Bethesda Does Denuvo Backwards: Puts The DRM On Game Released A Year Ago
from the it's-baaaack dept
It’s been quite some time since we’ve talked about Denuvo and its once-vaunted anti-piracy DRM for video games. If I’m being totally honest, I had thought that part of the company’s business was simply gone, so poorly did the DRM perform. By the end, cracking groups were getting around Denuvo-protected games in days, sometimes a single day, and even sometimes in a matter of hours. If a DRM can be defeated in hours, what’s the point of it?
Well, the answer from some was that the DRM at least offered some protection in the critical first-release window of a video game. The idea is that with a massive percentage of a game’s sales occurring within the first days and weeks of release, the protection offered within that window was worth the cost of the DRM. I’d argue that’s idiotic for a variety of reasons, but there is at least some logic to it. If you’re Bethesda, though, apparently you layer Denuvo onto a game that was released a year ago.
Bethesda Softworks has just quietly added Denuvo protections to Ghostwire Tokyo, a game that was quickly cracked after its Denuvo-free release just over a year ago. The late addition was confirmed by DSOGaming, which says it triggered the new Denuvo protections in the game’s latest Steam update by simulating frequent changes in the CPU. While fresh Denuvo protection seems unlikely to impact piracy for the long-cracked title, it could serve as a shield for new DLC and expansion content.
It doesn’t appear, however, that buying DLC is what will trigger the addition of Denuvo. Those who play the game are going to be getting it regardless. Which, frankly, is pretty shitty. Customers bought the game without Denuvo and now, after a year, they’re suddenly going to have DRM added to what they already purchased? DRM with a reputation for causing major performance issues.
Piracy issues aside, Denuvo has received widespread criticism for allegedly hurting performance when compared to unprotected versions of the same game. Ars’ testing found those allegations weren’t true for Warner Bros.’ Arkham Knight, but Digital Foundry found Denuvo caused some minor CPU-based slowdown in Devil May Cry 5.
So, will Denuvo help protect all this DLC and expansion content for Ghostwire? I doubt it, given how quickly Denuvo has tended to be defeated since roughly 2020. But, hey, maybe Bethesda can at least get its money worth by pissing off its own customers in doing all this, right?
Filed Under: denuvo, drm, ghostwire tokyo, video games
Companies: bethesda
Comments on “Bethesda Does Denuvo Backwards: Puts The DRM On Game Released A Year Ago”
I personally think the addition of Denuvo has less to do with DLC/expansions, and more to kneecap the community bugfixers. Since its a Bethesda product afterall, and community bugfixes (atleast now that theyre under Microsoft) makes them look bad for releasing buggy messes
Re:
Bethesda are the publisher, it’s a Tango Gameworks title. It’s Bethesda’s main in-house studio that’s known for releasing extremely buggy stuff. Zenimax’s various other subsidiaries like Arkane, id, Machinegames, etc. are generally a lot more consistently reliable.
The major jank issues with this one are all designed into the product, generally not down to any kind of bugs.
Re:
Timing suggests that it was added due to the Sony exclusivity period having expired and it being added to Game Pass for XBox, which I believe was combined with a content update.
Which would be silly, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s still some weird contract issues surrounding with the PS exclusive or games which were already past a certain point of development before Bethesda was acquired by Microsoft that forced a certain decision.
But, it just confirms the usual truism that people who buy legit PC releases are increasingly left with inferior products to people who just pirate.
Re: Re: How to turn customers into infringers: Penalize them for paying
But, it just confirms the usual truism that people who buy legit PC releases are increasingly left with inferior products to people who just pirate.
Possibly the most frustrating thing about DRM is that the only people it punishes are paying customers and yet companies still continue to use it while claiming it’s aimed at those that don’t pay.
As applied to a physical business it would be like a store paying staff to punch every other customer after they get done paying while just nodding to those that walk out with items they haven’t paid for. No-one would look at that and think it’s a good business model and yet go from physical scarce goods to digital non-scarce and suddenly it’s treated as though you’d be crazy not to treat your paying customers like that.
Re: Re: Re:
I think in concept, it’s meant to be like physical loss prevention. That is, you go to a store and items that are considered likely to be more liable to theft are stored in hard to open packaging, inside a plastic case or otherwise with things attached to them that set off alarms if they’re being stolen. Inconvenient for everyone, but they reduce theft and when you get home you have the same product.
The problem is, in that analogy, if someone steals the product and someone buys it legit, they either have the same product, or the stolen product is less valuable because it’s been damaged in the process of illegitimately removing the security. However, in terms of digital goods the process is reversed – the pirates get the original product, while the legit customers can never completely remove the security packaging.
I think at this point, DRM on purchased goods is just a CYA move that everyone knows is nonsense but it’s used for protection. If a product fails to meet sales expectations, the publisher isn’t usually going to own up to the fact that they released a bad product, marketed it badly, or just released a buggy beta version that’s intended to be patched after people bought it. They’re usually going to blame piracy to placate investors. But, the first question those investors will ask is what steps they took to mitigate piracy. The easy response to that is to pay a specialist third party company to “protect” it, so that if blaming piracy works, they also deflect blame to the third party.
I’m guessing, but I doubt that most think that DRM actually stops that many lost sales. It’s just the same mindset that allows companies to release broken products with the hope that the game killing bugs can be patched on launch day – they want investors to see them hitting targets, and someone else to blame if they miss them. Not sure what that has to do with applying DRM a year after release, of course, but I think that’s the mindset generally rather than them believing that the tiger repelling rock actually works.
Blah blah, Denouvo bad, etc…
What I find interesting is this:
You don’t have to do the testing yourself, but at least link to an article that doesn’t contradict your previous line.
Re:
There’s plenty consistent independent sources for testing of games with Denuvo which confirm the issues across many games. DF themselves, cited there, also confirmed the issue with games like Resident Evil VIII where the cracked PC version consistently lacked the frametime issues of up to 130ms and there was as much as 90fps framerate difference between the versions running on the same hardware
Re: Re:
So the author should link to one of those.
This isn’t a defence of Denouvo, it’s a criticism of Timothy Geigner.
Re:
You mean like the three articles that came before the one you chose to focus on?
Re: Re:
Any of which he could have chosen a pull quote from
Wait (a year plus) to see how the game performs
Oh but it gets even better, because if they’re willing to infect one game like this post launch with DRM then it’s entirely reasonable to expect them to do the same with future games, which means for any potential customers where DRM/Denuvo are a hard pass then the entire Bethesda lineup going forward just became a very questionable purchasing choice.
Maybe...
they just wanted to make sure the PC experience was as crippled as the Xbox version.
At this rate, I’m going to stop playing video games altogether.
Come to think of it, that may end up being a positive.
And yet there are still Denuvo protected games that haven’t been cracked…
Re:
Welcome to the internet, where nuance goes to get bludgeoned to death with a brick.
Re:
Are there? Would you be able to list some?