It is, though, because it’s an unnecessary and obvious point of failure. No predicting the future required. Furthermore, generally people don’t get upset about third party patches that fix compatibility issues in older games, but hacking out DRM, even if it’s just to get the game running at all, is still illegal.
To me, the point isn’t whether you, personally, will want to play the game in the future (though it certainly doesn’t hurt to enable that in case you would), but whether it will be available to future generations who want to experience the history of the medium. As you say, there are obstacles to preservation efforts already just from the nature of shifting technology. There’s no call to sabotage it deliberately.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have a specific problem with Denuvo over any other DRM - it’s not something I’ve personally had issues with. And I’ve long since stopped making purchasing decisions over DRM as it’s become clear all that accomplishes is sabotaging my own access to fun games - there simply isn’t enough popular momentum for publishers to take notice and actually stop using DRM. But I’ll never be happy about its use, or believe that it accomplishes anything productive. And I strongly disagree that it’s ever consumer friendly. It’s not for us. At best, it’s for the publishers and developers’ bottom line. In reality, it’s mostly for the DRM company’s bottom line.
Looks like the publisher/developer removed this via the latest patch recently. I guess they were happy with it doing it’s job long enough to keep early adopters from stealing it?
Hard to tell, their comments on the forums w.r.t. Denuvo usage was pretty dismissive of anyone who were against it, so can not really trust them to not include it in a more updated patch.
Edit: apparently Anthem uses Denuvo for their anti-debugging code… wonder if that is the cause of some performance issues also. i.e. slow as fuck loading times.
Denuvo really does make a dramatic performance hit. This makes me really angry that some of the performance issues I’ve had is the damn copy protection. Especially hitching and the sudden stutters… it was Denuvo.
I’ve seen his testing for years. It’s extremely thorough and has always appeared to be fair. While I don’t care so much about load times, I do care about the frame time issues.
And this shouldn’t be surprising. You can’t decrypt and contact a website regularly without impact. They just try to delay it, making the framerate impact rare.
That’s what I’m getting, sometimes it drops to 27 and sometimes it flies up into the 70s, it’s all over the place. Same resolution. Ultra High settings (but I went 2x AA instead of the default 8x).
EDIT - I see, I said “pretty sluggish” but I should say, sometimes it seems to chug a bit and even though it’s never hitching or causing any real problems (some of which thanks to g-sync) it still isn’t smooth 60fps all the time, and I feel like it should be, unless there are either optimization issues or Denuvo causing trouble, or a combination.
Are you playing via Steam? Because there is a bug with Steam online mode and Anno 1800. Causing low FPS and screen stuttering. Patch for that on 4/25/19.
DRM wouldn’t bother me in the slightest if, as a matter of course, the publishers would remove it after a set period of time; say a year or two, I’m not fussy. Then put the games on GOG so I could have a clean archive-ready copy. Some have done this already, but it’s been very infrequent.
For instance, Sniper Elite V2 is set to release on GOG in a week or so, and I’ll be buying it again just to have a clean copy, as I loved that game and could see myself playing it several more times in the years to come. Nothing wrong with my Steam copy; it still works just fine. But there is something psychologically comforting in knowing that I own a copy that is not dependent on a server somewhere to ask permission to install it.
Granted, I’ll be downloading it to a USB drive, and over time, the files could get corrupted. In which case, yep, I’ll be heading back to download it again from GOG if they’re still around. So it’s not a perfect plan. But it’ll still be nice knowing that I can look at my USB stick and say, “Right there it is. Not somewhere out there on some nebulous cloud waiting for me to remember my password.”
There’s no such thing as effective DRM. The only ways to prevent piracy entirely are to either make something no one cares enough to crack and distribute (pretty tough) or remove user access to data completely.
At which point the cure is definitely worse than the disease.
