Monday, October 14th 2024
Quick Denuvo DRM Cracks Cost Game Publishers 20% in Revenue, According to Study
According to a study by William M. Volckmann II from the University of North Carolina, we have received an insight into the financial consequences of digital rights management (DRM) breaches in the PC gaming industry. The research, titled "The Revenue Effects of Denuvo Digital Rights Management on PC Video Games," offers valuable insights into the relationship between piracy and game sales. The study's most striking finding reveals that when Denuvo, a popular anti-piracy technology, is quickly compromised, game publishers face an average revenue decline of 20%. Interestingly, the research suggests that long-term DRM implementation may be unnecessary. Volckmann's analysis indicates that games cracked after the first three months of release or those from which publishers voluntarily removed DRM protection after this period experienced negligible revenue loss.
The study also explored potential predictors for quick DRM breaches but found no conclusive indicators based on game characteristics. This unpredictability poses a challenge for publishers in assessing the risk of piracy for individual titles. Volckmann acknowledges gamers' concerns about DRM's technical drawbacks, recommending that publishers consider removing such protections after the critical initial three-month window. This approach could balance piracy prevention with user experience optimization. The findings present a compelling case for publishers to reconsider their DRM strategies. While protecting games during the launch period remains crucial, extended DRM usage may offer diminishing returns.
Source:
via Tom's Hardware
The study also explored potential predictors for quick DRM breaches but found no conclusive indicators based on game characteristics. This unpredictability poses a challenge for publishers in assessing the risk of piracy for individual titles. Volckmann acknowledges gamers' concerns about DRM's technical drawbacks, recommending that publishers consider removing such protections after the critical initial three-month window. This approach could balance piracy prevention with user experience optimization. The findings present a compelling case for publishers to reconsider their DRM strategies. While protecting games during the launch period remains crucial, extended DRM usage may offer diminishing returns.
136 Comments on Quick Denuvo DRM Cracks Cost Game Publishers 20% in Revenue, According to Study
Of the game projects i've worked on (and there have been some AAA) the best selling ones have been the ones with no protection. Anecdotal I know, but in my experience, protection on games causes more problems for the end user and the developer.
Better indie games? Sure and they come out all the time. Better AAA titles? Hell no! The sheer cost to make them means they have to sell the most copies which means they have to be dumbed down garbage.
Graphics killed gameplay as much as special effects ruined movies. Everyone who has gushed over graphics is to blame for bad games! Do you like fancy graphics, then YOU are at fault more than the companies who make them.
On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog (personnally, I'm a tibetan monk).
These two facts should be obvious to anyone using internet for some time.
They make your testimony quite suspect (as in an argument from authority).
If any of that is being taken as a defense of Denuvo, it's not. I don't like Denuvo or any DRM. If it is possible I always buy from GOG first.
Steam now says the ‘game’ you’re buying is really just a license
By the way, fuck devs/publishers who throw money on Denuvo instead of selling their products at a fair price.
I suggested a realiable way to gather such statistics in a prior post (here) but it requires (a) a major retailer to collect and publish the aggregated data and (b) for the community to actually go around specifing that they ignore the game because it has Denuvo/DRM.
AFAIC the gaming industry as whole would improve if Steam's Ignore button expanded like this:
This would allow developers/publishers to measure the damage certain "features" are doing to their sales.
Also, imagine what SteamDB's list of top 10 most hated publishers would look like. :D
But there is another angle to 'truths' as well. When it comes to company performance and 'success of policy' you barely if ever hear the truth if the company can keep it hidden. A lot of bad policy is simply changed over time and forgotten about, but you can rest assured that ANYTIME you see radical changes in approach (for example, when games switched to Season Pass-driven content) its clear the industry figured out a new way to extract money, that was clearly better than the old one, or is at least potentially better. When that, then, changes again shortly after (a sequel or two later), you know they were simply wrong, the numbers didn't pan out well, and a few millions were lost along the way.
Let's look at Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed franchise and how it got revamped and then rebooted again. Its the perfect example of how a company juggles the recipes it already knows and still can't figure it out proper. And alongside the constant 'radical' (aherm) changes to the franchise they also keep pushing different monetary tactics in their games, up to and including 'single player pay to win', or put differently, paid cheats by being able to buy boosts in a shop alongside DLC content, MTX cosmetics and season passes. They basically tried all of it, so now they're just throwing everything at the wall seeing what sticks.
Meanwhile
if like "Persona Strikers", the first build out day1 has errornously not the D protection applied (dev forgot) then the game updates just after to fix the problem, and D is as of now not removed, then, if somebody that buys the game day1 (or later, tho), is he in his right to download the first build that had not D inside !?
UBISoft looks really seriously involved ;)
Star Wars Outlaws - August 30, 2024
Massive Entertainment, Ubisoft Annecy, Ubisoft Barcelona, Ubisoft Bucharest, Ubisoft Chengdu, Ubisoft Milan, Ubisoft Montpellier, Ubisoft Paris, Ubisoft Shanghai, Ubisoft Stockholm, Ubisoft Toronto, Ubisoft RedLynx, Lucasfilm Games Ubisoft
No. As far as they are concerned, it's the cash flow that matters (which is why, among other reasons, I say studies based on supplier-side finances are better indicator of the efficacy of DRM than consumer-side ones). Even the most deluded, nonsense-peddling Ubisoft exec knows there is a large segment of players who dislike/hate DRM and being required to jump through hoops to play a game, but they also know it's a matter of priorities. To many, this dislike is secondary to wanting to play "Assassin's Creed" or "Far Cry" after all the grooming with ads and press coverage showing all those cool graphics!
The median consumer is a moron. And they're surely not a revolutionary or an activist. Welcome to mass market!
Also, if a purchase does not give you ownership, how could a pirated copy be theft? You still don't own a thing.
The only thing stolen is the license to play, a piece of paper saying 'you can do this now'. No money is stolen, no money is given.That's exactly how it works, its a balancing act, trying not to overstep gamer's bounds while making them suffer to the max to get what they want. In corporate views that's 'a great deal' and 'everybody wins'. Forget customer is king, das war einmal.We have a live example of that in Helldivers 2 and PSN account requirements:
www.ign.com/articles/playstation-reverses-course-on-helldivers-2-psn-account-requirement
if starting today all companies decided they would make mechanically-deep, interesting, fun games - they would sell well and they would become the status quo, as the market is huge, and nobody would have a choice - they would need to adapt to games being more complex, and with how popular games are as a pastime they would have no choice whatsoever, because if they chose to continue to play old, dumbed-down games eventually their friends would move on to new releases that aren't dumbed down - so they'd have to adapt and play what everyone else is playingthis is such a stupid thing to say, i wonder whether people said the same thing when pixel shader 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0 just rolled out, and the first 4-5 generations of PS supporting graphics cards sucked ass at pixel shaders just as the new cards currently suck ass at raytracing (though not as much anymore) - probably not, as while most people back then understood that PS is the next step in graphics, most people now don't understand that raytracing is the next step in graphics today, because rasterization is sort-of decent enough at faking all the effects devs wish they could do with RT
i mean, SSAO is an approximation of GI at a very low scale, and modern AO solutions are good enough on their own, who would wish for a much more accurate, higher quality AO solution using RT, right?
RT is the next step and it is inevitable, just like how pixel shaders were the inevitable next step back in the early 2000s
Reviews only provide information about users buying the game, bombing or not. Without ignore reasons the only thing you can do is buy the game, write a negative review and refund it, incurring in payment processing costs for the platform, provided your refund isn't denied for whatever reason. Without detailed enough, multi-select, ignore reasons the platform/publisher/developer has to go to forums, social media, etc. to find data that isn't easy to aggregate. AIs might help here but you can't really trust their output quite yet.
I'll say this very clearly: data about the users not buying your product is far more valuable than data about users buying because buyer data you can collect yourself as a seller, usually in the form of reviews, but data outside that scope is usually bought at a very high price from outside sources. That data not only gives you insight about you product and how to improve it but also opens the door to increasing your market reach, provided you know what to do and can act on it.
TL;DR if I was a game studio/publisher I'd be dying to get tabular data directly from the platform, particularly free data. Deviations from malicious users and strange biases can be accounted for in the analysis.
Granted most cases are about legitimate issues with the game itself, at which point it is completely fair.
Are you also crying fowl when publishers shut down game studios and overwork developers, which is actually morally corrupt but not illegal? But somehow capitalism has made that okay, yet broke teens downloading fitgirl repacks valued at 10s of dollars are thieves and pirates?
If you like games, buy them, but also maybe still hold game publishers to a higher standards, like not putting DRM in games which burdens all the paying customers and makes their experience worse just to delay the few that might not buy it anyway for only a few weeks or months.