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Pirate group suspends new cracks to measure impact on sales
- Thread starter warheat
- Start date
Pantaghana
Member
Unless all other pirate groups join, I doubt this will be a useful experiment.
Two months later Just Cause 3 is still not cracked, it is a bit early for Rise of the Tomb Raider but it is still not cracked too. Even if they are cracked soon delay of 2+ months is nice victory for publishers and Denuvo.
GavinUK86
Member
Most publishers will probably agree with that and cause Denuvo usage to spread.
It seems their idea is rather to check how much impact they, as a group, make on genuine sales given they seem to intend to also not allow other cracks to be posted on their own forums to prevent spreading them.
Yeah, no piracy excuses. Fall on your own sword. Might be good actually.
igordennis
Member
Can someone that understands the tech behind it explain to me why Denuvo is so impossible to crack? I thought everything was crackable.
SirMossyBloke
Member
This isn't an "experiment". They can't crack it but have too much pride to say they've given up.
"Measure impact on sales," yeah, k.
Would not be at all surprised if the group is actually stepping back to seriously focus on fully cracking Denuvo, as the current environment where they continue to put out releases works particularly well for the anti-tamper tech.
With 3DM rushed to put out their sloppy emulation workarounds to Denuvo, it only provides Denuvo that much more to work with to build better software.
Would not be at all surprised if the group is actually stepping back to seriously focus on fully cracking Denuvo, as the current environment where they continue to put out releases works particularly well for the anti-tamper tech.
With 3DM rushed to put out their sloppy emulation workarounds to Denuvo, it only provides Denuvo that much more to work with to build better software.
Pantaghana
Member
Denuvo is crackable, but the amount of time needed with current technology and cracking techniques exceeds a human lifetime by an order of magnitude.
Atleast that's how I understand the "problem" of cracking it.
orthodoxy1095
Banned
Lol sure. This is such a great experiment you know...without everyone else participating...
But there's no way to actually tell. The games could be selling better than they would have otherwise, no one could ever know.
The drm is really there to push back against the normalization of piracy, not necessarily prevent all piracy. They don't want it to become like how music is now, where pirating is the first thought by everyone.
The drm is really there to push back against the normalization of piracy, not necessarily prevent all piracy. They don't want it to become like how music is now, where pirating is the first thought by everyone.
While the sincerity of their claim is doubtful, it's possible that (if true) they just want to messure the impact their own group does.
ScatheZombie
Member
The development studio. Unless it's in-house, then they'll blame gamers.
Visualante2
Member
You can measure piracy going up and down, you can measure sales going up and down. But drawing a link between the two is incredibly difficult. The only way I can see us having useful data is a developer putting out regular, fairly similar releases, that sell consistently suddenly dropping DRM or adding it. And then measuring that difference year to year.
Real_Madrid
Member
Jup.
And off course is piracy affecting game sales. Never understood the pro piracy mentality on here. I'm happy there's finally a good DRM available that's unnoticeable for legit users.
It's not pro-piracy to question the specifics of how piracy affects sales.
Some Denuvo games have been cracked, but it tends to take months instead of days.
Haunted
Member
Oh, that actually makes total sense if you put it that way.
There is no pro piracy mentality here, nor would it be tolerated if it ever occurred.
Denuvo prevents executable modification which is necessary for some excellent mods in other games.
There isn't two camps. Everyone has their own opinion of it.
-Every pirated copy is a lost sale
-Not everyone who pirated the game would have bought it if they had to
-We need piracy for game preservation's sake
-Everyone who advocates for preservation is just a pirate in disguise
-If pirating is bad why are used games allowed
-etc
So that's why piracy threads tend to be as big as they are.
Also, Denuvo is not unnoticeable. Want to play Just Cause 3 multiplayer some day down the road? You can't because Denuvo kills all modding that tweaks the .exe.
The question is more specifically how much; we know there's a direct link between sales taking a plunge and pirated version being available. Problem is that sales data is under non-disclosure clauses and that from what I've seen from a very few examples (all happening after first 2/3 days) is that it can also vary a lot. Revenue dropping just a few percent to closer to halving sales is not something that you can work with without a much, much larger pool of samples.
It's slowing down the team's progress, but they are still being able to make progress from what I remember. I do admit that there is clear downside of reduced modding options and harder archival however.
Real_Madrid
Member
Yeah, but I played Just Cause 3 a lot and most mods worked perfectly. I know executable mods are not possible, but I hope that's something Denuvo can solve in the future, now they know their DRM works (for now).
Already Torn
Banned
Piracy, even if there's nobody pirating it anymore.
People aren't pro-piracy, they are anti-drm (at least to the point where it causes problems for legit users).
I think many are also tired of anti-piracy whining by developers who assume that every pirated download would have been purchased at full price.
InsaneTiger
Member
How noble and kind of them.
Pantaghana
Member
I heard that happened with older versions of Denuvo, and that improvements to the DRM since then have made it uncrackable in practice.
Please point out where even a single developer of late has assumed this. I beg you. I bet 99% of developers aren't that misinformed, yet most of us do have hard data to show that they are losing revenue to thanks piracy. So please stop projecting your crazy assumptions unless you have a clear quote where developers assume there's a 1:1 link. Hell, I've not even seen a single gaffer assume that.
If you keep all books forever and never return them and last I heard public libraries are not breaking the law. At least where I live.
(I'm loving all these half-serious, "let's defend the poor piracy-scene"-comments)
What everyone else? There's no scene groups that do Denuvo releases, and there's only other one cracker group that even tries to do Denuvo releases and they aren't exactly good at it.
The modder did say it was a real pain the ass in regards to develop the mod, so it's not like it doesn't have effect in modding, cause it does.
Reloaded and Codex don't do Denuvo releases. Most groups don't.
Oh awesome, I was under the impression that it had slowed to a standstill because of it.
Still, point stands!
A Denuvo that played friendly with mods and allowed a DRM-free version years later would be perfect.
But what are the sales now after the first 2 weeks or whatever.
Would love to hear that too; unless they have access to the revenue reports and an alternative universe where they can A/B test this, it's highly unlikely they can make any meaningful assesments.
Publishers will be more than happy with software that delays a pirated version even if only by a week or too. Can Denuvo be patched out by the dev/publisher themselves? Mainly so that mods/fan patches etc can still be created freely after the first month or so (since that's where the majority of sales come in)
Actually that's wrong as well since piracy would be copying the book and not taking it away from others.
Still, the library metaphor is dumb because libraries aren't a business that make money from books sold.
A better one would be a Barnes & Noble.
outunderthestars
Banned
The number of people who will openly admit to pirating media (especially in Off-Topic threads) is staggering. The flimsy logic they use to back rationalize their behavior is even worse.
Turin Turambar
Member
Yes.