Plus, she’s wrong! There are plenty of “free” games already.
$99.00 for 36,000 boost koins! Best deal!
I would be surprised if scene crackers are discussing how to defeat Denuvo and other Digital Restriction Technologies on their blogs, but maybe the P2P “Scene” does it that way.
Regardless, Denuvo just means more GOG and more Kickstarter, and less “AAA” games (that are mostly Sequels and not new IP). So money saved for me at least.
It’s quite amazing that hardcore gamers, who usually obsess over every fraction of an FPS, now seem to have swallowed the tale that code obfuscation doesn’t degrade performance.
Wait, are you saying it does?
How can it not? It artificially inflates the amount of operations to achieve the same result.
Is there evidence that it does? I hope not. Effective copy protection that does not impact legitimate purchasers would be a fantastic development for gamers.
But whether that equates to a noticeable decrease in performance isn’t clear. I don’t care if something takes more CPU cycles if it isn’t noticeable to me.
The only way to test it 100% would be to run a Denuvo .EXE and a non-infected .EXE and see performance for both.
Logically it is only natural that the obfuscation technology Denuvo employs causes some extra cpu cycles to be burned to achieve the restriction they want. If it is on the same level as the SafeDisc (or was it SecuROM?) version of Morrowind and the non-infected version remains unknown.
Mad Max used it and it was one of the best performing games of the past year.
There’s no such thing nor ever will be, unless it’s time limited. See, even if they manage to stop piracy and it has literally no direct impact on people who actually purchased the game while it was available for sale, what happens when it isn’t for sale anymore? Lost in the shuffle or deliberately sat on by the rights holder or whatever. Piracy and copyright protection cracking measures in general have been critical to an enormous percentage of the effort to preserve the history of videogames.
Even if it has a noticeable impact, it’s going to be on the CPU side. I doubt it’s going to have any real-world impact on the majority of games that use it. For the games where I care about the CPU (and there are definitely some where I do), I doubt they’ll be using this.
That’s assuming there’s any impact at all, though. Why would obfuscation impact performance? The compiler or CPU doesn’t care if your method name is sensical or made up of gibberish. EDIT: To be clear, I’m not familiar with everything Denuvo does, I’m just going off of your mention of obfuscation causing a performance hit.
It has a performance impact because it encrypts/decrypts/scrambles the executable dinamically at (mostly) real-time (static encryption/decryption/scrambling would have been cracked by now). So yes, it uses some CPU to work, though how much it uses is still unknown (and heavily dependant on how well the algorithm works with cache, pipelining, etc).
Speculation, based on Denuvo’s claims, is that they specifically don’t obfuscate performance-sensitive main-game-loop sort of code. It makes sense—not a lot of ways to jump right into that code, generally; just protect the licensing/DRM steps you need to take to start the game in the first place, and you’re safe.
It does have an impact, since it requires CPU to function. The question is whether that impact is negligible or not, and that depends on both implementation of the anti-tamper technology AND its application to the game executables themselves. It’s very likely that, if used correctly, then the performance impact is pretty much negligible (as is the intention behind the product, as far as I know). But if used incorrectly or carelessly, it can have a more noticeable impact, I suppose.
Anyway, I don’t think it will remain uncracked forever, though. We’ll see.
I suppose it really comes down to the financial incentive. Jailbreaking iOS, for example, is insanely lucrative, which is why you have multiple groups competing to crack it first-- and why iOS continues to be regularly cracked. It enables piracy for an entire platform, and installs Chinese-only appstores with scamware, etc. All worth tons of money.
Enabling piracy for a single game, on the other hand, can’t be worth much at all. I’m sure there are still stores selling pirated PC games on the streets of hong kong, but does the cracker make any money off that stuff, or is it still being done out of sheer altrusim (love of the scene, etc), like back in the 90s? Where’s the money?
Yes, that’s how it works. But given the power of modern cpus, who knows if scrambling data a few thousands of times per second is barely a 0.5% hit in the cpu.
Piracy works somewhat like competition for games devs, forcing them to compete to the low prices. I wonder if it have a role in the health of the pc market, from the gamers perspective. A uncrackable copyright protection don’t need to be a good thing necessarily.
Less importantly, any copyright protection need to be broken for archiving purposes so future generations can experience current games.
That’s actually the only part I personally care about, as I’m not a kid and pay for my games these days. If copy protection is really unbreakable, games will simply disappear.
Exactly. I think there are some other arguable benefits to the existence of some piracy as long as it’s not replacing actual sales, but the part that personally concerns me is archival.
I’m DRM free forever. DRM = no sale.