years ago, a friend of mine built something functionally equivalent to Denuvo in his spare time over the span of a few years. I think his original idea was "DRM for the little guy", recognizing that indie games probably lose massive revenue from initial release piracy.
He had no idea how to sell it. After it sitting around for awhile, I tried pitching the technology to few friends in VC, who had absolutely no idea what I was talking about.
It bothered me for a long time to see such a culmination of talent and effort get 0 reward for it. I've wondered if such technology would be interesting to some large publisher to just buy outright, bringing their anti-piracy in-house rather than relying on Denuvo. Any ideas/help appreciated :)
> recognizing that indie games probably lose massive revenue from initial release piracy.
This seems like an odd claim _especially_ for indie games. Indie games tend to already have trouble attracting buyers, it feels like anyone considering pirating it would just move on if they couldn't do so.
Plus having a pirate version is essentially advertising for them if their product is good. Many indie title success stories I think is thanks to pirates trying them out for free and then telling everyone "Wow I just played this awesome indie title that you never would have heard of because its an indie title with little to no marketing and it is really good!" which lead to people looking at it and talking about it and getting more sales. I myself have bought numerous titles that I never would have bought based on the steam shop page. This is especially true for building, survival, or physics based games, which are pumped out en-mass, but take real talent and vision to do well enough to be worth the time and money to buy and play. Just a few games off the top of my head that I own but never would have otherwise bought without first pirating and playing them include, Project Zomboid, World of Goo, Besieged, Neo Scavenger, Oxygen Not Included, Banished. And even some pretty large titles like Crusader Kings I would never have considered buying without playing it first, and now it is one of my favorite games. Factorio would be the same thing if they didn't have a old version as a demo to play.
A indie game dev phoned home how many players were playing his game that pirated it and he addresses your claim too in the article he posted about it[0]>
0. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/so-52-45-of-people-pl...
They'd play it for free* but how many would pay? Would that number go down if DRM were involved?
Personally, Steam's about where I draw the line. They've given me enough value as an ecosystem and their native 'DRM' doesn't seem that obtrusive, so they've got a lot of my money over the years.
I've regretted every single time I happened to buy a game, which turned out to have other DRM or any form of 'anti cheat' client side. They just never work in the long run.
I played both Oris for 1€ on gamepass only to buy it when it's in a steam sale (~11€ for both iirc). I have free games from epic only to buy them on Steam for 5€. I have no problem pirating games. The last big title was Cyberpunk. It runs like shit on my end but once I buy a GPU I'll buy Cyberpunk. Until then I can wait.
I pirated GTA5 to test it on my machine back in the days. Textures popped in seconds later because the HDD was way too slow to handle the game. I prefer pirating a game over dealing with refunds. I have it for free from Epic. Would I buy it now? No. I don't like the game at all after playing for 4 hours.
What is my favorite single player game? Cyberpunk. Do I share that information? Yes.
I really enjoyed this article, thanks for sharing!
It's a shame that OP didn't add a tracker to the pirate plea button. I would wager that he made practically zero sales from it - looking at how well donations seem to work in software development in general. I think that this is why microtransactions work well. They give away a nerfed version of the game for free, and after the player formed an attachment to it, the game can be upgraded for a price. In a way, this is a much more human design, than forking up the entire cost in advance.
Many years ago I was publishing work independently with a few other colleagues, and yes, piracy was a big deal. It was flattering, because you knew the demand was there, but maybe the audience couldn't or wasn't willing to pay for the product, but you don't want to see your work obtained for free when you're charging for it.
Can't say I was sold with the target market mostly because the sales problem becomes orders of magnitude harder
My thought regarding indie games were successful ones though. Something like Celeste or Balatro.
I pay for games because it's convenient. Most DRM is decidedly inconvenient for me, especially Denuvo-tier DRM. The end result is that if there's DRM, I'm more likely to pirate it or not play it if there's no crack.
How's denuvo "inconvenient"? For the overwhelming majority of people, it just works and they don't even know it's there.
One situation it regularly fails is with no internet connection. You download a game on your steam deck, get on the plane, and then it refuses to launch. You can prime it by loading the game while connected, but every now and then it randomly unauthorises itself leading you to regularly get stuck in this situation.
>DRM for the little guy
The main problem with this is that some of us who buy indie games specifically buy them because they are available on DRM free platforms like Itch.io and GoG.
Adding DRM is just going to stop me from ever wanting to purchase the game. Its the same problem with Steam sucking up indie devs who started to only release on Steam. Will never purchase their game on a platform where I can't keep my own offline backup for when the service eventually fails.
It's nice to see such effort into user-hostile technology go unrewarded. When your product is, "what if we made everything we touch a bit worse?", you deserve to get 0 reward. It's sad to see that things like Denuvo haven't met the same fate as your friend's software.
I love that the only example of inconvenience presented in this thread is that a person might open the wrong game while on a steam deck while possibly not having internet while on a plane. The agony!
I was right there with you with this opinion back in the day. Distribution was terrible, people didn't have near 24-7 access to internet. The times have changed. You're also not 11 years old anymore. You can afford to pay your peers in your industry.
"The wrong game"? What about the game they want to play..?
Or what if they want to play the game they bought on different computers they own?
Or what if they're troubleshooting something?
What about when I wanna play the game again in 10 years and your activation servers are down?
> You're also not 11 years old anymore. You can afford to pay your peers in your industry.
I haven't pirated a game in forever, and as a paying customer, I'm harmed by anti-piracy measures. Pirates usually get a better experience since crackers strip out the DRM.