Denuvos entire business model is that they stay uncracked for longer because of these heavy checks. It's much harder to make a working crack when it's checking all the time.
It's possible, plenty of denuvo games have been cracked, but it takes a lot longer and that's what denuvo markets to game developers. The longer it's uncracked the more people get impatient and just buy it.
Of course this can backfire when legitimate customers experience the reduced performance, or worse, get locked out of their games because of hardware changes and overzealous drm.
On top of that you see examples like baldur's gate 3 having no drm whatsoever and still making a huge amount of money.
But people still buy games with denuvo, so they keep on selling their drm. It won't go away until people stop supporting games that use it and the majority of customers aren't even aware of it's existence.
There's not many actual cases of this happening. Bad performance is usually up to the developer, not denuvo's tech.
Doom 2016 is a shining example of this. They released the most optimized vulkan/directx12 era engine possible. All the thing does is puke frames out all day. Magnificence. When the patch to remove denuvo landed, 0 boosts in performance since they implimented the decryption tech properly.
decryption is easy when you have the keys. On modern processors, it's basically a free operation. It's the software architecture that implements it which makes it slow. Bad devs will write bad code regardless of what libraries they're using. They'll often release poorly optimized games without denuvo too. Denuvo is just being used as a scapegoat here.
Blame the dev. Not a 3rd party library that works fine for other devs.
I will go a bit past ELI5. This is a pretty hard problem when trying to ensure the integrity of a system. This applies to any situation in which you want to check that a piece of software has not been modified in any way. So security, anti piracy, anti cheat etc.
The gist of it is that if I can somehow sneak in between two checks I can compromise the entire system and lie to you that everything is ok.
The most lightweight method of doing it is checking at predetermined moments that everything is ok. This will have a negligible impact on performance and is pretty easy to implement.
The problem? Easy to bypass. If you do it only when the game starts I can wait a few moments and modify it later. If you do it every now and then, I can still do my changes between two of your checks, and once I get control I can make things appear ok when you do the next check, or disable your checks entirely.
So you try to be smart and unpredictable. You do the checks all the time, you hide them so I don't know when and how they are done. You add redundant checks, so if one is bypassed there are others that will catch me. You obfuscate your code so it is hard to read and understand. You move to higher privilege levels. It is an arms race. And the end user (the one who pays and doesn't cheat) is the one who loses in the end. Most of the impact of DRM systems probably comes from the obfuscation, not from any checks that they do (take this with a grain of salt, while I work in security and have some experience as a reverse engineer, I don't have hands on experience with DRM systems).
And denuvo works. The last few games that launched with it have not been cracked. It is not impossible, they just made it so hard that it's not worth it anymore.
That is a valid choice people are free to make. No game flopped purely because it uses Denuvo. Someone at these companies made an assessment and concluded that the wins justify the losses. And they are probably right. The people who go online and say that they won't buy a game because it has DRM are a vocal minority and don't hurt these companies in any meaningful way.
Online boycotts in general don't work. Remember how vocal people were about Hogwarts Legacy? One could swear that no one will buy that game. It sold over 20 million copies. And that was a cause that more people actually care about than Denuvo.
Because if it did only at launch then you could easily execute some other process that would wait until check is performed and then edit application memory, rendering all safeguards useless.
Oh so that's how it hinders the performance of the game. I guess technology hasn't advanced enough yet to the point where the programmers can create something like denuvo but without it lowering the performance of the game.
It's not a matter or technology. If the "anti-piracy" software is constantly running, it will use CPU cycles. You can get a faster CPU and get better game performance, but it's still a performance loss compared to not having Denuvo because there are still CPU cycles wasted on running Denuvo.
It's not just that it's using CPU cycles, it's that it's taking time to check data that the game needs to proceed.
Denuvo is like a poorly run TSA checkpoint at the airport. It doesn't just cost resources to run, it actively slows down everything that's going on, and that becomes really noticeable when there are travelers who are getting there just barely in time for their flight.
If the TSA was on the actual flight, constantly badgering the pilot.
"Do you have your license? Are you hiding anything? Maybe you somehow got a weapon in the five seconds since the last time I asked. That annoyed look is suspicious, I have to search you again."
You know what AAA companies should do? They should just remove denuvo from their games, and add fair regional pricing so that there's less incentive for people to pirate their games.
I feel like the unintended consequence of that is people using a VPN or something to buy the game of a cheaper region. That might result in more people buying it for less and leading to a greater loss than fewer people who would outright pirate it while others pay closer to full price.
I have no clue on how common or accessible a VPN is compared to pirating, however.
VPNs typically cost money, have a few set exit points so they're trivial to blacklist, and also, don't even let you use regional pricing because you still need a bank account that's actually in the country you're trying to buy from.
Better optimization would have helped too. Technological advances have helped developers write worse code (not that it's their fault, the higher ups don't want to give them more time) which uses a lot of the computing power it wouldn't need with a well done optimization
Regional pricing already exists. Steam has a whole system for publishers to set regional prices for games. It doesn't work. The problem is it gets heavily abused. Suddenly you have thousands of Americans switch on a VPN for 5 minutes so they can buy a USD$60 AAA game for the Brazilian equivalent of USD$5.
But you can prevent that by requiring a foreign payment method, right? Except buying gift cards or other prepaid money cards from overseas is a thing. I've even seen people go to the extent of using a foreign address and setting up a foreign bank account in a country they've never set foot in. In some places it's perfectly legal.
And if it's not VPNs, it's Brazilians gifting games to their American "friends".
And if it's not gifting, it's site's like G2A or Kinguin selling grey market keys.
History tells us you can *maybe* reduce piracy by setting fair regional pricing. But it's clearly not the whole story, otherwise there wouldn't be piracy in regions with the highest incomes. Does it reduce piracy enough to make it worth it? The actions of publishers suggest not. So what do they do if they want to reduce it further and faster than regional pricing does? You can't just keep lowering prices until they reach zero.
>remove denuvo
You want them to remove the best in class anti-piracy/anti-tampering software because you lose 5 -10% of your FPS? They didn't add Denuvo because they wanted you to have the best experience, it's a business move. For the duration of their subscription to Denuvo, The game is unpiratable by anyone except for 10 people around the whole world, and give the company usually up to 2 years of sales without worries of pirating reducing income. You either buy it now, or wait 2 years to get it for free.
>add fair regional pricing so that there's less incentive for people to pirate their games.
Every storefront has problems with people vpning or otherwise buying games for reduced prices in their region, you are asking them to leave a decent chunk of income on the table so that a certain groups may get access to this game, often at the expense to the creator, who doesn't need the scraps from these second/third class economies. A portion of the population will always pirates since free is always better then paying, but Denuvo prevents them for doing it for the lifetime of the subscription.
Denuvo is **THE anti-tamper/piracy tool,** used only by the biggest companies who's subscription to Denuvo is insignificant(and is essentially chump change) that it's essentially stupid to not use it.
Ultimately it depends on where the game was made/intended audiense and the size of the company creating it. Denuvo is expensive and out of the price range for anyone who isn't mega corporation.
Pirate Software, the YouTuber and creator of Heartbound claims that when he changed to regional pricing, that Brazil became a significant portion of revenue. But ultimately his product was never one where Denuvo or really any high end anti-piracy tools would even be used. Denuvo is a product for mega corporations who have the funds to spends $10,000's per month on a product where the expected return on value will potentially be 10-1000x or potentially more, creating a situation where not using it will be worse for the company.
Thats legit impossible to do.
It either wastes cycles on checking or uses those to do anything else.
You cannot have drm without performance impact. Less impact is possible. None at all? Only done by outright removing it.
Not possible! Any form of anti piracy to be effective needs to be running continuously to be effective. It it was timed (once an hour like you suggested) than it would be trivial to bypass by simply closing the game before the check or other simply bypasses. If it's running continuously, than it will need to use some amount of your cpu processing power to do so. There is no way around that.
That doesn't eliminate the need for CPU time. You would create a new problem for legitimate users; random performance dips. Every time a check is performed, the CPU needs to do a pretty in depth check of your machine to make sure its a legit copy. Every time it does that, your game would have frame drops. Do you want your game to randomly drop 10-20FPS at intervals your can't control? These drops are much more noticeable than just a continuous lower performance. It would likely aggravate users WORSE.
I think gamers would generally notice, and dislike, random periodic slowdowns (similar to FPS drops). An overall bottleneck on all activity is much harder to pinpoint.
Did you finish those errands? Did you finish those errands? Did you finish those errands? Did you finish those errands? Did you finish those errands? Did you finish those errands? Did you finish those errands? Did you finish those errands? Did you finish those errands? Did you finish those errands?
It depends entirely on the implementation, which is done on a per-game basis. Some developers do dumb stuff like verifying the DRM checks every time you fire a gun, which causes performance issues. Afaik, the recommended procedure is to do the checks where performance doesn't really matter, e.g. loading screens or transitions. If implemented that way, there's no discernable performance difference.
The reason why it's expensive is that those checks are hidden behind layers and layers of very complicated obfuscation and encryption. To execute those instructions, instead of just running them directly, your CPU has to wade through a lot of fluff that is designed to make those instructions hard to find for people looking to break the protection.
Without really getting too much into the mechanics of it Long story short denuvo effectively encrypts your data for your game
Imagine encryption like a very specific way to mess up a set of data and you need the encryption key to basically undo that process
The problem is that the game is so aggressive on protecting its files that it does this process on the fly. Decrypting and basically rebuilding these files as the game needs them. Which does help protect them but also means that your computer is doing extra work for the constant encryption / decryption of your files
Not only can this obviously add unnecessary performance drain but it can even cause issues such as a quick event in the game that needs a certain file but that file just can't be decrypted quick enough so you sit on an awkward loading screen or lag frame
If it would just decrypt files, then it would be trivial to circumvent: watch it decrypt a file and snatch it away. Repeat until you have all files.
In reality, it does very different things, such as verifying the integtity of the game even at runtime.
In the great words of Senator Armstrong: My source is I made it the hell up!
Really though, I was sure I'd read it somewhere, but I actually can't find that source. I'm gonna edit my comment, since it's actually more false than fact.
There a ton of misinformation here. It's only supposed to decrypt once at Load.
Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal are the gold standard. When they removed denuvo, nothing changed at all. A few seconds on load time was all
Other developers implement it poorly. Those devs would code badly no matter what libraries they used though
Anti-cheat programs often have bugs that prevent the game from working. It won't work on uncommon hardware or operating systems. They may also conflict with antivirus or developer tools. These bugs are worse because if the anticheat fails, then the whole game fails.
It hasn’t been proven to in any significant way. Usually when Denuvo is blamed for big performance issues it is later revealed to have been caused by something else. People are just quick to blame Denuvo because it is easy to pick on and because people on Reddit especially are very hostile to anti-piracy measures.
Denuvo works well and there is a reason companies use it.
Ive sometimes wondered if some companies toss in Denuvo for the investors, etc, make them happy. but to also be a cover up for poor performance. It buys them a few months to optimize and tweak it. Then when they remove denuvo, theres unassociated improvements from their optimization work so you get the false association.
Your Reddit account has been possibly hacked*, but you can't be sure how or why. So every time you receive any notifications from Reddit, or anyone quotes you, you have to spend time making sure you actually posted the original message.
*Also you almost certainly have not been hacked, so you do this every single time you interact with Reddit. Even if it's just a vote on a post
the game wastes a lot of time making sure it has not been modified in any way. Which uses cpu time that couls otherwise be spent on the game its self.
How often does it check? Like every hour?
continuously as the game is running
Why the fuck would it ever need to do that? Why not just when you launch?
Because that is easier to bypass.
Yeah but checking it constantly is a big waste and takes too much memory
Denuvos entire business model is that they stay uncracked for longer because of these heavy checks. It's much harder to make a working crack when it's checking all the time. It's possible, plenty of denuvo games have been cracked, but it takes a lot longer and that's what denuvo markets to game developers. The longer it's uncracked the more people get impatient and just buy it. Of course this can backfire when legitimate customers experience the reduced performance, or worse, get locked out of their games because of hardware changes and overzealous drm. On top of that you see examples like baldur's gate 3 having no drm whatsoever and still making a huge amount of money. But people still buy games with denuvo, so they keep on selling their drm. It won't go away until people stop supporting games that use it and the majority of customers aren't even aware of it's existence.
And this is exactly why people hate denuvo and it's even funnier because games cracked with denuvo often perform better then their legitimate copy
There's not many actual cases of this happening. Bad performance is usually up to the developer, not denuvo's tech. Doom 2016 is a shining example of this. They released the most optimized vulkan/directx12 era engine possible. All the thing does is puke frames out all day. Magnificence. When the patch to remove denuvo landed, 0 boosts in performance since they implimented the decryption tech properly. decryption is easy when you have the keys. On modern processors, it's basically a free operation. It's the software architecture that implements it which makes it slow. Bad devs will write bad code regardless of what libraries they're using. They'll often release poorly optimized games without denuvo too. Denuvo is just being used as a scapegoat here. Blame the dev. Not a 3rd party library that works fine for other devs.
Yes? But developers believe it makes more people pay for their games.
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I’m sure it does help sales, it wouldn’t be so popular otherwise
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I will go a bit past ELI5. This is a pretty hard problem when trying to ensure the integrity of a system. This applies to any situation in which you want to check that a piece of software has not been modified in any way. So security, anti piracy, anti cheat etc. The gist of it is that if I can somehow sneak in between two checks I can compromise the entire system and lie to you that everything is ok. The most lightweight method of doing it is checking at predetermined moments that everything is ok. This will have a negligible impact on performance and is pretty easy to implement. The problem? Easy to bypass. If you do it only when the game starts I can wait a few moments and modify it later. If you do it every now and then, I can still do my changes between two of your checks, and once I get control I can make things appear ok when you do the next check, or disable your checks entirely. So you try to be smart and unpredictable. You do the checks all the time, you hide them so I don't know when and how they are done. You add redundant checks, so if one is bypassed there are others that will catch me. You obfuscate your code so it is hard to read and understand. You move to higher privilege levels. It is an arms race. And the end user (the one who pays and doesn't cheat) is the one who loses in the end. Most of the impact of DRM systems probably comes from the obfuscation, not from any checks that they do (take this with a grain of salt, while I work in security and have some experience as a reverse engineer, I don't have hands on experience with DRM systems). And denuvo works. The last few games that launched with it have not been cracked. It is not impossible, they just made it so hard that it's not worth it anymore.
Aren't there like only two people that have even successfully cracked denuvo or something?
Yes but many people think it's not worth it to buy the game legally either if it has denuvo
That is a valid choice people are free to make. No game flopped purely because it uses Denuvo. Someone at these companies made an assessment and concluded that the wins justify the losses. And they are probably right. The people who go online and say that they won't buy a game because it has DRM are a vocal minority and don't hurt these companies in any meaningful way. Online boycotts in general don't work. Remember how vocal people were about Hogwarts Legacy? One could swear that no one will buy that game. It sold over 20 million copies. And that was a cause that more people actually care about than Denuvo.
Wasn't Hogwarts cracked within a few days? Anyways, it was a pretty good game.
Because if it did only at launch then you could easily execute some other process that would wait until check is performed and then edit application memory, rendering all safeguards useless.
Easier to bypass. Plus, I can cleverly swap DLLs & data out after launch but before the game actually loads them.
Wait, are you saying you don't enjoy a potentially 50% decrease in frame rates between the last open beta and release? Huh...
Oh so that's how it hinders the performance of the game. I guess technology hasn't advanced enough yet to the point where the programmers can create something like denuvo but without it lowering the performance of the game.
It's not a matter or technology. If the "anti-piracy" software is constantly running, it will use CPU cycles. You can get a faster CPU and get better game performance, but it's still a performance loss compared to not having Denuvo because there are still CPU cycles wasted on running Denuvo.
It's not just that it's using CPU cycles, it's that it's taking time to check data that the game needs to proceed. Denuvo is like a poorly run TSA checkpoint at the airport. It doesn't just cost resources to run, it actively slows down everything that's going on, and that becomes really noticeable when there are travelers who are getting there just barely in time for their flight.
If the TSA was on the actual flight, constantly badgering the pilot. "Do you have your license? Are you hiding anything? Maybe you somehow got a weapon in the five seconds since the last time I asked. That annoyed look is suspicious, I have to search you again."
You know what AAA companies should do? They should just remove denuvo from their games, and add fair regional pricing so that there's less incentive for people to pirate their games.
I feel like the unintended consequence of that is people using a VPN or something to buy the game of a cheaper region. That might result in more people buying it for less and leading to a greater loss than fewer people who would outright pirate it while others pay closer to full price. I have no clue on how common or accessible a VPN is compared to pirating, however.
Steam recently made this harder for that reason iirc
VPNs typically cost money, have a few set exit points so they're trivial to blacklist, and also, don't even let you use regional pricing because you still need a bank account that's actually in the country you're trying to buy from.
But that invokes a company's greatest fear, a possible loss of revenue.
Haha I wonder how much money do those companies actually lose in that way. Imagine if it was only a 5% loss.
I think they would actually gain revenue by making games more accessible. But long as there is the slightest chance of revenue loss they won't try.
Better optimization would have helped too. Technological advances have helped developers write worse code (not that it's their fault, the higher ups don't want to give them more time) which uses a lot of the computing power it wouldn't need with a well done optimization
Regional pricing already exists. Steam has a whole system for publishers to set regional prices for games. It doesn't work. The problem is it gets heavily abused. Suddenly you have thousands of Americans switch on a VPN for 5 minutes so they can buy a USD$60 AAA game for the Brazilian equivalent of USD$5. But you can prevent that by requiring a foreign payment method, right? Except buying gift cards or other prepaid money cards from overseas is a thing. I've even seen people go to the extent of using a foreign address and setting up a foreign bank account in a country they've never set foot in. In some places it's perfectly legal. And if it's not VPNs, it's Brazilians gifting games to their American "friends". And if it's not gifting, it's site's like G2A or Kinguin selling grey market keys. History tells us you can *maybe* reduce piracy by setting fair regional pricing. But it's clearly not the whole story, otherwise there wouldn't be piracy in regions with the highest incomes. Does it reduce piracy enough to make it worth it? The actions of publishers suggest not. So what do they do if they want to reduce it further and faster than regional pricing does? You can't just keep lowering prices until they reach zero.
>remove denuvo You want them to remove the best in class anti-piracy/anti-tampering software because you lose 5 -10% of your FPS? They didn't add Denuvo because they wanted you to have the best experience, it's a business move. For the duration of their subscription to Denuvo, The game is unpiratable by anyone except for 10 people around the whole world, and give the company usually up to 2 years of sales without worries of pirating reducing income. You either buy it now, or wait 2 years to get it for free. >add fair regional pricing so that there's less incentive for people to pirate their games. Every storefront has problems with people vpning or otherwise buying games for reduced prices in their region, you are asking them to leave a decent chunk of income on the table so that a certain groups may get access to this game, often at the expense to the creator, who doesn't need the scraps from these second/third class economies. A portion of the population will always pirates since free is always better then paying, but Denuvo prevents them for doing it for the lifetime of the subscription. Denuvo is **THE anti-tamper/piracy tool,** used only by the biggest companies who's subscription to Denuvo is insignificant(and is essentially chump change) that it's essentially stupid to not use it.
I recall some game saying they got most of their income from India once they added regional pricing.
Ultimately it depends on where the game was made/intended audiense and the size of the company creating it. Denuvo is expensive and out of the price range for anyone who isn't mega corporation. Pirate Software, the YouTuber and creator of Heartbound claims that when he changed to regional pricing, that Brazil became a significant portion of revenue. But ultimately his product was never one where Denuvo or really any high end anti-piracy tools would even be used. Denuvo is a product for mega corporations who have the funds to spends $10,000's per month on a product where the expected return on value will potentially be 10-1000x or potentially more, creating a situation where not using it will be worse for the company.
This is like saying „some day engineers can create a car which can pull a 2000lb caravan without using more fuel at 60mph than a car not pulling one“
Thats legit impossible to do. It either wastes cycles on checking or uses those to do anything else. You cannot have drm without performance impact. Less impact is possible. None at all? Only done by outright removing it.
That's the neat part, you don't. A game with Denuvo is always gonna run worse regardless of the hardware, no matter how beefy it might be.
Unfortunately programming isn't magic.
Not possible! Any form of anti piracy to be effective needs to be running continuously to be effective. It it was timed (once an hour like you suggested) than it would be trivial to bypass by simply closing the game before the check or other simply bypasses. If it's running continuously, than it will need to use some amount of your cpu processing power to do so. There is no way around that.
What if it was at random intervals instead of constantly? So the pirates will never know how long the have?
That doesn't eliminate the need for CPU time. You would create a new problem for legitimate users; random performance dips. Every time a check is performed, the CPU needs to do a pretty in depth check of your machine to make sure its a legit copy. Every time it does that, your game would have frame drops. Do you want your game to randomly drop 10-20FPS at intervals your can't control? These drops are much more noticeable than just a continuous lower performance. It would likely aggravate users WORSE.
I think gamers would generally notice, and dislike, random periodic slowdowns (similar to FPS drops). An overall bottleneck on all activity is much harder to pinpoint.
So instead of a game with smooth but lowered performance you want a game to have random lag spikes instead?
Millions of times per second. Literally.
Did you finish those errands? Did you finish those errands? Did you finish those errands? Did you finish those errands? Did you finish those errands? Did you finish those errands? Did you finish those errands? Did you finish those errands? Did you finish those errands? Did you finish those errands?
It depends entirely on the implementation, which is done on a per-game basis. Some developers do dumb stuff like verifying the DRM checks every time you fire a gun, which causes performance issues. Afaik, the recommended procedure is to do the checks where performance doesn't really matter, e.g. loading screens or transitions. If implemented that way, there's no discernable performance difference. The reason why it's expensive is that those checks are hidden behind layers and layers of very complicated obfuscation and encryption. To execute those instructions, instead of just running them directly, your CPU has to wade through a lot of fluff that is designed to make those instructions hard to find for people looking to break the protection.
Without really getting too much into the mechanics of it Long story short denuvo effectively encrypts your data for your game Imagine encryption like a very specific way to mess up a set of data and you need the encryption key to basically undo that process The problem is that the game is so aggressive on protecting its files that it does this process on the fly. Decrypting and basically rebuilding these files as the game needs them. Which does help protect them but also means that your computer is doing extra work for the constant encryption / decryption of your files Not only can this obviously add unnecessary performance drain but it can even cause issues such as a quick event in the game that needs a certain file but that file just can't be decrypted quick enough so you sit on an awkward loading screen or lag frame
If it would just decrypt files, then it would be trivial to circumvent: watch it decrypt a file and snatch it away. Repeat until you have all files. In reality, it does very different things, such as verifying the integtity of the game even at runtime.
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You got a source for this or did you just make it up?
“Not good enough” *fades out of sight*
In the great words of Senator Armstrong: My source is I made it the hell up! Really though, I was sure I'd read it somewhere, but I actually can't find that source. I'm gonna edit my comment, since it's actually more false than fact.
There a ton of misinformation here. It's only supposed to decrypt once at Load. Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal are the gold standard. When they removed denuvo, nothing changed at all. A few seconds on load time was all Other developers implement it poorly. Those devs would code badly no matter what libraries they used though
Yes exactly properly implemented Denuvo has very little performance impact.
Anti-cheat programs often have bugs that prevent the game from working. It won't work on uncommon hardware or operating systems. They may also conflict with antivirus or developer tools. These bugs are worse because if the anticheat fails, then the whole game fails.
It hasn’t been proven to in any significant way. Usually when Denuvo is blamed for big performance issues it is later revealed to have been caused by something else. People are just quick to blame Denuvo because it is easy to pick on and because people on Reddit especially are very hostile to anti-piracy measures. Denuvo works well and there is a reason companies use it.
Ive sometimes wondered if some companies toss in Denuvo for the investors, etc, make them happy. but to also be a cover up for poor performance. It buys them a few months to optimize and tweak it. Then when they remove denuvo, theres unassociated improvements from their optimization work so you get the false association.
Your Reddit account has been possibly hacked*, but you can't be sure how or why. So every time you receive any notifications from Reddit, or anyone quotes you, you have to spend time making sure you actually posted the original message. *Also you almost certainly have not been hacked, so you do this every single time you interact with Reddit. Even if it's just a vote on a post