Hitman 2's Denuvo DRM Cracked Days Before the Game's Release (arstechnica.com)

thegarbz writes: Denuvo, the darling of the DRM industry was once considered by publishers to be the final solution to piracy. Slashdot has documented the slow decline of Denuvo from stories in 2014, and 2016 where publishers were praising Denuvo's success at mitigating piracy for weeks, to its slow decline last year where games were being cracked within "hours" of release. The popular wisdom of publishers in the past considered DRM worth while as it thwarts piracy during the critical sales spike when games are first released. Last week saw Hitman 2, the latest Denuvo protected game get cracked in a short time. The kicker, the game isn't officially released until this Thursday.

Publishers are now eroding the potential sale day advantage of DRM through the latest practice of offering games for early release in an attempt to secure an ever larger number of pre-orders for popular titles. This leads to the obvious question: Does DRM make financial sense to include in titles if they risk being cracked before release date? Conversely, does releasing games early to selected customers make financial sense if it results in the DRM being cracked before release?

Comments

Shamus Young has an insightful appraisal of Denuvo

[Lanthanide]

One of my favourite gaming authors has an insightful appraisal of Denuvo and how effective it is. His conclusion is that it's already proven all the publisher's claims about piracy to be lies and in doing so has made itself redundant.

If you want to learn more about what Denuvo is and how it works from a games programmer and (good) author, then it's well worth a read.

Here's the main thrust of the article:
> On the other hand, I stand by the point I made four years ago: Denuvo is so good it proved it was useless.
>
> For years, consumers complained about intrusive DRM. It locks you out of your legitimately purchased product.
> It creates bugs and slowdowns. It’s a hassle. It makes it impossible to run the game years later when the servers
> go down. It punishes legitimate customers while doing nothing to inconvenience the pirates.
>
> In response to these concerns, publishers would tell us that strong DRM was necessary because of rampant piracy.
> Piracy was blamed for high prices, or for a refusal to port games to the PC. Developers claimed that between 90%
> and 95% of players were using pirated copies. This led publishers to make absurd claims that game prices would be
> lower or that they wouldn’t need to close so many studios if there weren’t so many dang pirates,. The assumption was
> that if 90% of players are pirates, then games would make ten times as much money if we could stop piracy. All those
> pirates would run out and buy legitimate copies and it would usher in a golden age of low prices and profitability.
>
> Tomb Raider 2013 pre-dates Denuvo. Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Rise of the Tomb Raider were both protected
> by Denuvo. And yet we haven’t heard about any miraculous sales spike that caused the second two games to massively
> outsell the first. If Denuvo makes any difference at all, it must be very slight. Is it even enough to offset the loss of
> potential customers? If Denuvo was actually making a measurable difference in terms of sales, wouldn’t all games be
> using it by now?

https://www.escapistmagazine.c...

I'll tell you it makes me not want to buy games

[rsilvergun]

at launch. A lot of times the patches remove the DRM, since they charge per install and why keep paying for DRM 3-6 months after launch day when the pirates have moved on. But that means I'm buying on Gog or on sale, and a lot of games don't launch day 1 on Gog if at all.