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Denuvo causes major issues for legitimate owners of Sonic Mania Plus
- Thread starter lashman
- Start date
This Denuvo garbage has to die. I'm fucking tired of having this malware attached to games I buy.
waiting for the "denuvo is good it keeps away the pirate scum!" brigade that always hilariously infiltrate these threads
Does anyone know what Denuvo does behind the scenes that makes games chug? Does it constantly check something to make sure it's not a cracked version that eats up CPU power? I always hear how crappy it makes things run but don't know the details.
It's nice that the people who actually buy stuff legally have to deal with this stuff while people who steal it just circumvent it all anyways.
Mania Plus was cracked on day 1, so a lot of good that argument will do. :P
Fucking delete Denuvo already. Publishers are pathetic cowards if they still think the road to protecting their products vs piracy is punishing legitimate customers. Fuck off already.
Nothing. It virtualizes certain portions of code.
Used correctly, its impact is negligible. I also think the source in this thread is suspect; it could be that they've misused it (causing performance problems), but IIRC he has a history of attributing all sorts of problems to anti-tamper/DRM.
Really now, who doesn't love DRM? Screw pirates and their games that function as they should, we should be happy as paying customers to have to put up with bullshit like this.
http:///LdRc.png
http:///LdRc.png
I've had multiple instances where I am prevented from playing the single player portion of this game that I paid full price for on Steam, thanks to the glorious DRM that infests within it.
Sega have used it on every single PC release of theirs since Mania - maybe they have a sort of bulk deal going on?
The real headscratcher is why they chose to hastily update Denuvo when it's now known to be (relatively, depending on who works on cracks for what) futile.
Not saying that guy is trustworthy but
https://www.resetera.com/threads/de...oblems-in-tekken-7-according-to-harada.36153/
Denuvo can cause performance issues.
I can only imagine a meeting between Western branch and the main branch in Japan:
W: "Guys, we should port our Japanese games on PC, it's a profitable platform."
J: "But how about them scummy pirates on PC?"
W: "We'll put Denuvo on all of our games (*explains what Denuvo is)."
J: "Get it done."
It's Denuvo or no port.
This. Even companies who use this garbage are known to get rid of it after a certain period. Not double down and go with an update. What are they protecting? The pirates can already get the pirated version that's DRM free. Suits must be getting bonuses for this one.
By nature of what it does, it definitely can. But that comes from misuse (and lack of adequate testing).
I suspect most of the time it's forced on the game by the publisher, meaning there's not always a process in place to ensure it gets used correctly.
I've pre-ordered Yakuza 0 on PC, but the moment a crack becomes available I'm going out of my way to use it for my own peace of mind.
Sega is going to continue to add Denuvo, despite the backlash it seems. I assume they must have determined the loss of sales for having Denuvo was less than the loss of sales for not having it.
Not really. The majority of the games that have been cracked still have it.
But what is very interesting is this,
Abzu and Sherlock Holmes: The Devil's Daughter are available on GOG while their steam release still have Denuvo. That is honestly fascinating.
I think most of it is probably bad implementation, e.g. "it's not Denuvo's fault". But wait, let me try to prove that even if this is true, it's still Denuvo's fault.
Denuvo, to simplify it to the maximum extent that is useful -- is adding extra work for the game engine to do, with no actual benefit to the game. To be effective, it has to have its hooks in various places in the engine, which generally means you have to do a small (maybe very small) amount of re-engineering of the engine. If I can speculate for a moment, this re-engineering effort seems to often be made by different developers than the ones who wrote most of the original game's code -- I say this because so many copy-protection implementations using Denuvo are buggy. At the very least, it is something that occurs outside the usual QA cycle (not sure if this is licensing related or because no devs or QAs want to deal with Denuvo shit while they're trying to actually be productive).
So:
1. extra complexity in the code
2. immune to the QA cycle
3. (speculative) possibly done by a dev not as familiar with the code base?
Even if we're just dealing with #1 and #2, this is already a recipe for Shit To Go Wrong. This is always going to be the recipe for Shit To Go Wrong for any kind of heavy-handed copy protection, whether it's named Denuvo or something else. Denuvo happens to be the most famous boogeyman, but when most of us trash it, we're really trashing the idea that it's ok to risk (with a high probability!) crippling the game for paying customers for the rewards of... an extra couple weeks before piracy can happen.
(and oh by the way, if the crack doesn't happen, your game has a built in ticking time bomb until it doesn't run anymore)
That makes the most sense to me since they're just adding in code without thinking of its repercussions. And like you said they aren't the games developers , so even if they think they're doing something safe they don't know for sure. Depending on the way it's implemented it could cause issues especially if there's no qa testing after the Denuvo code is added.
I would fully support Denuvo in games if it was removed once a game is cracked. But since many publishers don't remove it, we end up with legit versions of games being the objectively inferior versions. That's not okay.
FWIW, I expect they do some QA. Just clearly orders of magnitude less than the rest of the game had to endure to go gold.
(which, functionally, might not be different from "no qa" -- if you miss the bug!)
I'm sure there's some check in place, but yeah can't be nearly as extensive.
For what it's worth, there's a UK game developer called Lab42 who has their own private branch for Sonic Mania according to SteamDB. Their branch was added as early as May 2018. This branch is currently even with both the Denuvo testing branch and the Plus branch (presumably testing/developing the improvements brought to 1.04/1.05 along with the Encore DLC).
Lab42 doesn't seem to be explicitly credited judging by the staff roll so their exact involvement is kind of vague. This is purely speculative, but perhaps they could have done the newer Denuvo implementation for Sega Europe if this theory's correct; maybe they simply did just do some (uncredited) testing. Maybe they did some (perhaps also uncredited) development support for the PC version of the Encore DLC, etc.; maybe all of the above. Mabye none of the above. Who knows.
Slight tangent but it apparently wouldn't be the first time Sega Europe's worked with them; a cursory web search showed me a resume for a technical artist at Lab42 who apparently worked on Sonic Forces Speed Battle under contract from Hardlight (the main devs, and a Sega Europe-owned studio).
Fuck Denuvo so much. I have pretty much stopped buying PC games completely since they started that shit, and have stuck to console games. Can't even remember the last PC game I bought anymore.
It's why I have stopped buying SEGA published games.
I'm torn over wanting to support them finally bringing the Yakuza series to PC, and not wanting to support their continued use of Denuvo.
I tend to treat it on a case-by-case basis rather than outright not buying anything that uses Denuvo, but I do refuse to buy anything that includes it at full price.
They didn't seem to have problems porting games before releasing Sonic Mania.
Based on the leaked data a few weeks ago, Bayonetta appears to have sold almost three times as many copies as Sonic Mania without any need for Denuvo, and it was only released four months prior.
There are now several provable examples of Denuvo hurting game performance, and many more games using it which have performance issues speculated to be caused by it.
I have now had to crack several games that I own to mod them for ultrawide support.
Unfortunately only about 1/4 of games using it have actually removed it at some point, and it's not always removed from the Steam version for some reason.
If companies would at least guarantee its removal at a later date; e.g. 6 months after release, I would be far less bothered by the inclusion of Denuvo to "protect" those first-week sales.
Denuvo sucks but this argument makes little sense to me; just like people that buy the console version of a game due to a "bad PC port" even when the current state of that port is still better than the console version.
I would hope that things are better going forward with the current console architecture, but the state of backwards compatibility on the PS4 is embarrassing.
It's literally to make suits who have no idea about games or PC gaming in general feel better. If they "feel" like their game is protected then their mind is at ease and they approve the port. It doesn't matter if it gets cracked right away. If they think it stopped some people from pirating then that's all they care about.
Yeah it really is that ridiculous but that's executives for ya. With japanese companies this effect can be even worse because they like to live in their own world over there to begin with and aren't as up to date on things like PC gaming as most western companies would be.
When are we going to get some actual, hard data on whether or not Denuvo actually impacts games in a significant way? It seems like what I hear is almost always hyperbole. Have there been any mainstream comparisons with and without Denuvo that I've missed?
Edit: Found. Looks like there was basically zero impact with Doom and FF15.
Edit: Found. Looks like there was basically zero impact with Doom and FF15.
Actually, this affects everyone.
A proper implementation of Denuvo causes no performance problems other than a longer initial loading.
I'm still so confused that the execs in the games industry haven't learned the lesson that having the best experience possible for your paying customers is a winning strategy.
Harming your customers in some silly attempt to hurt non customers is a garbage idea.
Harming your customers in some silly attempt to hurt non customers is a garbage idea.
Harada himself says it impacted Tekken 7.
This isn't Denuvo impacting performance here, this is Sega fucking up the implementation of it completely leading to major issues and allowing it to be cracked day 1 anyway.
