I’ve been reading the same thing a couple of times lately, company x removes Denuvo from game y.
What is happening? Are we returning to a state of innocence and purity?
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Lots of studios are Denovo to try to reduce piracy during the release period of the game, and then remove it when the impact of piracy would be lower. It probably involves everything from managing customers good will to the cost of Denovo over time.
It’s the one silver lining Denuvo has: It’s a subscription. So publishers are incentivized to remove it eventually.
It’s usually just because they have to pay an on-going licence fee to keep using it, and after a certain amount of time, the revenue that a particular game is expected to bring in isn’t worth the fee.
Piracy mostly affects sales during the initial sales period, and Denuvo is about the only way to stop piracy in single-player games. After a while, piracy doesn’t really affect income as strongly, as not that many units are sold and the people who do pirate will be the ones that wouldn’t spend money on the game in the first place, but Denuvo still wants their subscription fees.
At some point, it’s cheaper to ditch Denuvo and live with piracy (which tends to happen a few years after release, even with Denuvo on) while also gaining a bit of performance and compatibility in the process.
After a while, piracy doesn’t really affect income as strongly
Piracy affecting income in a meaningful way is generally disputable. Executives and shareholders just refuse to accept that fact.
Most piracy is instead be from people that were never going to pay for the game anyway. So in many cases DRM like Denuvo just causes issues and slowdowns for the people actually paying for the game, making it worse for them. Meanwhile the people that weren’t going to buy the game anyway, still don’t buy the game once the DRM is removed or bypassed.
Piracy primarily comes from two major sources:
- People that would buy the game but do not have the money to buy the game. On the larger scale this is often due to lack of price localization outside the major markets like US/EU. Games are often simply prices out of reach of people in smaller markets like Brazil for instance where one game can cost a large portion of a monthly paycheck. Or from children who simply do not have the money to buy the game. Pirate Software talking about localization. He localized the price at 65% off, and piracy in Brazil is essentially nonexistent, in fact it’s 25% of income from the game despite being 65% off.
- People that cannot buy the game where they are, usually because it is not available in their region. Usually an issue outside major markets that companies just ignore in general, or markets where a game might be banned for various reasons. This is how CD Projekt (Developers of The Witcher games) started, providing games in markets they were not released in.
There are plenty of stories online of people in those categories later on buying the game when they are able to because they weren’t actively avoiding paying for the game, but rather just not in a position to at the time for whatever reason and correcting that later on to support the developer.
There are of course a very small number of people that can buy a game, and specifically choose to pirate it instead. The actual impact of these however wouldn’t even be a rounding error for most developers, these are people that were never going to buy it anyway, there is no actual monetary loss since a sale was never going to happen.
Apparently the lisence is costly. So the good old money seems to be the reason.
