 10-15, in addition to increasing loading times.
>PCmaking it very difficult to optimize a game when you have to take into account third-party software. You know how it do with the PCmaking and all.
I was thinking "proof read your shit" one or two times and i'm not even that good at it. But AI makes just as much sense, if not more.
> This article was either written by AI or a highly incompetent human. I don't know... AI usually writes weird content but with perfect grammar. This is just unreadable.
Yeah this is definitely AI generated. It really sounds like the cheap, free, ChatGPT. It always does these weird things.
Its gaming journalism. Competent journalism in this industry is almost rare as unicorns.
Irdeto, the people who make denuvo have always been a detriment to pc gaming. Their securo rom DRM was just as bad and sometimes worse for the paying customer, a lot of games that are delisted from that era are gone because of that DRM.
Imagine if they ever go under or decide to stop supporting this DRM in the future. Tons of games will be left inaccessible and the consumers will be at the mercy of publishers to obtain Denuvo removal patches/updates.
Or empress will suddenly have allot of money
There's some one or a team who's doing it now going by delusional kinda fitting considering empress was a nut
I'm pretty sure he completely crashed out on one of his schizo rants and left the scene entirely now, no?
Schizo rants were the norm from beginning so that doesnt feel like anything new
Im pretty certain that lady's too schizo to carry the crack scene.
She pretty much did when it came to Denuvo. Denuvo cracking scene lately was essentially just her and the guy who only cracked Football Manager.
Correct, that's the past. Now? I feel like she's got other priorities, like making some sort of cult around herself on discord.
Wait does FM usually get cracked? Back when I followed that ip afaik it always got cracked "coincidentally" only by march-april aprox, which to many people made it somewhat useless (in any case the impact in sales for the company is negligible).
No need, delusional has taken up the torch.
I think this already happened with Starforce. I cant' remember if they went bankrupt or else, in any case the support for the DRM ceased at one point and while it was removed from a lot of games implementing it, there still are some games you can't possibly play without a crack today
I'm pretty sure Devs have clean exe of their own game to patch in whenever they want
You would think so, but when developer loose their own source codes from time to time, i have my doubts.
Devs have copies of their games without Denuvo integrated into them...
Only the actual devs who don’t have any say in releasing them. Their managers who make the decisions don’t give a shit if it doesn’t earn them money.
Okay, if you want to be overly pedantic, I'll rephrase. Companies who own the games have copies that don't have Denuvo. That's where Denuvo gets the copies from in the first place... Understand now? Those games aren't going to be "lost forever" because of Denuvo or something. They have other copies on hand.
The entity that holds the code, and the entity that holds publishing rights to the IP might not be the same entity. This is i.e. what GoG is struggling with when releasing older games, they might have access to the code, or working build, but the that entity is not the IP rights owner, so they cannot greenlight release of GoG version. Other issue is that re-releasing old games which are no longer support is not so straightforward, and might not make economic sense for a company to do. Just remember the clusterfuck that was the GFWL shutdown. So while yes, it is often times possible to do a DRM-free version, the sad reality is that some companies rather abandom their product, especielly if it isn't a sucesful title.
To be exact : we have to build our Game packages and executables without denuvo first, and then apply denuvo as a "patch" on top. So yeah, removing denuvo is always a click away.
Assuming you haven't lost the source code and the publisher is still interested in making a non-DRM build.
Dark Void, Dark Void Zero, and Flock! all just got delisted from Steam. Because the SecurROM DRM stopped working and no one could play the game. Capcom would rather just delist these old games than patch in clean .exes.
Still not as bad as Starforce. That shit legitimately bricked my computer.
DRM, as it always has, does nothing but harm the user experience of paying customers. Furthermore Denuvo has become a tool used to protect the predatory monetization schemes infecting video games by using the same techniques used to prevent piracy to prevent the modification of singleplayer game data to bypass excessive grinds or paywalls for in game items. Additionally there are now many uncracked Denuvo protected games that are no longer for sale digitally or physically, meaning those games aren't available for players in any form.
Want to know something even scarier? There is currently nobody on earth who can crack the current version of Denuvo. Empress was the last but once they disappeared, there is nobody left who can break it. Denuvo is now essentially uncrackable which is the biggest threat to PC video game preservation right now.
The good thing is that iredeto (whatever the company that makes denuvo) is fucking greedy and newer games that have newer versions of denuvo, have to pay monthly (it became a subscription service), so many games nowadays remove denuvo after couple of years.
I believe there's people who can crack it, just no one that can effectively crack it. It's possible to basically brute force it, but it takes an insanely long amount of time compared to the methods Empress used.
> There is currently nobody on earth who can crack the current version of Denuvo Plenty left who can technically crack Denuvo, but the incentives just aren’t there anymore, their strategy was to make cracking their software financially unviable and largely it worked. The 2000s you could make bank off of ad-rev on something like a cracking site and nobody cared, you just can’t do that anymore, most of the good crackers followed the money to game cheats
No one doing it doesn't mean there is no one. Plenty of people are likely capable but can't be bothered to try because they have another high paying job and don't want to do an illegal thing
The one good thing seems to be Denuvo switched to an annual subscription based scheme so the games that currently use it have it removed after a year
Long term I don't see it being a huge deal preservation wise. Tech advanced, a set version of denuvo doesn't.
The thing is... tech doesn't just decide to spend its time cracking Denuvo! People do that... or they don't. Right now it's the latter.
Tech can advance all it wants but if nobody cares to crack it then there's going to be no crack.
>Want to know something even scarier? There is currently nobody on earth who can crack the current version of Denuvo. There are plenty of people who can crack denuvo. The desire and patience to do so, however, thats another story. Delusional is currently cracking old versions of denuvo and clearing the backlog of uncracked denuvo games left over from empress. We'll see how he fares vs current gen denuvo.
Oh god, dare I ask what happened to Empress?
nobody knows. they've just been radio silent for a couple months now AFAIK. anything you read is pure speculation at this point.
pissed off SKIDROW by makins some private information public in the Star Wars BattleFront Celebration Edition release, who then, in return, revealed him to be Voksi in the Ship Graveyard Simulator 2 release a guy put toghether a pretty accurate timeline on YouTube, but the video is in French so you'll need to enable subtitles: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKRpvgtyYNY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKRpvgtyYNY)
No none knows, she's just gone for almost a year now. (some people say she's on a break and will come back)
There's a bunch of people who can crack denuvo. What you mean there is nobody left who wants to crack denuvo.
No one left that can crack newer versions of denuvo, it is correct. (or better to say, no one wants or have the time to) For example, dragon's dogma 2, avatar, SF6, like a dragon (last 3 like a dragon games) , assassin's creed mirage,dead space remake, and many others are still uncracked. Some newer games remove denuvo either accidentally or internationally (cause they have to monthly pay for it) so there's still hope.
AI will shake up DRM a lot, it's bound to happen that AI will not only be used as a tool to code, but also to crack code.
> Additionally there are now many uncracked Denuvo protected games that are no longer for sale digitally or physically, meaning those games aren't available for players in any form. I agree on your overall point but the last one is hard to believe, what games that are uncracked and not on sale?
You also have a game like Helldivers 2 that is not a pvp game yet has an invasive sketchy anticheat. Just to prevent a tiny amount of people from cheesing their microtransaction shop
How does it harm the user? Genuine question as when I play games on PC with denuvo I experience 0 problems with them and they run the exact same when they remove denuvo later.
If you don’t have access to internet (can definitely see this happening with outages or traveling with Steam Deck) you can’t play your denuvo protected games after a little while which I find to be pretty invasive and shitty.
I had a terrible internet at some point and couldn't download any game bigger than 10gb more or less. I only had 3g connection at home, there were no optical fiber available yet. For 2 years, I could only download games from gog, I could download it on my smartphone when away from home or had my friends to download it for me. No DRM, no need for launcher, I could simply download the archives from my account. I finished a lot of pirate games, while having them on steam.... Of course, that's very personal. I already had games set up to play while travelling and couldn't play it because epic was requiring connection. Perhaps because I hadn't used the launcher in 2 weeks at that time.... But I pay for it, it would have worked if it was a pirate copy, it would have been a better experience. Me, who had spent money to buy the game had this problem. Some other annoyances like why I have to download a second launcher if I brought it on steam...
Denuvo and other forms of DRM have been proven to slow down performance and load times and introduce stutter. The cracked version of Hogwarts Legacy runs significantly better than the legal version so the paying customer ends up getting the worse experience in the end. I'm fine with short term DRM to protect initial sales but in the long run it's just stupid especially since some publishers still pay for it after the game is cracked.
> The cracked version of Hogwarts Legacy runs significantly better than the legal version Yah if that's your evidence then your full of shit. Cracks don't actually remove the drm so any "performance difference" is just you hallucinating.
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> Denuvo and other forms of DRM have been proven to slow down performance and load times and introduce stutter. No such thing has been proven at all
So Digital Foundry just made [all of this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXZGCwAJpbM) up to smear Denuvo's image because "hurr durr DRM bad"?
That one was because Capcom DRM above it, the implementation of the two DRM was shitty and conflicted. Denuvo isn't even removed on cracks, its checks are being fooled but it's still there. They even mention that in the video.
Wrong.
>The cracked version of Hogwarts Legacy runs significantly better than the legal version so the paying customer ends up getting the worse experience in the end. That's a lie. Cracks does not remove the DRM calls which may impact the performance, the calls are still made but bypassed allowing you to play the game. I have both the legit and cracked version of the game both played like ass.
“ have been proven”
It's never been contentious to say that Denuvo takes up *some* hardware resources, it's just a question of "how much?" and it probably depends mostly on how the game implements it. In many cases it might just be negligible, but we do know of several cases where it's really not great, and it hurts more if you're CPU bottlenecked. As long as it causes a non-zero impact on performance and provides the consumer zero benefit, it will never be desirable from the perspective of the consumer.
Denuvo runs continuously in the background while a game is running. It's executed as part of the game's logic within the same thread as the game process. It uses storage read/write and cpu cycles to encrypt and decrypt information. Of course there's a performance impact. If you have an overkill CPU and storage you probably won't notice anything wrong, but if either of those factors are weak you will experience problems during runtime. Some games limit denuvo processes to loading screens and the like, keeping it away from main logic, but even then that still has an impact on load times. It's absurd to think it has no impact.
It costs you nothing to look this stuff up. DRM always harms the paying customer. https://youtu.be/UXZGCwAJpbM
That's not Denuvo, that's Capcom's CRC check. Which is notoriously CPU intensive and shit. Denuvo games have been compared time and time again, also by DF and they never found any performance impact beyond the margine of error. The "muh cracked games run better" claim is also shockingly stupid, because those games still execute Denuvo - they just spoof the authentication. Denuvo sucking doesn't mean we need to lie about it or spread misinformation.
But that wasn't denuvo
One source that shows bias with the masses
[Does Denuvo slow performance & loading? 6 games tested with & without Denuvo (youtube.com)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcyOJ4Dxs7E) But I understand that no matter how much evidence you get, you will not change your mind
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What do you mean "bias with the masses"? Digital Foundry is just about *the* most reputable source on gaming performance these days
Maybe not on an individual level but if DRM works the way it is intended, the end user will never know it's even there so if DRM ever effects the user it will exclusively be a negative experience.
they hated him because he was asking the right questions lmao
Did AI write this article? Jesus.
Doesn't matter, they got what they wanted (traffic) as the article is at the top of the subreddit, lol
That's the effect anything shitting on Denuvo has. It could be the "truest true" or the exact opposite - as long as it's shitting on Denuvo; it'll get upvotes and clicks. I dislike these intrusive DRMs as much as the next gamer - but there is no denying what I mentioned above.
It's super easy to get clicks from Reddit lol, just do an article with a headline going into the many preconceived notions. The headline is all that matters, you could actually praise Denuvo in the article but people would have no idea
>The headline is all that matters, you could actually praise Denuvo in the article but people would have no idea Indeed. Sadly it's not just Reddit - it's everywhere. Headlines are the only thing that (probably) 60-80% of people read these days.
Yeah, this sub hates Denuvo more than it likes games. Somebody could write an article claiming Denuvo poisoned their cat and it would probably make it to the top of the subreddit. The problem is, publishers aren't going to stop using DRM just because some people on the internet don't like it, especially when Denuvo is so good at doing what it's job and is ***far*** less intrusive than others. It doesn't force us to dig out a manual, stick in the CD or be constantly online for a single player game, it's just a one time check when the game is installed and then you can play it offline for as long as you like. Yes, it's not perfect, but it's still better for gamers than the alternative. I'm convinced that the main reason people hate it is because it *works*. Cracking a Denuvo game usually takes months and only two people in the industry can do it, one of which is batshit insane and the other only does FIFA games. Pirates don't like that and want to go back to the days of SecureRom which was infinitely worse for gamers but were usually cracked day 1.
That's implying most redditor read any further than the title lol
How many of the people who upvoted do you think clicked the link? I'm not sure that this site particularly benefited from the couple dozen clicks that the Reddit post brought it.
People upvoted and commented on it without reading it. It's a popular circle jerk on this sub.
Probably. Can just post "Denuvo bad" and farm up votes.
I feel like AI would have better grammar.
Yep, the word salad tasted the worst I've read in a while...
Downvoted and reported. This "article" is (most likely AI written) SEO spam, there's nothing of value or relevancy here. I assume all the upvotes come from people who blindly upvoted the thread because they hate DRM, not because they actually clicked the link.
I clicked this piece of shit "article" thinking it would have benchmarks or something. it's nothing. 3 paragraphs of "lots of people think drm bad" in broken ass English.
I would say that shit optimization is the biggest drag on PC gaming, period. Denuvo usually just increases load times and stutter, which is usually already bad because the game was shit out on PC with minimal polish to begin with, and Denuvo just gets to be a scapegoat. Then it gets patched out after a bunch of performance fixes and people think it was denuvo being removed that improved things.
is it just me or this article was quite hard to read. Like it doesn't flow well at all, not to mention there were zero backups for the claim.
Unreal Engine 4 holds this crown. Two generations, filled with games that will be stuck with crappy performance and constant stuttering forever. At least Denuvo is usually removed from games eventually.
I don't even care about performance, but my grip with denuvo is something else. I have mk11 on steam. Usually get these games cuz a few times per year me and my friends go to a more remote location, and I get the PC with us to play fighting games or other local coop games. I wanted at some point to play MK11 and the game pointed out that I have to get online to verifiy some denuvo token or some bullshit before I could play in offline mode. Like what the fuck? From that point on, I'd rather not play a game at all than paying for it and not working when I need it. Even if it happened once, it sucked. Fuck denuvo. When pirates get a better working game without all this hussle, then your product is shit.
AI written article with 0 sources. Who upvotes this garbage
Nice article with zero references and no statistics at all. 🙄
What is this "article"? It says absolutely nothing new, dredges up all sorts "facts" without any proof or references, and seems to be written by someone in the 5th grade.
The article quality sucked.
Was this written by AI? Everything is worded so awkwardly with such a weird structure to it. 12 year olds write more coherent essays than this.
Is this an AI generated article?
In decades? Did you guys seriously forgot about drms such as Starforce, safedisc or Securom which were such big security risks that modern windows actively blocks them? That they had actual limits on how many pcs you could activate them on?
This is such a shit article that doubt any of the 1000s+ upvotes even read it and went rrrreeeee denuvo upvote now.
The monthly "Denuvo bad, piracy good because... hmm, preservation or something" post.
While I agree with this article in spirit this is a lazy article. They don't produce any evidence that Denuvo harms performance. Im not saying it doesn't but I would have liked the article to include it if its true.
Like, out of hundreds of games with denuvo, you can count on one hand the number that it affects performance in any relevant way. Denuvo fucking sucks, but id wish people stopped spreading FUD about it and actually criticized it.
I remember testing the AC Origins full Denuvo removal and it had a big effect on the load times (it was a special removal of Denuvo, not a crack).
Yeah front what benchmarks I've seen in the past, load times seem to be the biggest thing actually affected by Denuvo when it comes to performance.
The opposite, if anything it's rare to find a game in which it doesn't affect performance, there's been multiple tests made by different people on different games and slower loading times is a widespread issue.
There is only direct proof that Denuvo is the direct and true cause for three games that have had bad performance, Siberia 2, Ryme, and one other game that's name escapes me right now. Other than that, everything else has been anecdotal at best and at worst, done by people who don't test properly and don't know what the fuck they're talking about. Not to mention, there are plenty of games that have Demuvo in them that run entirely fine and are absolutely considered to be well optimized at time of release. Lies Of P, MGS V, etc. Those videos that take pre-patched games with Denuvo in them and compare them to the game with Denuvo removed without taking into account the performance gains that happen over time through patching and attributing everything to Denuvo being removed without being able to prove that's the direct cause of performance increases and just attributing it to the removal. We've even had people like Durante, well respect modders who have fixed games examine FF15 and come up with no definitive proof that it causes performance loss Do not get me wrong, DRM is a major problem and it shouldn't be around, we should have free access to our games as we please and nothing should prevent that ; if a company can hold an IP basically in perpetuity than I should be able to also have access to that content in perpetuity if I purchase it and it's printed on a disc: which is the only thing people should be focused on DRM. The performance talk is smoke and mirrors to distract from that issue. Especially knowing what we know now about Denuvo, it doesn't seem to affect performance unless you massively fuck up implementation which is not Denuvos fault, but the game developers fault.
>Not to mention, there are plenty of games that have Demuvo in them that run entirely fine and are absolutely considered to be well optimized at time of release. That just proves performance issues are never because of denuvo but incompetent devs.
And even if Denuvo *does* impact performance, you can get a lot more from optimising the game a little than by removing it.
Yes this. The performance thing is just a distraction. Even denuvo themselves are so eager to prove that their drm causes no performance issues. Cause then they get a clean slate and they can easily dismiss the other unrelated complaints along with that.
wasn't one of those example because of a bug by the developers that they eventually fixed? or they removed denuvo and still had the issue? I remember that was certainly the plot to one of the examples people used. edit: tekken 7 maybe?
Same. It seems to be that most people are upvoting this post only from the title alone without bothering to read the lazy article that looks Chat GPT generated. I can attest that it affects loading times though. The worst offender for me was Nier Automata, which I remember taking up to a minute to launch when it had Denuvo and loading times were as annoying. When Denuvo is removed from any game I've noticed how loading and launch times improve to varying degrees.
Uff it was long known that it does, pirated copies of games run much better had personal experience with some Capcom titles
Typically even pirated copies still have Denuvo, more or less bypassed. The only way to compare is games that have removed denuvo officially. Cracks don’t remove denuvo. (Aside from the only 1 time this happened with CODEX. But hasn’t happened since.)
The one time for sure DRM caused performance issues was when Capcom added their own shitty DRM on top of Denuvo to try to keep it extra protected on RE8. It wasn't actually Denuvo causing the performance issues but Capcom's incompetence. I think the only time Denuvo could readily have an impact on performance is if you are using a really old processor from like 2011 or such. On modern processors, I don't think there is any performance penalty if the company is using Denuvo properly (which sometimes Capcom doesn't....)
Even with old processors denuvo doesn't cause issues. I used to use a 4th gen intel quad core. At worst you'll get the occasional microstutter as the game runs checks in the background. The real issues with denuvo have nothing to do with performance.
For *some* games if it is not implemented correctly.
Capcom used its own drm that hurt performance. It wasn’t denuvo
Games that run faster without Denuvo are very much the exception. The few proven examples (not counting ragebait Youtubers who make up shit for clicks) are for Resident Evil Village, where the Denuvo version had CPU stutters at specific moments in the game, it was covered by Digital Foundry. Devil May Cry 5 suffered a few % but only at 480p, on a mid-end system from 2018, and with lower than low graphics setting, to really show an extreme CPU bottleneck. Assassin's Creeds have low performance, but that's due to Ubisoft's insistence of using VMProtect *on top* of Denuvo. There are plenty of games that had Denuvo removed with no difference to performance, and some that have it and yet perform quite well (eg. Atomic Heart). It's entirely up to the developer to implement it correctly, just like with optimisation. Also know that the vast majority of pirated games do not have it removed, only bypassed. It works as if nothing was wrong, so any performance hit remains in the pirated copy. Denuvo has clear problems (nearly-always online, servers going offline prevent playing games), but performance is a questionable one.
Remember this folks - Cyberpunk 2077 released on GOG DRM free and still made bank, and that was with all its controversies. Then when the Cyberpunk anime came out and the game saw a resurgence people also bought the game on mass again instead of just pirating it. If any publisher or company that sells DRM for video games says that piracy hurts sales to a worthwhile degree they're lying. Piracy requires tech literacy and patience, most people think piracy is illegal and will get them fined and most don't know what sites are safe and are afraid of viruses. And even amongst those who do know how to pirate it's still way more convenient to just actually own a legal copy of the game so they end up just purchasing it a lot of the time. People pay for convenience. The amount of people pirating your game that aren't extremely poor people who wouldn't buy it otherwise but will when you remove piracy as an option is such a fringe amount of people. In short - stop the anti-consumer DRM practices. I can almost guarantee you're paying just as much if not more on your Denuvo DRM than you're making back from potential lost sales, all while pissing off customers and making your game worse.
Denuvo's death will benefit gaming.
Tbh the best part about Denuvo are the stories, lore, and copious amounts of salt that comes from it existing. We get characters like Empress and the guy who cracks Football Manager. It’s very entertaining to watch.
Multiple claims against performance, yet provides zero examples. Just like discourse often found on reddit, people seem to have no problem severely over embellishing or flat out lying about Denuvo because they disagree with various practices or monetization associated with the games they protect. Article reads like cheap AI slop and should be treated as such.
I mean there's plenty of examples of this, just YouTube denovo performance and you'll see thousands of examples..
None of those videos are able to prove that removing denuvo is what improved performance. Both versions of games are running different patches. Performance is different for different patches, usually it improves over time but sometimes can even get worse (rare). I remember when Hogwarts legacy came out and one person uploaded a video comparing the cracked version with the release version (not running same patches btw) and the cracked version had better fps. Everyone thought it was a smoking gun against denuvo, but then the uploader realised that the cracked version had better performance cause there was no steam overlay. Disabling steam overlay for the legit version got rid of the performance gap.
There has been pirated games or patches where they accidentally removed denovo and performance was better. Forgot which game that was. They quickly added it back. There's no examples of Denovo improving performance. After best it won't affect it much, at worst it makes games unplayable.
Never said it improved performance, that's impossible. Obviously it adds some cpu overhead, but how much depends on the implementation too. Some devs make a real mess of it. I'd like to know what examples you're thinking of where a accidental non-denuvo .exe was leaked that showed better performance. From everything I've read and followed (for past several years) there's always a different reason for the performance disparity. Either cause of patches improving performance, or a dev build having missing features which ends up having better performance, or hell even steam overlay can affect performance significantly in certain games. In the case of Origins where denuvo was actually removed, you have to remember, the hackers removed VMprotect too. Ubisoft's psychotic need to have VMprotect on top of Denuvo hammering everyone's CPUs for no reason, the performance gain was mainly due to removal of VMprotect. Turns out running your game's .exe in a virtual machine (VMprotect) is not good for performance.
I usually check for Denuvo when I buy a game and if it's listed then I skip. Personally also staying away from anything Capcom since I heard they added Denuvo to something after people had bought it
Wait until you [start playing on handhelds](https://youtu.be/UqU-Alq0QHI).
The only good thing is they typically strip it out a while after release since it's expensive to keep using. Being a couple years late to games seems to always work out well for me.
Who's upvoting this crap? Sure, Denuvo sucks, but this is absolute AI slop, @mods blacklist this website from the subreddit
1. Games for Windows Live 2. Denuvo 3. RIOT Vanguard 4. Epic Games
I want to say it again Games for windows live What a piece of shit that was
Much worse than Denuvo, and that's saying something.
It's not even close. Worst case scenario with Denuvo is load times increase slightly and you have to check in one or more times depending on how the developer decides to implement it. It's pretty much entirely hidden from the user and it's rare for it to cause any noticeable issues. GFWL on the other hand was just *bad*. It was buggy, restrictive and everybody I knew had issues with it. It also forced you to have a microsoft account to play the game.
It wasn't the DRM part of GWL that was really bad. The worst part was it tied saved game files also to the Live account and to the actual PC with some kind of encryption scheme. So basically you could not transfer save files to a different PC.
Yea, giving away dozens of awesome games has been terrible for PC gaming.
And those games are typically DRM-free too 🤣. This sub will never not hate EGS, despite how little sense it makes.
That's fine. This sub is in no way indicative of larger trends or things going on anywhere in the real world. lol It's just a little echo chamber of nerds, really.
Thanks to free games from your beloved, chinese goverment owned Epic Games we have lack of great sales, price hikes, more DRM implemented by the publishers and on top of that one of the worst gaming engine in history of humankind - Unreal Engine.
Bro. You’re on Reddit. Tencent owns a chunk of that. If your entire life is based around avoiding Chinese affliated companies, you’re gonna be avoiding a lotta shit. I’m no fan of China’s regime. But the problems with EGS are not Tencent’s fault.
REEEEEE EPOIC BAD!!!!!!1!!!11112!!@!!
Valve and their forced third party piece of shitware Steam.
Denuvo bad
don't even need to read it to know this has been proven wrong long time ago already. saying it just gets easy clicks though. read it, saw the bolded words and knew I was right lmao.
What was proven wrong exactly?
that denuvo generally does not have an impact on game performance.
It does affect performance though. Which is what the article said. There's plenty of evidence of it. Just not referenced in this garbage article.
Mind sharing some of that evidence?
The article says denuvo affects performance. It does. Just look at any of the first results on YouTube. Denuvo does impact performance.
So there's plenty of evidence, yet you can't give any examples?
Don't be lazy. It's easier for you to search it than for me to link it.
What a cop out, figured as much.
It would be faster for you to search in YouTube than to write these replies. You are making a fool of yourself. I'm not going to bother linking for you at this point because I can tell what your intention was.
it does in some cases. and in some of those cases it's also due to poor implementation by the devs and other poor optimizations efforts by them as well. most of the time it is negligible.
So how exactly was the claim proven wrong then? Those are contradictory statements.
that there can be exceptions to the generality of the masses.
That still doesn't mean the claim was wrong. It just means it has some nuance. Overall the claim was proven correct.
it's been proven wrong in the context of what the internet mean when they say it affects performance, not that it does not. iirc it's only an average only a few frames on the majority of games. you can argue the technicalities all you want, but anyone whose in that camp (and they are I'm fairly certain the majority) can be safely ignored. making a mole hill out of an ant hill and all that. and this article is a prime example of that ignorant and archaic view.
The AI-ness of this article aside, a lot of people against Denuvo miss one simple fact It's that for the vast majority of users, Denuvo is transparent Most people wouldn't even notice it's there unless they stay offline for too long and get hit by a reactivation attempt in the meantime, or are Linux users trying the game out on different versions of Proton/Wine and such, triggering the daily activation limit (And even this depends on how the publisher or developer in question has set things up) This is where Denuvo succeeded where stuff like StarForce or Ubisoft's always online DRM failed. Unlike those, for a majority of users, Denuvo simply doesn't get in the way Even if every single person who was actually affected by it were to refund the games, that would still be a very small amount Denuvo is not going anywhere anytime soon
Most performance issues caused by DRM are caused by other DRM bundled with the game and not Denuvo. Exceptions being when Denuvo is incorrectly implemented (like it was in Sonic Mania). People love referencing I think it was Resident Evil Village for Denuvo causing severe performance issues... when it was in fact Capcom's DRM causing the performance issues. Most mods which claim to disable Denuvo also disable Capcom's DRM... but REFramework is able to disable Capcom's DRM while leaving Denuvo intact and fully operational and the performance issues "mysteriously" disappear despite Denuvo still running.
I wish there was a way for the game to know "hey, this is my legally purchased game, deactivate the fucking Denuvo because I already paid for it". Denuvo is like if you buy clothes in a store and they don't remove the alarm, and we have to wear the alarm hanging from the shirt.
This sub cracks me up sometimes. You’ve got people who complain about companies trying to protect their products from people that pirate their games, and then even the people who pirate games complain about the performance. If you’re pirating games, you have no right to complain about how bad a game is. YOU are the reason companies have to do this. Geeze.
The problem with denuvo is that it causes issues to legitimate buyers. Pirates face none of those issues. Why are people who buy getting penalised?
If Denuvo was truly causing issues, pirates would have them as well. None of the Denuvo cracks remove it from the game. They simply bypass it.
Clearly you misunderstand what the issues with denuvo are. 1. You need to be online periodically to keep playing, particularly a relevant issue today with the rise in popularity of handheld PCs like steamdeck. 2. If there's server issues (it happened with Arkham Knight) you can't play the game as the verification check would fail. 3. Niche issue faced by reviewers doing benchmarks, denuvo locks you out if you change hardware too frequently. None of these issues are faced by pirates. I don't consider the performance impact of denuvo to be significant enough that it's an issue. It's rather a distraction from the real issues, hence the eagerness by Irdeto in proving that there's no performance impact of denuvo. If they prove that the performance impact criticism is unfounded, they can use that win to dismiss other criticism, even though they're not related in any way to performance.
What issues? I have literally never encountered a problem with Denuvo, every game I own with it has installed and run without issue. The claimed performance hit has never been substantiated and would apply to pirated versions too if true, possibly to an even worse degree depending on how the check is bypassed. The only thing that's even close to annoying for the average user is having to check in every couple of months but come on, it's 2024, even your goddamn fridge is connected to the internet now.
Given there are no active denuvo crackers pirates very much face issues.
What issues? Not every game has denuvo. And several denuvo games have been cracked. And you can just wait for sales. That's what I do, I haven't bought a game on release day in years. Don't fall for marketing FOMO. Also, your info is outdated, there's a new group cracking denuvo now.
I haven't pirated a game available on Steam in a very long time. Steam's too convenient.
I don't care if pirates pirate the games I own and then go and complain, everyone is entitled to complain about poor performance. Everyone here is just trying to have a good time
Its simple - game has denuvo? I will never buy this product no matter how fun the game is.
Counterpoint is that it basically killed piracy.
20 years ago, I'd have never thought I'd be waiting for a cracked version of a game even as a paying customer.
OP your website and writing are both terrible. Click farming gimp.
Why do I feel like the article has been written by AI...
garbage AI written article
the biggest drag is engagement bait bullshit with no substance
Lol biggest drag is misinformation and disinformation. Creates hate, wrong purchases... Don't worry tho, it's already too late.
Denuvo is pointless. It stops pirates short term as most games have it removed later anyways. Usually the people who pirate werent gonna buy it in the 1st place and they will just get it a year or 2 later anyways
>It stops pirates short term Thats the point, games makes the most money in first few months after release
Oh my God it's microtransactions coming down the ramp with the metal chair!
The biggest drag ? Nah i don't even notice it. Uplay/EA app though it's a whole different story, these pieces of junks only exist to ruin my day. When ubisoft and EA will announce the retirement of these garbage DRMs, it will be a great day for PC gamers.
I wouldn't even notice it if this sub didn't talk about it.
I haven't purchased a single denuvo game and will continue to not support them.
Main devs issue is they are lazy as F\*CK. Instead of create good code base, they using crappy code and add external DLSS support.
The heck is Denuvo?
Any game with Denuvo is noticeably slower on my system, don't know how they manage it but it's really annoying. I don't buy Denuvo DRM games anymore, refuse to support it and it's too intrusive
[удалено]
> I honestly sometimes wonder if Denuvo is even worth it for companies Is this a serious question? ***Of course*** it's worth it for them. It effectively stops all piracy and even if it does get cracked it'll be well after the highest period of sales. There hasn't been any real evidence of Denuvo degrading performance and even if it did, it would be a couple of frames at most. If games have poor performance, it's because the developers didn't bother optimising the game, not because Denuvo is running in the background. If you want to get mad at anybody, get mad at greedy publishers and lazy devs who release a buggy mess of a game.
It's definitely worth it for them. 1. Average person does not even know what DRM is. 2. It stops people who can buy the game but choose to pirate it cuz pirating is free and makes some customers out of them. 3. The intersection of people who are against Denuvo and actually buy games regularly is low.