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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.
Because many game's sales over time tends to look like a logarithmic curve. Sales are stacked at the launch and drop dramatically after that, flattening into a long tail. My guess is they don't care about what happens after a few weeks, so long as they can maximize the profits during the initial sales period.
Still, from my perspective (as a game developer and player), it's not really worth it. Any sort of reasonably effective PC-based DRM is, by nature, going to be intrusive, because it's not built in as a seamless part of the platform (which is why fewer gamers mind the less intrusive DRM of console games or even Steam's DRM, IMO). I'm certainly not planning on releasing my game with any DRM, since I think that's a selling point for many players. Honestly, I'm more interested in the long tail anyhow, since my games have lower up-front development costs than big AAA games.
A DRM-based fight is really a no-win battle in the long run, so it seems pointless to fight such a war in the first place to me, especially 100% of the collateral damage is your paying customers. Just make peace with the fact that some people won't want to pay for the game. Instead, focus on building a community that wants to support your development efforts in order to encourage development of more of the games they like. You know... don't be jerks, don't be greedy, listen to your customers, and build quality products. Radical stuff, I know.
To be honest, one of the things that's baffled me over the years is how entertainment-focused companies and even entire industries can generate such hatred and loathing. You would think it wouldn't be so hard to have a favorable public opinion when your entire business is delivering entertainment products that people willingly spend their discretionary income on.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
I stopped buying DRMed products after purchasing Unreal Tournament 2004 a decade ago. That game had two releases: the normal release (7 CDs) or a special collectors edition that shipped on a DVD and came with a ton of bonuses. This was one of the first big commercial titles to ship on DVD instead, and was supposed to be a super simple install process. The game was supposed to install faster, and no disc swapping during install! Clean and simple, right?
Well, the DRM that existed on the DVD version was absolutely broken. After a few hundred (maybe even a few thousand?) of us went to the Epic forums to bitch about the issue, they finally admitted that the errors occurring during install were related to the DRM, a bug which didn't exist in the CD copy. Yes, that's right. Only those of us that paid the premium to purchase the collectors addition were screwed in our asses due to the DRM.
After a few days, there was no fix, so a buddy of mine brought over a pirated copy he downloaded of the 'net, so I could play the game.
The game was still mass pirated. Those of us who legitimately purchased it were totally screwed over. This really helped the company, so I've yet to purchase any more of their games on disc since then, and never again will.
but paying 60+ dollars for a game? simply NEVER GONNA HAPPEN!!! incompatible with a healthy human brain. distributors need to realise that for every sucker who pays, there are 100s willing to pay a sensible price (not steal). and for each of those, there are even more willing to buy it as a hmmm i'll play it when kids grow up for a dollar or two.
Don't you think that distributors actually have thought this through, and have done a lot of research on price elasticity in games? Why would you assume that people for whom the pricing of games is a multi-million or multi-billion dollar question are totally wrong about optimal pricing, and instead that your own personal price elasticity curve holds true for the population as a whole?
You say that, for every "sucker" who pays $60, there are "100s willing to pay a sensible price." Modern Warfare 3 sold 6.5 million copies on its first day, in the US and UK, at $60/copy. You really believe that, at $10, it would have sold 650 million copies? That's more than the combined population of those two countries put together.