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Denuvo DRM Challenges Game Crackers
jones_supa writes Now that the PC gaming community has grown very large, it has become only a matter of hours before the copy protection of a major AAA title is cracked and put up for download after its official release, or sometimes, even before. However, it looks like CI Games is having great luck with its recently launched next-gen video game known as Lords of the Fallen, as its PC DRM still remains uncracked now after 3 days of release. The DRM solution that the game uses comes from a copyright protection company known as Denuvo, and it is apparently the same one that has been used in FIFA 15, which is also yet uncracked. While this DRM has kept the game from being pirated until now, it has also been speculated that this solution is supposedly the main cause behind several in-game bugs and crashes that are affecting users' gameplay experience. To improve stability, the developer is working on a patch that is aimed at fixing all performance issues. It remains officially unconfirmed if the new DRM solution is really causing all the glitches.
Par is actually a few months.
Let me know if this Denuvo DRM remains uncracked for as long as Spiro: Year of the Dragon, which had various traps to detect incomplete cracks, and delay the crackers for the initial wave of sales to be completed.
It's interesting you should observe that, because in the end, It's the bottom line that allows game companies to pay their developers to continue to develop more titles, and what the actual customer experience is going to be is a direct reflection of how many titles they actually sold, not necessarily what people think of the experience afterward. Customer experience only impacts them to the extent that it might theoretically influence future purchases from such customers, but as you've observed, DRM isn't particularly harmful to sales in the first place, so any bad customer experience from it isn't actually giving such game companies sufficient disincentive to stop them from continuing to use it.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I've been out of the scene for a while, but asking around, Denuvo == Sony DADC/SecuROM peeps. It's just the new version of SuckuROM. Yawn.
They're quite proud of how twitchy their protection is. Bugs in this case are indeed often due to the protection hooks and false-positives, but it sounds like this game is also unfinished and buggy. I guess that's one way to complicate testing.
There's a tool ready for DNV, back from FIFA 14 (took almost 2 months for RLD to develop the tools). FIFA 15 is probably just being tested. My guess is that nobody really cares until something major's done, and no, "oh look another football game" isn't major. Then it'll be a race between the big-time groups, but my money's on RLD.