Denuvo 4.9 cracked... and with a startling realization of how bloated it is.

[wraith808]

“So I downloaded Puyo Puyo Tetris. I thought ‘it’s small game, it’d be easier to analyze’, but oh no no,” he said.

“The game executable is 128MB big, of which just 5-6MB is the real game code. The rest of it is Denuvo. It’s the most bloated Denuvo I’ve ever seen.”

Why don't they just stop?  That's insane!

https://torrentfreak.com/latest-denuvo-anti-piracy-protection-falls-cracker-voksi-on-fire-180706/

[4wd]

Far Cry 5 (released March 27) is protected by Denuvo 5.0 (and VMProtect) - it was cracked after 19 days.  (Apparently it wasn't the copy protection that slowed them down, it was the included anti-cheat system, EAC.)

Denuvo 5.0 was also the reason Far Cry 5 wouldn't run on my computer, it requires a CPU that has SSE v4.1.  My CPU, (Phenom II X6 1100T), although perfectly capable of running the game, wouldn't even start the program due to the copy protection because it only supports SSE 4a.

Luckily eBay came to the rescue with a FX-8350 8-core for the princely sum of AU$76

[wraith808]

That does remind me of the reason that companies still use this flawed technology.  The number of days to crack gives a number of days where people have to buy it in order to play.  This has been shown to raise the number of sales.  I need to find that study, because I could see the parameters being altered in order to make it look like this is the case (see how to lie with statistics).

[Deozaan]

I recently watched a video on video game sales on Steam that would support that theory. Basically, you can roughly estimate your first year of sales by multiplying your first week of sales by 5.

See the video at about 10:20 for that particular detail:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WycVOCbeKqQ

So yeah, if your sales fall off so quickly after launch that in the first year you make only 5x as much as you made in the first week, then I can see why it would be so important to capture as much of those early sales as possible.

Also, this great article from 2001 about the copy protection methods built into Spyro 2 on PS1 mentions that this is one of their primary concerns. So at the very least we can say that this mindset about (or excuse for) DRM in video games is not a recent change.

This is what happened to Insomniac's 1999 Playstation release, Spyro 2: Ripto's Rage. Even though it had good copy protection, it was cracked in a little over a week. So when we moved on to Spyro: Year of the Dragon (YOTD), we decided that something more had to be done to try to reduce piracy. The effort was largely successful. Though a cracked version of YOTD has become available, it took over two months for the working patch to appear, after numerous false starts on the part of the pirates (the patch for the European version took another month on top of that). The release of patches that didn't work caused a great deal of confusion among casual pirates and plenty of wasted time and disks among the commercial ones.

Two months may not seem like a long time, but between 30 and 50 percent of most games' total sales occur in that time. Approximately 50 percent of the total sales of Spyro 2, up to December 2000, were in the first two months. Even games released in the middle of the year rather than the holiday season, such as Eidetic's Syphon Filter, make 30 percent of their total sales in the first two months. If YOTD follows the same trend, as it almost certainly will, those two to three months when pirated versions were unavailable must have reduced the overall level and impact of piracy. On top of this, since YOTD was released in Europe one month after the U.S., those two months protected early European sales from pirated copies of the U.S. version.

[f0dder]

Why don't they just stop?  That's insane!

Indeed, it is.

And I generally stay away from games protected by Denuvo and similar insanity. I don't want to support the idiots who believe these ham-fisted schemes are justifiable.

I was about to make an exception for Far Cry 5, but then realized it requires Ubisofts shitty Uplay shit, even when purchased on Steam... so that became another no-purchase.