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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?
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?
I've seen tests that show that some types of DRM do impact the performance of games, Denuvo being one of them. I've seen results from a 5 to 10 frame drop, or larger. That is not trivial. DRM is not stopping piracy. As it is now, the pirates are getting the superior product. Games that are DRM free will always get more money from me than games with horrible DRM.
I think it's even worse than that. For years, the piracy figures were so blown out of proportion that if you bothered doing the math it wasn't unusual to end up with a dollar amount that rivaled the world's GDP. If you're a CEO or manager, it's pretty easy to blame piracy for failed expectations and shareholders might go along with you on it. Of course at that point, you now need to try to do something about the piracy that you've told everyone is destroying your business, so you buy some useless DRM, but what the hell do you care since it acts as a good cover and when it inevitably fails, you can just point to that failure as another excuse.
Eventually though, investors will realize this is just a load of shit. Just make good games and you'll get showered with money. There was just a story here about Rockstar having the largest weekend haul with their new game. Or look at companies like CD Projekt Red that are selling their games on GoG without DRM and they've grown from a small studio to a massively successful one and their newest game has a massive amount of hype behind it. Their games are easier to pirate than any other since it has no DRM on it, yet they've made massive amounts of money as well.