Does denuvo do that it claims it does? More sales due to less pirating?
I would wager companies lose more money using it than the sales lost due to pirating.
this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2026
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Not to mention pirates do increase game visibility, which is free advertising. And pirates play games that they wouldn't otherwise buy.
Small percentage, sure. But it's a factor.
They're not denuvo games but I tried CO:E33 and BG3 because they were big and popular. I eventually bought both. I would have never tried or bought them otherwise, the price tag was just too great to bother.
and every pirate can tell you the list of games that they ended up buying because they enjoyed the game.
Piracy does get converted into sales, when the game is good enough and deserving enough.
Especially when you ignore the logical fallacy that every pirate download is a lost sale, which absolute bollocks and in no way true or even realistic.
Which I think is a big reason you don't see demos anymore, cause the majority of games are broken shovelware shit and letting people know that before they drop 70 dollars on it would be a surefire way to tank profits.
I eye a lot of indie games and more often than not, I just wait for a really deep discount before I pull the trigger.
But when I try a demo... and that demo SLAPS, I buy shortly after. AND I tell my friends about the game.
I love demos.
It's very difficult to prove either way. There's also the factor of making a big deal of removing Denuvo post release; if sales were lost due to its inclusion, does it fully recoup those? Does it actually result in more total sales?
Whether it actually causes measurably more sales, my thoughts are that if paying customers are treated worse than pirates, then piracy is justified, so including Denuvo inherently justifies pirating the game to me.
Didn't buy the 2nd Doom (2016) due to Denuvo. I enjoyed the first (modern) Doom and apprecitated how well it ran but I've not looked back to see if it was removed (too late now, my standards are even higher now).
This week, members of the CrackWatch community declared "the year of the Linux desktop" after a new Linux-based method emerged that can launch an increasing number of Denuvo-protected games without triggering the DRM.
Useful quote for people like me that had zero idea what Denuvo was.
This so-called article contains absolutely no information to support the headline. It's worthless garbage.
do we have more technical information on how this works? this article is pretty light on that