this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2023
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It already played great on the Deck (Denuvo hasn't been a problem for Wine/Proton for several years), but the removal of DRM is always a win in my book.
I'd like to see this trend of publishers stripping it out of their games after a couple years continue.
Why wait a few years and not avoid it completely? I doubt there's any reliable data that confirms a significant loss in sales if they launched without Denuvo and its ilk. DRM is at best useless and at worst "harms" customers.
You can't really measure the proportion of players that would buy the game were they not able to pirate it, which makes it easy for CEOs to imagine every incidence of piracy as a lost sale. Who's going to convince them they put the cart before the horse? It absolves them of direct responsibility for almost any shortcoming possible
Essentially, it's probably some manufactured guesstimated metric that some sales executives pulls out of his ass for each release.
There's no publicly available hard data one way or the other. However the fact that publishers continue to use it while abandoning other forms of DRM suggests that there is probably some benefit.
I don't really buy the argument that the only people who pirate content are people who would never pay for it to begin with. I know too many fellow software engineers that make comfy 6-figure salaries and pirate everything they can and spend money when it's the only option.
There is definitely a benifit, it just doesn't necessarily have to be for the bottom line. If you are running a major publisher you are likely spending public shareholders money or executive partners money (with some skin in the game yourself) on these games.
At the very least based on the consistency some publishers use Drm we know getting Drm buys piece of mind/job security that whoever is managing the project is doing something to prevent shrink/theft.
It's like the ad line goes, nobody ever gets fired for buying an IBM.
There is safety in doing the best practice or industry standard.
That all said, it's entirely possible there is hard data out there that strongly suggests there is a cost benifit too it, and it's just not public data.
I was not thinking about the business side but rather about what the customer gets out of it. What bothers me about DRM systems is that they cause problems that you don't have with pirated game, which is the opposite of how it should be. I don't want to struggle to get a game running, when the pirated version does not caus those problems. That being said, I haven't bought any large AAA title in years and my experience is from 7+ years ago. Maybe things have changed but I kinda doubt it.
I think this is why Denuvo has been successful. Where old DRM solutions got up in your face with onerous installation procedures, installing borderline rootkits, and ridiculous activation limits, Denuvo is essentially invisible to the end-user. It's not ideal, but if developers are going to insist on shipping DRM I'll take this over what we used to deal with any day of the week.
I'd be surprised if there WASN'T reliable data that confirms a significant loss in sales if they launched without Denuvo.
I don't think that astroturfers claiming to be pirates who "gave in and bought the game because of the DRM" is what people have in mind when they say reliable data.
Sure I don't deny that those people actually exist but I do also know that there is an incentive to push that narrative because they are spending money or time (in the case of In-House DRM) on implementing these measures so they got to make it seem as worthwhile as possible (especially in the case of publicly traded companies with shareholders).