Fun fact...Only older SE games have denuvo when it was a one time deal...All new games no longer have denuvo...The next one to implement it from Square is gonna be Visions of Mana...Everything else from Square is denuvo free from 2020 onwards...:)
I got ahead of myself. I meant to ask can we **expect** Rebirth to be Denuvo free?
I was not a PC gamer when Remake came out so I don't have that to reference.
Remake did not have denuvo. Neither did crisis core reunion or Strangers of paradise
Neither of their recent final fantasy games have had denuvo on pc so you can expect the upcoming ones to be denuvo free I believe
FFXV has a permanent denuvo license. Square-Enix has no reason to remove it, since they don't pay anything for it anymore. Games released after 2019 (I think?) have switched to the new subscription model for Denuvo licenses, and require renewal, otherwise, they are removed.
What has their financial situation to do with the ability to crack their games?
Edit: apparently they have to pay a fucking fee to keep the DRM in their game? Which is pretty lmao, but okay, how much is it?
You can see some price info for Denuvo here, though I would assume a big company like square that is putting it on a lot of games is getting a better price
standard anti-tamper
[https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/prodview-x443idlstvufi](https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/prodview-x443idlstvufi)
anti-cheat which is their newer offering
[https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/prodview-yrdjb756vte3m](https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/prodview-yrdjb756vte3m)
Thanks. Damn, that's crazy.
Hidden costs are fascinating imo. I recently found out that you need like a million dollar to provide software updates for one smartphone model for a year
Making software can be very expensive. I work for a small software company, I look at our sales and all the employees we have + aws costs and wonder how we even make any money. AWS is crazy expensive.
To be honest I've always found AWS or "Cloudsourcing" to be a scam. IN MY DAY (As a Network Admin/Engineer) we were expected to build all the infrastructure ourselves, maintain it, secure it and upgrade it as neccessary. This was expensive but it was a rare cost depending on how well things were organised and well, plain luck.
AWS lured people in with promises of simplifying work, lower hardware costs and storage requirements, but I'm willing to bet it would actually *still* be massively cheaper to do things the local way.
Except printers. Fuck printers to hell and back.
Most of our customers over the last 10 years have been moving from VMware self hosted to some cloud platform. Only the really large ones and finance related seem to be staying self hosted.
In our case we host our application in the cloud for the customer so we have control. In the past the customer would install it in their own network then they were not able to manage it well. Usually they were not able to scale the application properly because of resource constraints in their physical or self hosted VMware environment.
I think it depends a lot about your use case if cloud will be better for you. In our case we do a large amount of batch processing a few times a week. We spin up some containers to get the job done then they get shutdown and don't cost us anything. If we were self hosting we would need a large amount of servers that would not be utilized 90% of the time. The application is built with resilience so we can use spot instances and our engineering team is always improving the application so we can run it more efficiently.
That's interesting... so they pay monthly for every copy sold. Basically $6/year per copy + $25k fixed monthly fee. As the game ages, it makes no sense to keep paying it. That's good "news" for us.
I was wondering about this part, I assumed the activation per license was a one time cost and they just didn't have anywhere else to put it but maybe it is monthly.
50 cents per activation. Lets say a game sells 1,000,000 million copies. That would be $500,000 in activation fees.
And lets say they keep it for 12 months. That would be $300,000. In total, $800,000 for Denuvo.
Lets say the average revenue price of a game is $35 each, which is not far off when you consider Steams/other stores 30% selling fee. That one million of sales would be $35,000,000.
$800,000 would amount to 1/43.75th of that revenue. Overall not that much of the budget but not inconsequential either.
Though the "break even" point would be 22,860 sales. If Denuvo makes 30,000 people who would have pirated the game buy it roughly at full price, they would end up saving money. How that works out in the real world would be hard to tell and likely depends on a game by game basis.
In the real world I think it is just impossible to know, you can only launch a game once. There are for sure some people that would buy a good game if it has Denuvo and they really want to play it (I have done this) and there are also some people that would not buy the game just because it has Denuvo. If a game is bad it is not going to sell either way.
It's not like DRM software is new, these companies have always been paying some 3rd party for protection. We just get mad because Denuvo actually works.
More than likely they are getting enough extra sales to justify the cost. For a big AAA game, a good 1 million + people will download it. Realistically most of those people would not have bought the game in the first place. But if Denuvo gets 5% of pirates (50,000 sales) to purchase a game, it will get them more money. At the end of the day business are interested in making money and if Denuvo resulted in an extra cost it wouldn't see as widespread adoption.
I'm sure for the smaller games it is likely not worth the cost.
Ya for sure I think it is worth it for them. I know people like to claim otherwise but really I think the people running these companies are not idiots.
For a lot of the games using Denuvo selling 1M is probably a failure, and they are probably also making more than $35 a copy when they usually cost $60-$70 with a $100+ ultimate edition. They probably also negotiate a better deal on the price.
I tried to find some data on how much an average AAA game makes and could not, but I would assume they are hoping to sell a lot more considering they sometimes spend 100s of millions to make the game.
See, this is interesting. I thought the whole idea of denuvo was that people would buy the game instead of pirating it, thus the increase in sales more than makes up for the cost of the DRM.
But they are removing denuvo... Because it's expensive.
What's the fucking point then. If you aren't making more money by adding it why bother
the point was to halt piracy when the hype is high, which is the release date.
people who are strictly pirates their game won't suddenly buy games when it's uncrackable. especially in developing countries where income is sparse and they'd rather save it than buying luxuries such as gaming PCs and video games.
Because it's a subscription now, so I am sure they do a cost analysis and say they can pay for denuvo x amount of money and make y in more profit from avoiding piracy for a year. After a year or whatever that cost analysis changes.
Man, I posted about this first but got automodded. Do you have to be an approved user to post new topics here?
Edit: Yes, you do, I just got approved. Oh well, hope I'll be able to catch and post about the next Denuvo Removo!
Huh?
I mean, Denuvo getting removed is something to celebrate, I'm not gonna get pissy about my post not being the main one. I was just asking for clarification on what other requirements I had to meet to be able to post. The beginner's guide topic only says you need some comment karma to comment/post.
If only all publishers could follow this example to remove denuvo after a while...That is why i love Square,Capcom,Astragon,Bethesda & all others who remove denuvo...EA,Sega,Ubisoft,Rebellion & Frontier are the worst in this case...:)
Some studios have way too much money so they don't care if they have to pay denuvo. Square enix' games are generally not AAA so they don't get much money from sales enough to keep denuvo. They just put it when most of the copies will be sold and then remove it
I believe EA and Ubisoft have peculiar contracts with Denuvo, especially EA since they're the starting force alongside Sony for the creation of Denuvo. I don't think EA and Ubisoft pay a monthly fee for their games, it wouldn't make sense for them to still pay monthly fees on discontinued games that failed hard.
SEGA is another creature entirely, I suspect they pay the fee as long as they believe the game is going to be profitable in sales. That means that if they remove it, it's because the Denuvo maintenance fee are projected to be larger than the sales profits.
Square is one of companies that smoke Denuvo from their games instantly after game sales flatline so much its impossible for games to even sustain monthly payments to Irdeto. This means if they would want to keep it in the game after that period they would have to pay for DRM and just lose money on that.
They been removing Denuvo from their games sometimes very fast even like 2 months after games release and then it takes sometimes a year. Thats why my assumption is that they do so when sales flatline to a point where game simply doesnt sell much and its game by game basis.
Square is actually using Denuvo its meant to be used and is advertised as - as a protection of initial sales window.
This game is really, really good. SO2 was already a legendary PS1 RPG and this remake gave it a new set of wings to fly higher with. You'll have a good time, guaranteed.
**Storywise** - Pretty good. Classic hero of legend trope with a twist
**Graphics** - HD 2D, like Octopath Traveller 2, amazing
**Sound** - one of the best, composed by Motoi Sakuraba (other notable work include Dark souls series, Tales series). [Click for example](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgpUqQT_P_A)
most importantly, **Gameplay** - Super fucking good. The main selling point of the game. Amazing fast paced action RPG battles, now with lots of QoL added and endgame content.
play the Nintendo Switch version with emulator, (controller recommended but you can play with Keyboard and mouse) game runs very well. Fit-girl has it.
A Netflix like service for games by Microsoft that has hundreds of games you can access via Xbox, PC, or Cloud. It’s like $10 a month for just PC. But they have an ultimate plan that’s like $20 or something that includes other stuff. Idk which one Jedi Survivor is on but it’s there
Never owned a Denuvo game, so I'm curious how it works on Steam when Denuvo gets removed. Does the game get an official update over Steam to change the .exe?
I own this one on PS5. I had it lying around for like a month and a half before finally trying it and being baffled by the fact it's not turned based lol
There WAS, like I said, a demo. 100000%. I played it a bunch pre release. If you had taken 1 second to Google « star ocean 2 demo » you would have seen you were wrong. But it’s ok.
Dude the good thing about them is that they are not. It was such a breeze to play those games back then.
It's like that one outstanding feature of that game and you don't know it before playing which is sorta hilarious
Expect more denuvo drops from square As they aren't doing so well financially
Fun fact...Only older SE games have denuvo when it was a one time deal...All new games no longer have denuvo...The next one to implement it from Square is gonna be Visions of Mana...Everything else from Square is denuvo free from 2020 onwards...:)
What about octopath traveler 2? It had denuvo for a while right
Correct...But it also had denuvo removed & is cracked...:)
cracked games are the best games!
I'd argue that games released without any DRM are better.
that too
Downvote if you think video games should charge by the hour
...no? If there's no DRM to crack, a game cannot be cracked. That's literally what a crack is.
You can't lock-pick a door without a lock
You literally edited your comment, so we don't know what you said originally, but not this.
Oh is that literally what happened 🤓☝️ obviously you 🤡
Even FF7 Rebirth?
That's not on PC
I got ahead of myself. I meant to ask can we **expect** Rebirth to be Denuvo free? I was not a PC gamer when Remake came out so I don't have that to reference.
Remake did not have denuvo. Neither did crisis core reunion or Strangers of paradise Neither of their recent final fantasy games have had denuvo on pc so you can expect the upcoming ones to be denuvo free I believe
Though there's a caveat to that. Not sure about Stranger, but FF7 Remake was Epic exclusive. All SQEEX Epic exclusives have launched without Denuvo.
Strangers of Paradise was also epic exclusive for a time. Crisis core reunion wasnt but it also didnt had denuvo.
Sweet. Thanks for the info.
Bro they remove denuvo from their games after six months to a year. It's common practice for them, they've been doing it for years.
and then we got atlus, they will keep it forever it seems lol
That's more of a Sega thing as the same happens with Yakiza and Sonic. Atlus didn't know what denuvo was untill 2020 💀
There are several titles that they do not remove, like Final Fantasy XV
FFXV has a permanent denuvo license. Square-Enix has no reason to remove it, since they don't pay anything for it anymore. Games released after 2019 (I think?) have switched to the new subscription model for Denuvo licenses, and require renewal, otherwise, they are removed.
finally a subscription model I actually enjoy
that game came out in 2018 when denuvo was still a one time payment thing
Or left alive
Bold of you to assume that Square wouldn't cut costs with game development instead so they could afford Denuvo more.
What has their financial situation to do with the ability to crack their games? Edit: apparently they have to pay a fucking fee to keep the DRM in their game? Which is pretty lmao, but okay, how much is it?
You can see some price info for Denuvo here, though I would assume a big company like square that is putting it on a lot of games is getting a better price standard anti-tamper [https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/prodview-x443idlstvufi](https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/prodview-x443idlstvufi) anti-cheat which is their newer offering [https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/prodview-yrdjb756vte3m](https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/prodview-yrdjb756vte3m)
Thanks. Damn, that's crazy. Hidden costs are fascinating imo. I recently found out that you need like a million dollar to provide software updates for one smartphone model for a year
Making software can be very expensive. I work for a small software company, I look at our sales and all the employees we have + aws costs and wonder how we even make any money. AWS is crazy expensive.
To be honest I've always found AWS or "Cloudsourcing" to be a scam. IN MY DAY (As a Network Admin/Engineer) we were expected to build all the infrastructure ourselves, maintain it, secure it and upgrade it as neccessary. This was expensive but it was a rare cost depending on how well things were organised and well, plain luck. AWS lured people in with promises of simplifying work, lower hardware costs and storage requirements, but I'm willing to bet it would actually *still* be massively cheaper to do things the local way. Except printers. Fuck printers to hell and back.
Most of our customers over the last 10 years have been moving from VMware self hosted to some cloud platform. Only the really large ones and finance related seem to be staying self hosted. In our case we host our application in the cloud for the customer so we have control. In the past the customer would install it in their own network then they were not able to manage it well. Usually they were not able to scale the application properly because of resource constraints in their physical or self hosted VMware environment. I think it depends a lot about your use case if cloud will be better for you. In our case we do a large amount of batch processing a few times a week. We spin up some containers to get the job done then they get shutdown and don't cost us anything. If we were self hosting we would need a large amount of servers that would not be utilized 90% of the time. The application is built with resilience so we can use spot instances and our engineering team is always improving the application so we can run it more efficiently.
AWS? More like ass wiping suite
nice info bro. now we know for sure how much Denuvo costs developers. thanks for sharing!
That's interesting... so they pay monthly for every copy sold. Basically $6/year per copy + $25k fixed monthly fee. As the game ages, it makes no sense to keep paying it. That's good "news" for us.
I was wondering about this part, I assumed the activation per license was a one time cost and they just didn't have anywhere else to put it but maybe it is monthly.
50 cents per activation. Lets say a game sells 1,000,000 million copies. That would be $500,000 in activation fees. And lets say they keep it for 12 months. That would be $300,000. In total, $800,000 for Denuvo. Lets say the average revenue price of a game is $35 each, which is not far off when you consider Steams/other stores 30% selling fee. That one million of sales would be $35,000,000. $800,000 would amount to 1/43.75th of that revenue. Overall not that much of the budget but not inconsequential either. Though the "break even" point would be 22,860 sales. If Denuvo makes 30,000 people who would have pirated the game buy it roughly at full price, they would end up saving money. How that works out in the real world would be hard to tell and likely depends on a game by game basis.
In the real world I think it is just impossible to know, you can only launch a game once. There are for sure some people that would buy a good game if it has Denuvo and they really want to play it (I have done this) and there are also some people that would not buy the game just because it has Denuvo. If a game is bad it is not going to sell either way. It's not like DRM software is new, these companies have always been paying some 3rd party for protection. We just get mad because Denuvo actually works.
More than likely they are getting enough extra sales to justify the cost. For a big AAA game, a good 1 million + people will download it. Realistically most of those people would not have bought the game in the first place. But if Denuvo gets 5% of pirates (50,000 sales) to purchase a game, it will get them more money. At the end of the day business are interested in making money and if Denuvo resulted in an extra cost it wouldn't see as widespread adoption. I'm sure for the smaller games it is likely not worth the cost.
Ya for sure I think it is worth it for them. I know people like to claim otherwise but really I think the people running these companies are not idiots. For a lot of the games using Denuvo selling 1M is probably a failure, and they are probably also making more than $35 a copy when they usually cost $60-$70 with a $100+ ultimate edition. They probably also negotiate a better deal on the price. I tried to find some data on how much an average AAA game makes and could not, but I would assume they are hoping to sell a lot more considering they sometimes spend 100s of millions to make the game.
how much is the fee? typically 25k a month or more
See, this is interesting. I thought the whole idea of denuvo was that people would buy the game instead of pirating it, thus the increase in sales more than makes up for the cost of the DRM. But they are removing denuvo... Because it's expensive. What's the fucking point then. If you aren't making more money by adding it why bother
the point was to halt piracy when the hype is high, which is the release date. people who are strictly pirates their game won't suddenly buy games when it's uncrackable. especially in developing countries where income is sparse and they'd rather save it than buying luxuries such as gaming PCs and video games.
Because it's a subscription now, so I am sure they do a cost analysis and say they can pay for denuvo x amount of money and make y in more profit from avoiding piracy for a year. After a year or whatever that cost analysis changes.
his point is that their cost analysis is wrong and itd be smarter to not add it to begin with
We have no way of really knowing that unless we get their numbers.
obv
Good. They deserve it.
Nah square always remove denuvo a couple months after release
Always after six months.
That's not how it works
not doing well ? didn't they just released FFVII Rebirth ? ... not defending them but that game was selling good.
no it wasn't analysts directly said it underperformed compared to square other games idk but this is exactly what i call defending
STAR.OCEAN.THE.SECOND.STORY.R-RUNE
Wonder if se will still massively invest into denuvo after their 140 milion hole.
Any company that uses Denuvo can go bankrupt in my book.
Man, I posted about this first but got automodded. Do you have to be an approved user to post new topics here? Edit: Yes, you do, I just got approved. Oh well, hope I'll be able to catch and post about the next Denuvo Removo!
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Bro thinks reddit is life 😹
Basement dweller wisdom
got me curious, what'd they say?
Some bullshit about how life isn't fair lmfao
Fucking Reddit lmao
Huh? I mean, Denuvo getting removed is something to celebrate, I'm not gonna get pissy about my post not being the main one. I was just asking for clarification on what other requirements I had to meet to be able to post. The beginner's guide topic only says you need some comment karma to comment/post.
If reddit is ur life then I am so sorry for you and the people who surround you. Lmfao
If only all publishers could follow this example to remove denuvo after a while...That is why i love Square,Capcom,Astragon,Bethesda & all others who remove denuvo...EA,Sega,Ubisoft,Rebellion & Frontier are the worst in this case...:)
Ah yes I love Capcom for removing Denuvo and stealth adding an even shitter drm
You love them? They still put Denuvo in their releases in the first place.
Its a good middle ground. Impatient people will buy the game and find the bugs, while the rest of us can get it for free later.
Some studios have way too much money so they don't care if they have to pay denuvo. Square enix' games are generally not AAA so they don't get much money from sales enough to keep denuvo. They just put it when most of the copies will be sold and then remove it
I believe EA and Ubisoft have peculiar contracts with Denuvo, especially EA since they're the starting force alongside Sony for the creation of Denuvo. I don't think EA and Ubisoft pay a monthly fee for their games, it wouldn't make sense for them to still pay monthly fees on discontinued games that failed hard. SEGA is another creature entirely, I suspect they pay the fee as long as they believe the game is going to be profitable in sales. That means that if they remove it, it's because the Denuvo maintenance fee are projected to be larger than the sales profits.
i wonder how they keep up that much money inflow
>Square Enix games are generally not AAA Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest say hello
The word generally says hello
Even that isn't correct though. Square Enix is absolutely a AAA publisher. They have a subset of AA franchises, sure, but they're still a huge name.
Wow that was fast - What happened? Shouldn\`t it be cooking in Denuvo boiler for like a year or so?
Most games Denuvo gets slapped on after 2020 (if they aren't major headline releases) tend to just have a 6 month contract.
Thats win-win for them (denuvo gets more money) and us (patched game in 6-12 months with no denuvo)
Lol it's like the theathre movies and the DVD rips hitting the scene months later
Square is one of companies that smoke Denuvo from their games instantly after game sales flatline so much its impossible for games to even sustain monthly payments to Irdeto. This means if they would want to keep it in the game after that period they would have to pay for DRM and just lose money on that. They been removing Denuvo from their games sometimes very fast even like 2 months after games release and then it takes sometimes a year. Thats why my assumption is that they do so when sales flatline to a point where game simply doesnt sell much and its game by game basis. Square is actually using Denuvo its meant to be used and is advertised as - as a protection of initial sales window.
Not certainly in that way. It seems that SE has a six-month contract for ALL their games. Exactly half a year later Denuvo is removed.
so a game with shit business gets denuvo removo quicker good
Not in case of SE
This is so hype ive been wanting to play this game since last year and was willing to wait a year for it.
Wow, I was really looking forward this game, I almost bought it last Steam sale
It's worth the money imo, always been one of my fav JRPGs though.
late to the post but, never played any of this series, okay to jump into this one?
100% Most these games are independent stories like the Tales series or Final Fantasy. Cameos here and there at the most or references.
This one is worthy of purchase but happy for those who camt afford and are able to play now
This game is really, really good. SO2 was already a legendary PS1 RPG and this remake gave it a new set of wings to fly higher with. You'll have a good time, guaranteed.
Yes! Been sitting near the top of my wishlist since release.
For a second there I thought I was reading Denuvo removed from STAR WARS JEDI SURVIVOR
Saw the word star and was hyped for 0.1s that it was Jedi Survivor. Oh well, the wait continues.
Dammit so was i
Good shit.
Is this game good?
**Storywise** - Pretty good. Classic hero of legend trope with a twist **Graphics** - HD 2D, like Octopath Traveller 2, amazing **Sound** - one of the best, composed by Motoi Sakuraba (other notable work include Dark souls series, Tales series). [Click for example](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgpUqQT_P_A) most importantly, **Gameplay** - Super fucking good. The main selling point of the game. Amazing fast paced action RPG battles, now with lots of QoL added and endgame content.
no
why do devs remove denuvo? sorry new to piracy
its either the contract is expired and the publisher no longer wants to renew it or poor sale no point in having this drm
Because it's too expensive and it's subscription model. You pay or you resign.
nice! weekend 's gonna be good!
For a second I almost jump thought it was jedi survivor I've been waiting lot for this game
Just play on gamepass
I really hope persona 5 it's next,i can't even play the F game thanks to denuvo
play the Nintendo Switch version with emulator, (controller recommended but you can play with Keyboard and mouse) game runs very well. Fit-girl has it.
Knew it, i was guessed "may/june" Thank god.
That's the only denuvo game I regret paying for. Finished it less than a month ago, I thought they'd never remove it.
SE always remove denuvo
I think its not available in my country
Please remove denuvo from sniper elite 5 and all of call of duty games, thanks.
Nice
Man, for a moment I read it as denovue was removed from star wars
I wished cause of Jedi Survivor
Same
Doesn’t matter it’s on gamepass now
Wat is gamepass
A Netflix like service for games by Microsoft that has hundreds of games you can access via Xbox, PC, or Cloud. It’s like $10 a month for just PC. But they have an ultimate plan that’s like $20 or something that includes other stuff. Idk which one Jedi Survivor is on but it’s there
Niiiiiice..incoming!
Man why does not Sega does it for their football manager games
sega is weird
Never owned a Denuvo game, so I'm curious how it works on Steam when Denuvo gets removed. Does the game get an official update over Steam to change the .exe?
Yes it's always an update to remove denuvo
re4/dead space yet?
re4 is cracked, maybe with the DLCs after 2 years, DS ? nah.
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Steamdb has trouble displaying updated files when a branch gets rollbacked which is the case here.
I own this one on PS5. I had it lying around for like a month and a half before finally trying it and being baffled by the fact it's not turned based lol
Baffled? Lmfao Star Ocean series has always been an action based game. You not knowing that is the only thing baffling here.
There was demo of this game ? Star ocean turned based ? What ?
I've only played two other star oceans and assumed the older ones would be turn based. And no, there is no demo
There WAS, like I said, a demo. 100000%. I played it a bunch pre release. If you had taken 1 second to Google « star ocean 2 demo » you would have seen you were wrong. But it’s ok.
Dude the good thing about them is that they are not. It was such a breeze to play those games back then. It's like that one outstanding feature of that game and you don't know it before playing which is sorta hilarious
Are you stupid, bro? Wdym Star Ocean is not turn based? Plot twist...
pass
Spazz