The official Steam page for Deep Silver and Starbreeze’s PAYDAY 3 game has been updated to show the use of this ever-controversial third-party DRM.

  • CriticalMiss@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I like to use Denuvo as an indicator of a bad release. For someone with over 2k hours on PAYDAY 2, I just cancelled my preorder.

    Thank you for the fun times OVERKILL, sad to see you go this way.

    • CatZoomies@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Why are we still preordering AAA digital video games from multi-million dollar corporations?There is no incentive to preorder AAA video games anymore - long gone are the days of midnight launches for physical games.

      • Cyberpunk 2077
      • Returnal
      • Forsaken
      • The Lord of the Rings: Gollum
      • Fallout 76
      • Grand Theft Auto: Definitive Edition
      • The Last of Us Part 1
      • No Man’s Sky
      • Etc. ad nauseum

      All of these games came with a half-assed apology from the publisher and how “this wasn’t their intention”. Yes, it was absolutely their intention. They released a knowingly broken game and charged us full price for it. They already got our money and laughed because they know we’re too stupid to do anything about it and that they’ve trained us well with “fear of missing out”.

      How many times do us gamers need to get burned by video game publishers until we learn our lesson?

      Stop rewarding and encouraging their predatory behavior. Opt out of this abusive practice by not preordering and voting with your wallet. Let them earn your money, so “they can feel a sense of pride and accomplishment”.

      • BartsBigBugBag@lemmy.tf
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        1 year ago

        What was broken in Returnal on launch? Unless you mean the pc relaunch, I didn’t pay attention to that.

        • CatZoomies@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Pc had issues when it came to that platform, things like crashing and inability to launch the game. But that’s nothing compared to its debut on PS5. When it came to PS5, sometimes you’d lose your save file.

          All those problems eventually got patched. When games get patched and they’re stable, that’s when it’s time to buy (especially because you’ll get a “definitive edition” for less money than the sorry state at launch). I like being a patient gamer when it comes to AAA games.

      • Ado@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        What’s the risk when I can just return it if the game is shit after playing it for almost 2 hours?

          • Ado@lemmy.ml
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            1 year ago

            The comment was talking about broken games. If a game is broken, you will find out in two hours. If the game sucks and you buy it, it doesn’t matter if you pre-order or buy 6 months later.

      • kostel_thecreed@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        It really depends. There are some fan-fucking-tastic games that I did preorder, like FFXVI, Metro Exodus, SF6, TLOU:2 (I didn’t like the story, gameplay + graphics saved it for me), Zelda: TOTK, Elden Ring… the list goes on.

        • hyperhopper@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          And you would have gotten to play them even without preordering.

          But preordering gives the games industry bad incentives.

        • CatZoomies@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          I preordered Zelda Tears of the Kingdom, a physical Switch cartridge. I took a gamble with that but I decided to risk it since: Nintendo has a stellar track record of creating almost perfectly optimized first-party games throughout their entire history, and Zelda’s been in development for over 5 years. That was the exception I made.

          When you preorder these other games, you certainly have to calculate that risk. Cyberpunk 2077 was made by a developer with a wonderful track record of producing fantastic video games. A lot of people trusted them and preordered, and those with lower hardware that met minimum requirements got burned while those that had superior hardware were fine. A gamble that didn’t pay off too well at launch when people trusted a stellar publisher and developer.

          Regardless of the game, it doesn’t make sense to preorder digital titles. There will always be ones that knock it out of the park, but if they do release a wonderful game, certainly buy it but don’t preorder it. Reward them with your money only after they prove they’ve released a good game that’s worth it’s cost. Else, we continue this cycle and publishers will continue to repeat the same behavior without consequence.

    • Kerandir@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I don’t know a lot about Denuvo, is it a bad thing? Why did you cancel your pre order based on that?

      • CriticalMiss@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        It’s a DRM scheme to protect against piracy. Over the years I saw more and more shitty titles use Denuvo on release because God forbid someone steal their cash grab. A lot of titles that are of quality usually do not see the need for Denuvo.

        Therefore, nowadays, for me Denuvo serves as an indicator of a potentially shitty release. They slap Denuvo on top of it so that they can pump & dump.

        Maybe I’ll buy the game when it’s on sale, but for now I am too skeptical, especially since slapping additional DRM on an already DRM’d game (it’s multiplayer only and always online, unlike previous parts that allowed offline play) does not make any sense to me.

      • Miqo@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Edit: Seems the below statement was factually incorrect. Oops!

        It’s a very obnoxious and heavy-handed approach to anti-piracy measures. It slows down games, kills framerates, gives users a whole host of other performance issues, and just makes the experience worse overall. It’s a product that doesn’t even seem to care to improve, because they make their money from publishers, not the people who buy and play the game. Many people hate it, and I believe it’s absolutely justified.

        • beefcat@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          There isn’t a lot of evidence to back these claims up. For most users, it’s entirely transparent. You would never know a game shipped with Denuvo unless your first launch is offline and it fails to authenticate.

          There have been games that had their performance impacted, but I don’t think it’s the norm. Games like Doom 2016 shipped with it and saw no performance gains when Denuvo was eventually patched out. I think titles like Rime and RE8 are usually the exception, but it’s something I always watch out for in reviews. If a game runs bad, I don’t buy it, regardless of the cause.

          Denuvo has proven successful for 2 reasons:

          1. It’s actually effective. Games go months or even years without a crack.

          2. It’s nowhere near as draconian as what came before (TAGES, StarForce, SecuROM, etc). Most players aren’t even aware of its existence. They just buy these games on Steam and they work, which is why all the weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth that goes on in these threads never accomplishes anything.

          • Miqo@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            So, I went back and tried to look for a source, but you’re right. Thanks for informing me! From the few sources I read, those issues were debunked, exaggerated, or due to bad implementation. I want to add that I still don’t like the idea of Denuvo (or any other DRM) on digital media that I purchase, but that’s a different topic.

          • Alimentar@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Honest question here. Could it be possibly that as they improved their DRM with more triggers and methods that it has started to impact performance since 2016?

            As Empress was cracking Denuvo, I wouldnt be surprised if they started to quickly add extra defencive measures compromising what could have been optimised in the past.

            • beefcat@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              I don’t think so, because it has become less common over time for Denuvo to be the cause of bad performance. Doom 2016 is an early good example, likely because Id Software takes optimization very seriously. Stories of games having bad performance due to DRM were a lot more common back then. The worst example I can recall was Rime in 2017, which was borderline unplayable until the developers removed Denuvo in a patch.

      • Braydox_ofAstroya@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Denuvo in particular causes performance issues. And drm in general just gives the paying customer an inferior product when the pirates will just just get the better version.

      • Ado@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        There have been instances where it worsens performance. My computer is mid tier-ish at this point (3070, i7 10700k) and I haven’t noticed any poor performance from games running Denuvo (latest I tried Dead Island 2). It’s likely worse performance loss on older systems, but those older systems probably can’t run new AAA games well as it is.

        I think most people don’t like the fact that it takes a while to crack games running Denuvo, so they’re not able to be pirated for that time.

    • hyperhopper@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      The fact that you even gave them money and had a preorder to cancel in the first place means you’re part of the problem, my friend.

      Stop preordering.

      • CriticalMiss@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I usually don’t preorder games, PAYDAY is the exception, I have over 1k hours in the first game and over 3k hours in the second game.

        • hyperhopper@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          Doesn’t matter. People said the same shit about having thousands of hours in CD projeckt red games and then we’re disappointed in cyberpunk

          “Don’t preorder games” doesn’t mean “don’t preorder unless it’s your favorite series”.

          It means don’t fucking give anybody money for a game that’s not fucking out yet, period.