this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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I wouldn't say that it's evil, but rather it doesn't exist for the benefit of players, it exists for the benefit of corporations. They know that it hurts performance in games and prevents a lot of people from playing games that they've legitimately purchased, but so long as it's preventing some piracy they do not care.
Except it doesn't prevent any piracy. Pirates strip the DRM away within hours or days, and then the game runs better for the pirates than the paying customers.
So, you have a small window of the game being "protected" but that's the same window that people on the fence ab out the game wouldn't have bought it anyway.
I agree on the point that Denuvo DRM negatively impacts performance but I’m not sure where you got the idea it can get stripped away. Very few games using Denuvo have been cracked, unfortunately it’s very good at its job.
It is a difficult problem, but there have been a lot of cracked Denuvo games, even in this article, it mentions that about half of the released Denuvo games have been cracked out of a total of 127, that's not a small amount.
It is true though that Denuvo is complex and there's currently only one person who has been doing them for a bit and that person is presenting as very very mentally ill and may also be on a break... it's amazing reading, but it's hard to tell conclusively what's up with Empress.
The overall goal seems to be to slow down piracy in the initial launch period where they're trying to get critical mass for sales. Eventually it looks like a good number of them get cracked, but by that time it'll probably also be discounted on steam sales
I admit to being a bit out of the loop on new games/cracks. The last time I look was a couple of years back, when Denuvo was being cracked with zero day exploits.
So, looking it up now, there's just one cracker left working Denuvo, and the company downloads the cracks themselves and reverse engineers them to make future cracking harder...
Quite the change in three years.
Anyone sane with the skillset has been hired to do similar work for an actual paycheck and no fear of jail