Quick Denuvo DRM Cracks Cost Game Publishers 20% in Revenue, According to Study

[lexluthermiester]

Check the reddit

I generally and actively avoid reddit. It is a cesspool IMPO. Nothing personal toward you of course.

UPDATE1: Turns out this was not an intentional change and is not DRM related.

It's a bug that occurs because the game is trying to talk to GOG Galaxy but is not getting a response.

The game does this to integrate with a number of services, including achievements, cloud saves, etc.

The game is supposed to fail gracefully if GOG Galaxy is not running, and versions up to and including 2.0 did handle this correctly. However the "hotfix" version 2.0_PhL introduced a new bug, where this is no longer handled correctly and instead the game crashes if GOG Galaxy is not running.

Weird. Never saw that. I don't use Galaxy either. Then again, I didn't get Phantom Liberty on day one. Might have been fixed by the time I got it. The explanation seems reasonable.

 

[Vayra86]

I'm still asking the same question. Is any of this still relevant if no one is cracking Denuvo anymore to begin with? It seems to me that the war is long over and Denuvo won. Note that I'm not saying games aren't getting pirated after Denuvo is removed.

Its barely relevant to me at least... because Im barely if ever buying games with Denuvo in them. The only one in 2024 was BMWukong.

 

[IMABEARLOL]

It seems to be the study assumes a game release WILL be purchased at launch by every consumer who wants it.

The way games have been launching for the past... 10 years or so... I only pick up and play a game on PC after it is complete and discounted. I JUST purchased Starfield two months ago, and HZD: Forbidden West is my next play. I could easily pirate both, but I paid. I can't be the only sane person out there who treats game "launches" as betas and waits until the game is actually working and discounted to purchase and play.

I also have purchased many of the games I pirated and enjoyed when I was younger. Again, where does this study account for this?

I would also like to see how much adding Denuvo to a title costs the developer, both in the licensing costs and in the cost to people who pirate specifically to avoid Denuvo.

 

[AGlezB]

The way games have been launching for the past... 10 years or so... I only pick up and play a game on PC after it is complete and discounted. I JUST purchased Starfield two months ago, and HZD: Forbidden West is my next play.

I'm waiting for Starfield to release on GOG.
By that point it should be as good as it will ever be and cost $10-15 for the whole package including DLCs.

 

[lilhasselhoffer]

The people working 8+ hours per day, every day of the week, almost every week of the year to make money for their company, are more reliable, by their actions, than any study or the opinion of a random on the internet (that has his/her own bias).

Everything is changing ? Yes, that has been the case, like, forever. Especially in the video games industry. So what ?

Yes, companies are greedy. So why would they waste money on something that doesn't earn them anything, even costing them ?

Rest assured that when you have a multi hundreds of million dollars project, pretty much everything that can be measured is measured and analyzed. Especially if said project is always connected to the internet and can report back.

Arguments about stupidity or evil are not really grounded in reality.

I cannot tell if you are dense, just want to start a fight, or are defensive because you have some skin in the game.

Stop, listen, and stop projecting.
1) A 40 hour work week is not special or long...unless you're from Europe. There 40 hours was pretty much an immovable wall. Anecdotally, I know of people doing far more....myself included.
2) If you release a study it's meant to be about something. A historic study of the pony express is great...but using a study of the pony express to develop your strategy for cell phone tower placement would be silly. This is about Denuvo...and is using studies based on Napster. As you've stated it's not about the greed...but it is...so why use a bad predictive model like Napster?
3) You...get this through your thought process...want to call companies greedy. I do not. I want to say that bad predictive models, based on 20 year old situations, can be used to justify some pretty heinous stupidity. Case in point, Netflix damaged piracy rates when they made shows available to stream for a reasonable price...which does not fit the Napster model because it makes basic assumptions of piracy being motivated by things that they don't quantify but being constant (Slate article from 2011). Kinda seems like the piracy model falls flat when you make things affordable and easily available...whereas DRM is designed to prevent easy availability.

4) I support greed from companies...because companies are just a collection of people. Their "greed" puts food on tables. If they want to project to try and be the most profitable that's just dandy. The study...the point of this thread...is what I take umbrage with. Idiots, with tools they don't frame, are going to make bad decisions and hurt people because of their ignorance. This is the problem...they are going to read crap like this and project value into using Denuvo...a bad solution to a problem that cannot be quantified, but this study claims to do with actual emperical numbers.
5) I'm aware of analysis. Let me one-up this. To get a reimbursement of anything above $200 I need my boss to sign-off. They do a quick cost-benefit analysis of what I ask for, and approve it or not. This is small value, so it gets very little thought. A quarter million dollar machine gets the finance department to do a cost-benefit analysis, and it's based upon projected sales. They project that based off of the previous year...not the sales from two decades ago. I hope you get it...but in the event you don't, the analysis is timely and fits the current business model. That's the problem with using comparatively ancient references...for a gut-check...2002 was the year of the Pentium 4 processor.
6) Stupidity is using a bad model to justify Denuvo's inclusion. Evil is what you want to project...stop pretending I qualify this as evil. I'm old enough to know that DRM will never work if it puts up a 2" barrier to entry, let alone kills gaming entirely. Once it steps too far it'll die because people will suddenly not tolerate it anymore, and what was once "acceptable" will over night no longer be. The problem is that with DRM it's being sold to investors rather than the end user...so it'll take the death of companies (propelled by bad fiscal models, based on faulty data) to make that happen. How many "up to 20% below projection" failures can billion dollar projects take before they crumple companies?


So we are utterly clear, I want to give you a case study. Blizzard introduced Diablo mobile...and the result was the famous "Is this an out of season April Fools joke?" comment. Blizzard didn't listen. Diablo 4 came out, and the amount of loot you got from using paid gems literally amounted to days of normal grind. People were pissed...and they bled players. They have models that demonstrate the players were willing to spend money, and the whales would support them. Cool. They recently nerfed a bunch of builds for what seemed like no reason. They did so, apparently, to increase the grind (because these builds specifically minimized it). How healthy do you think the player base remains after another apparent cash grab on a game with a AAA price tag, which basically requires microtransactions?
Do you think maybe that model was wrong, and they've managed to produce a worse product?
Can you maybe see why "pirates can cost you up to 20% of sales" is a "the sky is falling" style hyperbolic thing to say based off of 20 year old reference material?
Barring all of the rest of this, can you please ditch the "greed" and "evil" crap? It's a childish way to look at what is going on.

Not all bad things are evil, greed is a loaded idea that is encoded to seem "bad," and if I never used either until responding to you...then maybe the fault is in your inability to understand there can be another point of view which doesn't believe that what is being done is inherently wrong...only really stupid in its failure to frame itself as anything but an advertisement for Denuvo.


-Edit-
To that Netflix thing...I read the 2023 version of the article. Piracy is on the rise.

What changed?

Fragmentation of the media, amongst multiple services. These services all charging...because it's perceived as their property and thus they deserve the profits. That's fair and all...but it's making streaming as expensive as cable tv for the same reasons. So...the good model where you can make a profit by being the only operator with slightly older media you bought the rights to at a reasonable price disappears, and the new model of becoming a content factory to support the growth of numerous paid services all competing with a fraction of what the consumer truly desires is what replaces it. The streaming wars have created a situation where you now pay and still have to watch advertisements...and to get a lot of what you want you need to pay as much or more than your old cable bill. The bad model of "everyone make their content exclusive" brought us to the point of a streaming war, and the result after a decade is increasing piracy because spending hundreds of dollars a month and not even having a freaking DVD is not sustainable...but the finance departments five years ago thought this was a model that would work because Netflix did it. This is not about evil, good, or greed. It's about stupid people doing stupid things because eight layers of middle management don't have the chutzpah to tell upper management the truth, because studies like this one support bad conclusions that would be obvious if anybody in the management class would spend five minutes talking to anyone at ground level (without the fear of termination...because people no longer have a career...they have a job that is 18-24 months of commitment).

-Edit end-

 

[MacZ]

I cannot tell if you are dense, just want to start a fight, or are defensive because you have some skin in the game.

Stop, listen, and stop projecting.

<snip>

Man, I don't care much.

Nothing you said invalidated anything I said.

Copy protection ("DRM") exist since a very very long time. And it has never prevented video games from progressing. You assert that it is based on faulty models. But it's just an assertion, an opinion, to which I reply that is contrary to the aim of any company. People managing multi hundred of millions dollars projects don't do random or stupid things. Your argument is telling that they are.

Industrial accidents exist, yeah, so how does it invalidate anything about DRM ? There are also large successes with DRM and microtransactions.

You write a lot but make little sense.

And most people don't care much about Denuvo, mostly because they are little aware of it. The paying ones.

There are in my view bigger problems than this, like having to register to another launcher or having a kernel anti-cheat software.

That doesn't seem to be an industry with problems :

PC Gaming sales

You are confusing what is with what you want reality to be.

 

[64K]

I would also like to see how much adding Denuvo to a title costs the developer, both in the licensing costs and in the cost to people who pirate specifically to avoid Denuvo.

I've tried to get a handle on that question too and it seems the answer isn't set in stone for every use of Denuvo. Irdeto isn't a publicly traded company so they aren't under any obligations to reveal financial info. So far, the best info I have seen is that Denuvo costs a publisher a one time fee and then a recurring fee based on continued use but then that raises the question as to whether there is some cutoff point to charges because if not then why in the world would some publishers leave Denuvo in a game for years? I have seen estimates that it costs a publisher around $100,000 to $200,000 for using Denuvo and that's why you don't see it being used much outside of AAA games but that info probably should be taken with a grain of salt imo.

 

[Wasteland]

You assert that it is based on faulty models. But it's just an assertion, an opinion, to which I reply that is contrary to the aim of any company. People managing multi hundred of millions dollars projects don't do random or stupid things.

Concord (video game) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

I don't want to get into a goofy internet slapfight over the particulars here, but arguing that laymen have no standing to criticize big corporations because the latter know their industry better is dumb every time it's put forward. Whether by accident, malice, or due to corruption, big business makes whopping mistakes all the time, some of which are so obviously ridiculous that any moron pulled off the street could have avoided them.

And yes, management culture frequently picks up imbecilic, sometimes even self-destructive, fads (e.g. "faulty models"). It's actually funny how completely certain jargon periodically takes hold of the corporate consciousness, only to be swept aside by the next fashion a year or two later, like a software update pushed out to androids in three-piece suits. The idea that our golden-parachute class reliably acts in the direct, much less long-term, interest of their companies strains credulity.

 

[Vayra86]

I've tried to get a handle on that question too and it seems the answer isn't set in stone for every use of Denuvo. Irdeto isn't a publicly traded company so they aren't under any obligations to reveal financial info. So far, the best info I have seen is that Denuvo costs a publisher a one time fee and then a recurring fee based on continued use but then that raises the question as to whether there is some cutoff point to charges because if not then why in the world would some publishers leave Denuvo in a game for years? I have seen estimates that it costs a publisher around $100,000 to $200,000 for using Denuvo and that's why you don't see it being used much outside of AAA games but that info probably should be taken with a grain of salt imo.

There's bound to be a further service model and even an SLA attached to all of this. After all Denuvo is tailor made work, that probably needs tweaking before being injected into games proper. And games change, get patched, the performance might nosedive...

There is an SLA. So Denuvo sells a service. And with most SaaS the price of the service is some base amount + the projected and real reach of your product.

 

[MacZ]

Concord (video game) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

I don't want to get into a goofy internet slapfight over the particulars here, but arguing that laymen have no standing to criticize big corporations because the latter know their industry better is dumb every time it's put forward. Whether by accident, malice, or due to corruption, big business makes whopping mistakes all the time, some of which are so obviously ridiculous that any moron pulled off the street could have avoided them.

And yes, management culture frequently picks up imbecilic, sometimes even self-destructive, fads. It's actually funny how completely certain jargon periodically takes hold of the corporate consciousness, only to be swept aside by the next fashion a year or two later, like a software update pushed out to androids in three-piece suits. The idea that our golden-parachute class reliably acts in the direct, much less long-term, interest of their companies strains credulity.

That's why all companies sink into bankrupcy all the time...

There is not a single company still standing.

If that where that frequent, the PC game sales wouldn't look like this ;

PC sales revenues

There are morons. There are also a lot of people who are good at their job. And they don't necessarly are c-suits.

 

[Vayra86]

People managing multi hundred of millions dollars projects don't do random or stupid things. Your argument is telling that they are.

LOL. How old are you? Take a little look at reality if you don't mind.

Boeing's terrible, horrible, no good, very bad year

Boeing has faced mechanical problems, safety problems, grounded planes, stranded astronauts, executive departures, a strike, and layoffs in 2024.

www.businessinsider.com

https://www.npr.org/2024/01/30/1227554424/evergrande-china-real-estate-economy-property-collapse

And that's just 2024. And just off the top of my head. I'll dig further if you want to keep pushing this ridiculous argument of yours.

This is a fun list, too

These 11 Famously Disgraced CEOs Have Entered the Reputation Hall of Shame | Entrepreneur

McDonalds' Steve Easterbrook is just the latest chief executive who allegedly failed to recognize the importance of ethics and permanently damaged their reputation. Here are the lessons companies can learn from each of them.

www.entrepreneur.com

 

[AGlezB]

If you want Denuvo pricing here is some:

source: https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/prodview-x443idlstvufi

source: https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/prodview-yrdjb756vte3m

Things of note:

1. AFAIK the product used in games is mostly the Anti-Tamper, not the Anti-Cheat. Former is a lot more expensive.
2. Companies make volumne deals which might drop the prices a lot. What you see there is AWS pricing which might not be all that realistic.

 

[MacZ]

LOL. How old are you? Take a little look at reality if you don't mind.

You are talking about _ONE_ company, in a market that is a duopoly.

That is quite different from a market with hundreds or thousands of competing companies. One of the two doesn't allow much errors (see Ubisoft).

Did I say that industrial accidents can happen ? Yes, I did.

We are not talking about one company using DRMs. We are talking about a whole industry, lots of companies, 40 billions dollars in revenue, reportedly hurting their businesses because they can't understand that DRMs are bad for their revenue. Yeah, No, sorry.

Evergrande is a result of the chinese authorities letting them run away with debt.

Also, Boeing is the US authorithies letting them run away with bad management (i.e. the FAA letting them certify themselves).

Also Netflix, which was referenced, uses DRMs.

Telling that Netflix proves that small prices beats piracy, when Netflix was burning billions of dollars borrowed at 0% to produce content and attracts customers while it was alone on the market, is like telling MoviePass proved movie tickets could be cheap.

 

[Vayra86]

You are talking about _ONE_ company, in a market that is a duopoly.

That is quite different from a market with hundreds or thousands of competing companies. One of the two doesn't allow much errors (see Ubisoft).

Did I say that industrial accidents can happen ? Yes, I did.

We are not talking about one company using DRMs. We are talking about a whole industry, lots of companies, 40 billions dollars in revenue, reportedly hurting their businesses because they can't understand that DRMs are bad for their revenue. Yeah, No, sorry.

Evergrande is a result of the chinese authorities letting them run away with debt.

Also, Boeing is the US authorithies letting them run away with bad management (i.e. the FAA letting them certify themselves).

Also Netflix, which was referenced, uses DRMs.

Telling that Netflix proves that small prices beats piracy, when Netflix was burning billions of dollars borrowed at 0% to produce content and attracts customers while it was alone on the market, is like telling MoviePass proved movie tickets could be cheap.

A whole industry?! You really need to get your facts straight. Also, sure, there are always reasons, but you said people doing multi million dollar projects don't make mistakes - they do. And that's just judging on what we know - there's a lot we don't know, because it remains internal. I work in corporate, too, so I see that side of the coin in real life. It's there.

Full list of games using Denuvo (2024)

Protection is important.

progameguides.com

We're talking about Denuvo here. There are a lot of DRMs that are NOT intrusive, and the discussion isn't really about them. @lilhasselhoffer specifically talked about the differences between kinds of DRM, too. They're relevant.

Still, you're not wrong concluding there are bigger problems than this. But we're here in a topic discussing the relevance of this supposed research on Denuvo.

 

[MacZ]

A whole industry?! You really need to get your facts straight.

Full list of games using Denuvo (2024)

Protection is important.

progameguides.com

That just for 2024. Also just Denuvo. Which is not the only DRM system.

So, yeah, you are arguing in bad faith, cherry picking arguments to respond to. And respond badly.

Laughable.

 

[Vayra86]

That just for 2024. Also just Denuvo. Which is not the only DRM system.

So, yeah, you are arguing in bad faith, cherry picking arguments to respond to. And respond badly.

Laughable.

Denuvo games are the only ones that you don't really find much on torrent sites. Stop moving the goalposts to where you think they should be and stick to the topic. It doesn't invalidate whatever else you said about it - you argue there are numbers and sound decision making behind implementing it. That's fine. We disagree.

 

[MacZ]

Denuvo games are the only ones that you don't really find much on torrent sites. Stop moving the goalposts to where you think they should be and stick to the topic. It doesn't invalidate whatever else you said about it - you argue there are numbers and sound decision making behind implementing it. That's fine. We disagree.

I wouldn't know. I don't want to have malware on my computers.

 

[Klemc]

While Denuvo began to protect one game once a time, now there is 50 by year !

If the system could bankrupt dev studio, it wouldn't be like this.

 

[AGlezB]

If the system could bankrupt dev studio, it wouldn't be like this.

Denuvo doesn't bankrupt studios. Bad management is the usual cause, although a game studio without a good game to sell...

 

[lilhasselhoffer]

Man, I don't care much.

Nothing you said invalidated anything I said.

Copy protection ("DRM") exist since a very very long time. And it has never prevented video games from progressing. You assert that it is based on faulty models. But it's just an assertion, an opinion, to which I reply that is contrary to the aim of any company. People managing multi hundred of millions dollars projects don't do random or stupid things. Your argument is telling that they are.

Industrial accidents exist, yeah, so how does it invalidate anything about DRM ? There are also large successes with DRM and microtransactions.

You write a lot but make little sense.

And most people don't care much about Denuvo, mostly because they are little aware of it. The paying ones.

There are in my view bigger problems than this, like having to register to another launcher or having a kernel anti-cheat software.

That doesn't seem to be an industry with problems :

PC Gaming sales

You are confusing what is with what you want reality to be.

I think you really don't get it.

Let me make this simple enough that a child can understand.
1) RM has waxed and waned since before computer games were a thing. It's the reason that right to repair exists...and you'll note that the D was not forgotten. Rights Management existed before it was digital.
2) One game title. Spore. Maybe you don't remember, but it used Securom. It had an activation limit. It prevented paying users from accessing their game. If you believe DRM never screwed anything up you've also not played a recent Uplay game. I...admire that you are this out of touch with reality.

3) Industrial accidents? What in hades are you talking about? Maybe it's a language barrier thing? I literally never spoke about a company accidentally doing a thing...so either more projection or you mean something else that I just cannot understand.
4) You want to pretend that "if you don't feel the impact of Denuvo it isn't a problem." Cool. Explain to me the examples where they've demonstrated that games before and after Denuvo performed better once it's been removed... I'll not be waiting. It's between 50% better and within testing error...which means DRM has an impact. You may not feel it...but I will guarantee that it can make a game go from marginal performance to stuttery mess. Regarding your low standards of "make the other guy prove everything and provide nothing" here's my example of Denuvo test, youtube video. It's anecdotal, but literally more than anything you've done...which is kind of funny when you claim the high ground without paying attention to multiple sources I've already cited.

5) You perform the dumbest move here. You claim my citations mean nothing...and then immediately turn around and claim your opinion matters more... I will not give you this.
6) On that same note...the launcher is required to launch a program. The "other" launchers are programs that are DRM. You claim it does nothing, then bemoan it. Are you thinking before you write...? I leave that as an open question because I'll admit to fat fingering some keys, but not to literally stating contradictive things within two sentences. Ouch.

7) PC gaming sales...with a graph behind a $200 paywall so I wouldn't be willing to check your garbage assumptions about the data being shown. Almost a good move...then you find somebody willing to provide the data. Statista summary
8) I don't trust you to not twist the words. If you compare the graphs for number of PC gamers and the profitability of games you'll notice they look similar in the past several years despite the differences in earlier ones. Almost like the data represents a growth in profit much less than the enormous explosion in player count over the same period. Almost like despite having a lot more people the sales are not increasing at the same rate. It's almost like despite all that growth from the last 5 years the sales numbers are relatively stagnant, whereas 2008 to 2019 represented each new gamer drastically increasing profitability. So we are abundantly clear, the difference is that if you remove the bump up from the coof times revenue is relatively stagnating despite a large influx of customers. Once you factor in ever increasing costs...as reported by the developers...then revenue stagnating is profitability decreasing. That is not reality.



I'll take one last poke at you pretending I wished this. It's an inherently stupid statement and I want you to consider it before you respond...but believe I'll get another half baked unsupported non-answer. Bring it on. To be clear I wish for EA, Bethesda, Halo studios, and Ubisoft to fail. I want the management of those companies to pay for their bad decisions. I want their code monkeys to land better jobs in a myriad of indie studios that fill the vacuum of their crash. I want those programmers to find new studio leaders who spec a bunch of AA instead of AAA games, where the focus is doing 5 things right instead of 50 things "good enough." While I continue to wish, I hope none of those indies fall for the DRM trap, and instead of Denuvo garbage we can get a Steam competitor. I also wish for a winning lottery ticket, and to crap out gold instead of waste matter.
What I expect is one development house or another to fall, a scandalous report to bring to light that the management brought it low, and get down to three or four actual publishers before there's coercion and government has to step in and break the monopoly that did scummy things "to prevent the industry from crashing" which makes it rational for them to want to cling to DRM because the person most afraid of pirates is the one in the middle of pirating themselves...only they call it corporate raiding.

Now that you know me, it's time to discuss you. No data to back anything. Hiding behind a paid data wall thinking I would take the L without somebody else providing it (and $200 just to prove you wrong is an insane price to pay) was scummy. But the true end of this is that you started a fight for no reason. I said this was my two cents, and you wanted to argue. You...have to know that this was about DRM, and that your points were literally a 30 second google search to debunk...so I'm going to guess you want to fight and this hits closer to home than you'd like. Good luck to you...but nobody cries when my job is lost, so why should I cry when the executives do the same for code monkeys? I, as a wrench monkey, know you've earned no special treatment. I also know things are interlinked...because they always are. DRM is within three steps of a discussion on disposable workers...and how our culture changed and didn't. We're now worker commodities and the thing that didn't change is that we're all searching for a better life.

 

[MacZ]

I think you really don't get it.
<snip>

Suit your own fantasies.

But be aware, that when (if) the companies you despise so much fail, others will take their place, grow and will end up with the same solutions. Because they will be confronted to the exact same problems.

I don't care much either case because I don't play that much anymore.

I just find it fantastical that adults would rather engage in wishful thinking rather than look at reality like it is (even if it is bleak).

 

[Paganstomp]

GoG.com for me....

 

[DAPUNISHER]

I am on team - If purchasing isn't ownership, then piracy isn't theft. The gaming industry is broken, with big corpos buying up everything in sight. When a studio knocks it out of the park like Tango Gameworks did, and still gets shit canned, the last reason to be against piracy is gone for me. That reason was wanting to reward game studios for their efforts and encourage them to keep making great games.

 

[evernessince]

While Denuvo began to protect one game once a time, now there is 50 by year !

If the system could bankrupt dev studio, it wouldn't be like this.

Bankruptcy is an illogically high bar to set as to whether the trend of more denuvo games is justified or not. It being in more games and those studios not going bankrupt isn't evidence that it's worth the cost said studios paid for it. If anything, looking at the list of recent Denuvo titles many of those games were complete flops. Not because of Denuvo but because those companies have long forgotten how to make good games. Denuvo is just a small factor in the equation of their total finances. It's not something that's going to make or break them unless they already made a long long series of completely terrible financial decisions.

It's very hard to say whether Denuvo is justified in fact because it's impossible for a studio to know what their sales would look like with and without Denuvo. Enough reliable data simply isn't being made public. The only correlation I as a customer can see is that games that are good sell well. To me it's rather telling when a studio will go through the effort to implement a DRM no one likes to potentially increase their sales based on arbitrary research. It speaks volumes of their confidence to make a good game, because if they could there is far more evidence that doing so will increases sales as compared to the implementation of DRM. It's a red flag if you will, much like an in game shop, lootboxes, or a battlepass in a full price game.

 

[nvidiaenjoyer]

the solution is simple - make better games
if the lack of talent prevents that, the solution is simple too - get rid of diversity hires and hire people based on their skillset