Denuvo DRM and Sales

[Zhukov]

That's why terms such as "educated guess" exist. People often forget that it's a thing that exists and has a valid use.

I feel safe in saying that an awful lot of educated guesses on something this specific are pure speculation.

I'd bet that educated guess have this funny way of being in perfect accordance with the preconceptions of the guesser. Actually, the term heavily implies that with the "educated" part. Wishful speculation in other words.

So... care to make an educated guess on how many copies, say, Rise of the Tomb Raider would have sold if it hadn't had Denuvo?

 

[JUMBO PALACE]

And you know why? Because people don't like stealing. Oh sure, some people do, but you won't get them to pony up the cash anyway. Then you have a bunch of people who can't really afford to pay for all their games. They literally don't have money to give. Finally, you get the the small demographic of people who have money, but are just reluctant enough to spend it for this to maybe sway them one way or another. And that demographic is tiny.

I was going to say something similar to this. The proportion of regular people who pay for their product thanks to their moral compass or because they want to support a developer is absurdly higher than the few who just pirate everything because they're cheap or vindictive. Ubisoft is the king of DRM and one of their executives was quoted as saying the PC platform is full of pirates so they don't care anyway. Until they say something about the thriving success of DRM I think there's more than enough room to be skeptical.

 

[Adam Jensen_v1legacy]

So... care to make an educated guess on how many copies, say, Rise of the Tomb Raider would have sold if it hadn't had Denuvo?

No because it wouldn't be an educated guess. I don't know how many copies it sold at all. If I knew I could compare sales to the last game in the series. There are several other factors involved like official reviews, user reviews, system requirements vs average Steam user PC, other games without Denuvo that were released in the same week or month which would make pirates simply choose to pirate those games instead and wait for Tomb Raider crack etc. This isn't rocket science. There are numerous factors involved but making an educated guess with enough data is absolutely possible. Boring but possible.

 

[Bombiz]

I don't really care about Denuvo. It may or may not decrease performance. But it's the business model of these companies that I don't approve of. Especially EA, Ubisoft and Square-Enix. I don't want to support THEM and their greedy business practices. And I'm hardly the only one. So they can keep using whatever anti-piracy measure they want. And then they can stand together bewildered when they discover that their games didn't sell any better despite their anti-piracy measures.

It's as much principle as it is the DRM itself, for me. I've already got so much bloody DRM on my systems as it is (and fuck, the version of Uplay downloaded with Assassin's Creed II from Steam doesn't even work, because what is making sure your games actually bloody run without forcing the customer to tinker around with everything years after they've been released?), I really don't care to be forced to allow more in. Also, I don't know what in the actual blue blazes Denuvo does, and as far as I'm aware there still isn't much hard information on that front (though I could be wrong).

Denuvo isn't openly intrusive, so it's at least got that going for it, but I'm still uncomfortable because I can't figure that it's just doing nothing.

the only thing I know for sure is that it prevents people from tampering or modifying the .exe file.

 

[Adam Jensen_v1legacy]

the only thing I know for sure is that it prevents people from tampering or modifying the .exe file.

In a nutshell. It's not DRM, it's protection for DRM because without it hackers can remove DRM with ease.

 

[chadachada123]

So... care to make an educated guess on how many copies, say, Rise of the Tomb Raider would have sold if it hadn't had Denuvo?

No because it wouldn't be an educated guess. I don't know how many copies it sold at all. If I knew I could compare sales to the last game in the series. There are several other factors involved like official reviews, user reviews, system requirements vs average Steam user PC, other games without Denuvo that were released in the same week or month which would make pirates simply choose to pirate those games instead and wait for Tomb Raider crack etc. This isn't rocket science. There are numerous factors involved but making an educated guess with enough data is absolutely possible. Boring but possible.

I don't know that an educated guess IS possible, because as you noted in your other post, you and I and people like us aren't going to buy Denuvo games on principle, and I can't think of any way to reliably estimate how many people like us exist.

Say, all other factors taken into account, a game sold 5% better with Denuvo. This could mean that 10% was lost by people like us refusing to buy it and 15% was gained from pirates deciding to buy it (a net gain from DRM), or it could also mean that 5% refused to buy, 2% decided to buy, and 8% bought because of some obscure factor that wasn't taken into consideration (a net loss that *appears* to be a net gain).

The obscure factors could be things like word of mouth or expansion into a new market (for example, a baseball game that just now started being sold in Japan would probably sell better than just the States), or, with the current Doom 4 example, a completely unpredictable amount of nostalgia points.

 

[Fimbulvetr3822]

Don't games with Denuvo have dire performance problems?
I heard it about Far Cry Primal and newer Tomb Raider, I think.
So they might actually have lower sales because of that.

There was an alledged issue with SSDs. But, I believe it was unfounded. It was a while ago, I forgot exactly.


In regards to game performance... Well... It's been that a lot of the games that run with Denuvo happen to have pretty poor performance. There's a few exceptions, but, these weren't exactly particularly graphically impressive games to begin with.

Total War Warhammer is the latest one, and it also runs... Apparently quite poorly.

However, given Total War games as of recent years have generally ran a bit crap and had a bunch of issues at launch, it's uncertain as to what the cause of that is.

From my 18 hours of experience since launch, I would have to say that Total War Warhammer is the smoothest launching total war I have played since Medieval 2. Granted the launch hotfix had been deployed before I got home from work so maybe for the first 4 hours it was an unplayable mess.

 

[Xyebane]

I think that if there was evidence that Denuvo helped boost sales (even weak evidence), we would not stop hearing press releases from Denuvo about how great it is and how much money it makes people who use it by preventing piracy. To be frank, there was never any strong evidence that piracy took away from a games sales figures anyways so it's not surprising.

 

[loa]

It's like marketing.
You can't measure its effectiveness yet everyone thinks they need to shove gigantic loads of it down everyone's throat in order to succeed at all because "that's just how it's done" and that's why it's here to stay no matter how much or little sense it makes.

 

[Fhqwhgod]

I avoid games with Denuvo. And it's really hard when I have to miss out on Doom, Hitman and probably the new Deus Ex as well.
It also means that pre orders are a no go since No company tells you before release that Denuvo is used and there is no info about it on the Steam store page either even after release.

 

[Bombiz]

the only thing I know for sure is that it prevents people from tampering or modifying the .exe file.

In a nutshell. It's not DRM, it's protection for DRM because without it hackers can remove DRM with ease.

I've recently seen a breakdown where people showed that Denuvo requires online verification on a games start up and that it regularly pings a server belonging to the company that owns Denuvo. Seems like it's more DRM than people were led to believe.

Do you have a link to that breakdown? I would very much like to see it.

 

[Ambient_Malice]

It's very complicated. Correlation vs causation and all that. Far Cry 3 and Far Cry 4 didn't use Denuvo, but Far Cry 4 sold a fraction of the copies of Far Cry 3. It is extremely difficult to prove or disprove anything.

I do think Denuvo does a decent job of encouraging sales, however.

 

[Adam Jensen_v1legacy]

I don't know that an educated guess IS possible, because as you noted in your other post, you and I and people like us aren't going to buy Denuvo games on principle, and I can't think of any way to reliably estimate how many people like us exist.

I don't refuse to buy games that use Denuvo. I refuse to buy games with a shitty business model, regardless of what kind of protection they might be using. I'm just tired of all the shitty things in gaming industry. So much DLC and hype for infinitely repetitive shit that I've seen before a million times. I feel like I'm buying shitty games and in bits and pieces and I just don't want to do that anymore. It drives me insane that I have to go through insane lengths just to play one of shitty Ubisoft's games on their retarded Uplay. It's infinitely more pleasant to just ignore it like it doesn't exist. Denuvo is a good thing. I hope it never gets cracked (but it will). Because when all is said and done and their games keep selling less than expected despite costing more and more, they won't be able to blame it on piracy and then they'll have to take a good hard look at what they've been doing wrong.

 

[Zipa]

Don't games with Denuvo have dire performance problems?
I heard it about Far Cry Primal and newer Tomb Raider, I think.
So they might actually have lower sales because of that.

There was an alledged issue with SSDs. But, I believe it was unfounded. It was a while ago, I forgot exactly.


In regards to game performance... Well... It's been that a lot of the games that run with Denuvo happen to have pretty poor performance. There's a few exceptions, but, these weren't exactly particularly graphically impressive games to begin with.

Total War Warhammer is the latest one, and it also runs... Apparently quite poorly.

However, given Total War games as of recent years have generally ran a bit crap and had a bunch of issues at launch, it's uncertain as to what the cause of that is.

The rumour was that it was writing to disk over and over which shortens the life of SSDs, I think it was Dragon Age Inquisition that was the game in question but it was never proven.