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.
I like to use Denuvo as an indicator of a bad release. For someone with over 3k hours on PAYDAY 2, I just cancelled my preorder.
Thank you for the fun times OVERKILL, sad to see you go this way.
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”.
Don’t forget KSP2! Worst €50 I’ve spent.
All of us got burned with an expensive lesson. But it was well-learned. Now, you won’t get burned again and are a smarter customer thanks to games like KSP2.
KSP2?
Kerbal Space Program 2
It’s out? And it’s bad?
Yes, and yes. It lacks a lot of features, the performance is terrible and it has a tonne of bugs. It’s like taking KSP and swapping the times when it glitches when the times it doesn’t. That’s how bad it is.
I hope they actually stick to the roadmap, though. So I’ll at least be able to use all the features
What was broken in Returnal on launch? Unless you mean the pc relaunch, I didn’t pay attention to that.
I posted in this thread about it.
Okay… so… no answer then. Thanks!
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With my last breaths, I channeled the last of my energy to complete a paste action to provide you the hyperlink to my comment.
Exhausted, spent, and my life force drained, I present to you my last hoorah. My greatest achievement. I provide you with the hyperlink to my comment. Cherish this moment.
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What was broken about Returnal?
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.
Based
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What’s the risk when I can just return it if the game is shit after playing it for almost 2 hours?
Two hours is a laughably short amount of time to figure out if a game sucks usually.
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.
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.
And you would have gotten to play them even without preordering.
But preordering gives the games industry bad incentives.
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, and I guess I got lucky. One day Nintendo might sully their track record. That’s probably when I’ll stop preordering physical Zelda games if they ever lose my trust.
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.
I don’t know a lot about Denuvo, is it a bad thing? Why did you cancel your pre order based on that?
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.
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.
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:
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It’s actually effective. Games go months or even years without a crack.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
It’s DRM known for causing performance issues.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Denuvo has become a very strong indicator to me that not the game devs are calling the shots during development, but the Excel-sheet-business-suit-monkeys are.
Only some business-fool would look at a proposal to buy that piece of performance-guzzling crap and go “Hey, then everyone who’d be a pirate otherwise will buy my product and spend money in muh cash shop, that’s totally worth the investment”, ignoring the immense drawbacks for paying costumers.
especially in a frickin’ coop-shooter where piracy will never be as big of a deal because people want to play together with others on your frickin’ servers anyway…
Yeah, I don’t get it – the game is essentially online-only (not sure if you can play with bot teammates like the previous titles, but that wasn’t too enjoyable anyway). Why pay for Denuvo as well unless you’re out of touch?
If past Payday games are anything to go by, you can play offline with just bots.
You wouldn’t want to, given the choice, and it’s not the point of the game, but you can.
Well, you can play “offline with bots”, but, unless something has changed since last I checked, it’ll be always online, which means that even if you want to play offline you need a constant connection to their servers anyway.
Almost feels like they’re going out of their way to see how many features that harm users they can add and still be able to sell well…
Last I checked, Payday 2 has had actual offline play since launch. It is Payday 3 that won’t have a proper offline mode.
Unless this got silently changed somewhere?
I was talking about Payday 3, probably should’ve made that more obvious. PDTH and PD2 both work completely offline as far as I’m aware.
Ahh I see, apologies for the confusion. Yeah I totally don’t get the regression in that regard
Bro who tf is stealing Payday let alone to play alone. What a waste of money and a fuck you to paying customers.
That’s the thing, the game is already online only, why do they need anti piracy DRM on top of it?
I think it may be more anti-cheat than anti-piracy, but Denuvo in particular can fuck itself
It`s a co-op game, who cares about cheaters?
IIRC payday 2 had glacially slow progression at launch. Now what if you could simply pay some (more) money to skip those boring early levels this time around?
Okay, so I wouldn’t care, but yeah if they want to sell progression…
I looked into it some more and it seems there was a “shady” script you could use to grant yourself any piece of paid dlc you wanted, so The Money People probably asked how they could ensure that doesn’t happen again and just didn’t care about the drawbacks for regular people.
Oh believe me, people got hyphy in PD2 about mods and stuff, even HUDs and QOL mods got peoples’ hackles up.
That’s dumb. Those people suck. :P
The PD2 community’s fuckin’ weird sometimes.
The people that make money off of it’s monetization. I’ll have to assume they’ll have some sort of season pass.
Overkill blew all their money with that WW2 spin off. And it crashed so hard there was a John Cleese shaped crater where it hit rock bottom.
They were only able to make Payday 3 with significant external investment. So basically, PD3 is going to be a gutted and whored game since those investors will get significant say what goes into the game. Denuovo just being the most obvious right now.
Isn’t the game going to be online only in the first place? They’re adding DRM on top of their DRM?
“Yo dawg! Heard you like DRM!”
You’re right. And even disregarding always online and/or GaaS elements if it’s anything like the other two PAYDAY games there is pretty much no reason to play it offline. It is a co-op game through and through.
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“Payday 3 guarantees an objecticely worse user experience at launch on pc version”
Adding DRM to a co-op game is one of the stupidest things you can do. The only thing I can think of that would be worse would be adding DRM to a game that is already always-online.
adding DRM to a game that is already always-online
Funny should you mention that
I understand people hate DRM, but what’s the specific gripe about co-op games having them?
If you do your authentication with online servers properly it is virtually impossible to get the full experience by pirating anyway so the only thing you’re doing by including DRM is taking performance and convenience from paying customers
The main point of co-op games is to play with friends. In order to do that, you (usually) need to connect to the games official servers, which you can’t do on cracked games (for the most part) which makes DRM pretty pointless. It prevents you from enjoying maybe a lazily thrown together campaign and it’s more of an insult than anything else.
Plus, it’s also worth mentioning DRM hurts paying customers by causing reduced performance in-game and also inconveniencing them.
causing reduced performance in-game and also inconveniencing them.
denuvo in particular will blow out your SSD with unoptimized mass writes, too
In addition to reduced performance Denuvo is very invasive regarding your operating system so it could be a potential way to hack your system too!
Worse performance for no reason
Good reason to not waste money on the game though at least
Golden Rule: Denuvo games exist if and only if cracked by EMPRESS
seems like a great way to punish honest people every time they try to play your game and mildly inconvenience pirates for about a week
Fwiw, Denuvo is actually really hard to crack. There’s like one well-known person who is capable and she’s incredibly unlikeable. Agreeable sentiment though; Denuvo sucks and harms legitimate consumers (arguably more than it inconveniences pirates).
I really doubt pirates or even any average person are going to worry about the beliefs of the person cracking the game.
Eh that’s not really true. When she was working on Hogwarts Legacy that’s when her really crazy side showed and she got a massive cult following as a result.
I’m not denying any of that. But are you going to consider that when you’re downloading the cracked version of your favourite game?
What happened and who is this person? Totally out of the loop here?!
If one person can crack it and is willing to distribute it then everyone can get a cracked copy. Such is the nature of the internet.
It’ll be on game pass so I’ll probably still test it out, but I really don’t get why a Payday game would need anti-piracy measures since the whole point is to play co-op
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I could be misremembering and I’m not going to look it up right now, but I believe Payday 2 lost to corpo greed long ago when they added a bunch of microtransactions. There was also something about the original devs being screwed over if memory serves.
I remember an apology being issued about it iirc.
Personally, I’m fine with mtx if it supports continual development of a game i paid for and enjoyed prior to them being added. As long as the actual meaningful game additions are free or 1-time transactions.
What i don’t like is constant FOMO based p2w mechanics that are a requirement to play in any meaningful way, like most mobile time walled games. I also don’t like when corpos make decisions like adding DRM to an always online game, that is known to impact users, just points to a devs inability or a monetary kick back of said 3rd party drm to the devs shareholders.
Shitty situation overall however :(
Oh, this game’s gonna have a rough launch won’t it?
The price of this game makes it one you should definitely be a patient gamer on. Not only will you save a ton of money but it’ll probably be Denuvo free eventually too.
The constant updates and online features were reason enough to not pirate payday 2 tbh. This is no good. Just lost a customer. Sad
Agreed. I gave up on PD2 because their update scheme involved reinstalling the goddamned game every couple of weeks. Massive pain in the ass for a hotfix.
Arent Deep Silver the guys who fecked up the new Saints Row?
Yes they are
