Mostly have to agree. I'm totally against it since piracy will happen with or without it and I'm completely unconfident it makes a huge enough dent to justify the costs to the developers.
The argument for it I have heard is that it is intended to prevent piracy during initial launch. Both developers and publishers realize that it is hopeless to prevent piracy all together, but most games make the vast majority of their money during and shortly after launch, so the more they can delay the availability of pirated versions, the better.
As we have seen time and time again, gamers as a whole are an incredibly impatient lot, willing to throw money after just about anything, no matter if they are rewarding poor behavior by businesses or scalpers just to get instant satisfaction, so it only makes sense that this applies to games as well.
And as we have seen lately, Denuvo has been getting better. Gone are the days when Denuvo was hacked within days or even weeks of launch. It has been almost 4 months since Far Cry 6 launched, and Denuvo still hasn't been broken.
A while back I did some googling and came across a piracy group on Reddit suggesting that there really only was one person in the scene who has had any success in breaking recent Denuvo builds, someone who calls herself Empress, and she has been very quiet lately, leading to suspicion that she has either faced some sort of secret legal consequences, or been paid off or flipped by Denuvo to stop what she has been doing.
Either way, I don't recall hearing about any game shipping with Denuvo being compromised in the last 6 - 8 months. I may have missed some, but at the very least the pace has drastically slowed.
I'm not in a position to weigh the cost of a Denuvo contract vs. the benefit in launch window sales, but that's at least the justification that I have read.
I also generally buy games way after launch, when Denuvo has already been removed from the release, so I have never experienced the performance impacts from Denuvo first hand. This game is actually the first I am aware of with Denuvo that I am considering buying, but like
@hubaduba above, I've probably bought it in the past without knowing.
I generally don't pirate, it makes me feel badly that I am negatively impacting those who are bringing me the games I enjoy. I prefer to make sure the developers get paid, but in rare circumstances I have exceptions. Far Cry is one of those, as I refuse to install Uplay or Ubisoft Connect or whatever the hell they are calling their launcher/store these days. I even have two free codes for the game that came with hardware I bought, and I refuse to redeem them. Forced launchers/stores ought to be illegal. I also pirated the Outer Worlds when it first launched as there was no way I was going to install the Epic Game Store. I then bought it as soon as it came out on Steam and finished the game with the official version.
Sadly these circumstances are becoming less and less rare these days though. It seems like barely a launch goes by these days without an bribed Epic Exclusive or a forced publisher store.
My general stance is that if they are going to try to screw me over, by trying to manipulate me into installing software I don't want, or creating accounts I don't want, then it's a completely different situation, and I don't feel badly at all for pirating something.
