Drasglaf

Abstract In the personal computer video game market, a digital rights management (DRM) technology called Denuvo has been used since 2014 to restrict software usage to legitimate buyers, thereby preventing piracy. Sometimes Denuvo DRM is bypassed or “cracked”, after which the video game can be pirated. I exploit the randomness with which Denuvo is cracked to estimate the effect Denuvo has on protecting revenue from piracy displacement. When Denuvo is cracked very early on, piracy leads to an estimated 20 percent fall in total revenue on average relative to an uncracked counterfactual, but that effect is weaker the longer it takes for Denuvo to be cracked. When Denuvo survives for at least 12 weeks, piracy leads to nearly zero total revenue loss on average. The results suggest that Denuvo does protect legitimate sales to an estimated mean of 15 percent of total revenue and median of 20 percent, but there is little justification to employ Denuvo long-term (i.e. for more than three months), especially given that Denuvo can have negative technical side effects and is generally disliked by users.

Section snippets Digital goods and digital rights management Digital goods are unique because anyone with access to the sequence of zeros and ones that constitute the good can replicate the good with no special know-how, compromising a developer’s control over supply. Furthermore, affordable and rapid internet speeds along with plentiful storage imply that additional units can be produced and distributed at practically zero cost by nearly anyone. Computer files are non-rivalrous and non-excludable goods. Consequently many developers rely on some form of DRM business decisions and effects The decision for publishers to use DRM on video games appears to depend on how rampant piracy is, whether DRM will survive for any meaningful period of time, and whether the developers have strong feelings against DRM. Video game publishers themselves have said that piracy is a concern, with the CEO of Ubisoft claiming that their piracy rates were above 90%, and furthermore than their DRM was “a success” in reducing piracy; but Ubisoft also mentioned that the online-only nature of their DRM was

Summary of Denuvo DRM “Denuvo Anti-Tamper” is a digital rights management technology that has been used prominently with PC video games since 2014. Its stated purpose is to prevent unauthorized distribution of software for a long enough period of time so as to protect early revenue from displacement. It works by assigning “a unique authentication ‘ticket’ to each copy of a game, a sort of license shaped by all sorts of factors like hardware ID. Because Denuvo integrates with a game’s code, you can’t just crack it Variables and data The probability that a particular game’s DRM gets cracked depends on how strongly cracking groups are focused on that particular game, so it is worth asking: what factors would make cracking groups target a particular game, and what factors can one use to predict how long DRM will last? It is hypothesized here that one is better able to predict if and how quickly a game is cracked depending on the following factors. (Subsequent tests will argue that none of the factors actually do help in

Effect of being cracked In this section, I examine how the availability of a cracked copy of a game affects a game’s revenue over time. The timing of the crack will be critical: revenue is highest close to the release date, and therefore a crack that appears close to the release date has a disproportionately large effect on revenue. On the other hand, a crack that appears well in to the future has little effect. This result has some precedent in other studies, for example Ma et al. [58] find that the pre-release

Predicting a crack I do the same tests using Metacritic scores instead of OpenCritic scores. Metacritic’s scoring system is opaque, sometimes omits reviews from notable publications with no explanation, and has no scores at all for many games, which is why it was not chosen as the main variable. That said, it can serve as a robustness check as a measurement of quality. As shown in Tables A.3, A.4, and A.5, the results are typically worse for regressions using Metacritic scores: the -values are considerably

Conclusion As with sales of digital music, movies, and e-books, sales of a certain type of video game (specifically, those with relatively small network effects) also appears to be prone to displacement from piracy. There appears to be little difference between the kinds of games that are cracked quickly and those that are not. When DRM survives the efforts of cracking groups, it appears to protect such video game sales from displacement of piracy. The extent to which DRM protects legitimate sales depends CRediT authorship contribution statement William M. Volckmann II: Writing – review & editing, Writing – original draft, Project administration, Methodology, Investigation, Formal analysis, Data curation, Conceptualization. Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgments I would like to thank Erich Muehlegger, Jacob Anderson, and Tomáš Fedor for facilitating data access and collection for this project.

but unfortunately the research is behind a paywall.

Do you mean from here?

Edit: I replied to myself with the full article, just in case. I have to go and can’t read it at the moment.

The X-Files because childhood and Gillian Anderson.

Star Trek TNG because childhood and Gates McFadden.

You just made it worse.

800€ and it doesn’t even have Blast Processing, what a ripoff.

Great, I’m sure nothing bad is going to come out of this, like everything else deepfake-related.

There’s always been the risk of confusion

A name change does make sense for both

Then make SUSE become ClosedSUSE. It couldn’t be easier.

So this is where trouser snakes come from.

Last time I tried VLC, it didn’t have the ability to play music without a gap between tracks and that was a deal breaker for me.

I played it at launch and stopped due to bugs and performance. Tried again a year and a half later but sadly the game didn’t catch me.

That’s some strong will, I could never take more than 2 minutes of torture.

Metal Machine Music. They’ll love it.

Amanita phalloides, if I’m not mistaken?

Thanks for this, I’ve been wondering for a while what was of that investigation.

Don’t watch your weird porn collection on Windows, got it.

Phase 3: Say you’ve changed to earn some good will

Phase 4: Fucking do it again

Transfroggification

In 2020 I bought a 2080 Super for more than 800€, I considered it crazy expensive but I had the money and my 1070 had died. 23 months later it died and Amazon refunded the money, so I proceeded to buy another GPU. That money was only enough for a 3070ti and I still had to pay 30-40€ more. I’m happy with my 3070ti for now, and I hope it lasts long enough, I don’t think I can afford that kind of money anymore.

And if there ever was a dark age for PC hardware, we’ve recently crawled out of it, thankfully.

With high-end GPUs costing what they still cost, I don’t think we’re out of it just yet.