Well, when the game is essentially running in a virtual machine with an address translation layer that scrambles the backing memory every few minutes you’re lucky the game even runs. Good luck trying to decipher that hell. A few guys have done it, I remember the one dude ranting on Twitter about trying to crack Borderland’s 3 back around launch.
And then the follow up which was that Denuvo was basically adding a ~30fps overhead to the game and everyone was initially blaming the devs for releasing unoptimized garbage.
Gabe had it right, piracy is a service problem. And my motto has always been if the game has some garbage like Denuvo, then you couldn’t even pay me to take a copy. Not worth the headache.
Denuvo was basically adding a ~30fps overhead
I’m very surprised when I read an announcement that id software were removing denuvo from doom eternal. The game was running very well on weak hardware I never suspected it has denuvo at all. After denuvo removal, I tried running the game again and didn’t notice any difference in performance. Maybe id software is an exception here and they worked some magic with their denuvo integration.
Doom Eternal actually released without Denuvo by accident, they quickly patched it in but the unprotected exe was already available for all so if you played it on day 1 you actually played it without Denuvo.
One major strength Denuvo has is actually it’s legal team, they have gotten a lot of cracking groups to stop working on it with legal threats. Empress is the exception because she is in Russia and absolutely batshit insane. The software itself is hard to crack but not overly so, it’s mostly done by bypassing and masking the executable as having a legit license and thus allowing it to launch.
I still very much remember a very very early denuvo that broke my fucking CD burner. Since then I’ve avoided them like the plague and check every game before I buy it.
I know that it has gotten better and “only” costs performance nowadays, but the hate I have for that company is still there.
