Denuvo, like DRM in general, offers no benefit to legitimate game owners. In fact, Denuvo explicitly strips away significant rights of ownership that legitimate owners have traditionally enjoyed and reasonably expected on an open platform like the PC. Denuvo blocks many forms of modding, which prevents owners from extending the functionality of their games or adding new features (e.g. GeDoSaTo, ENB, MP mods), prevents fan-made patches that fix bugs or restore content (e.g. VtMB, KOTOR 2), prevents conversions and unofficial expansions (e.g. The Long War, Endereal, Gekokujo), and prevents the creation of compatibility mods that help to preserve old games long after their publishers have abandoned supporting them (e.g. MMO private servers, System Shock Portable, OpenRA).

Denuvo also further guts preservation by making games dependent on online activation with third-party servers. Once it's no longer expedient for a publisher to maintain those servers, they get turned off, as does the ability for owners of that game, present and future, to install and play it. Fundamentally, Denuvo positions the publisher as a gatekeeper between the owner of the game and the game itself, requiring the owner to ask permission of the publisher before interacting with the game in any major way. If permission is not granted, for any reason or no reason, the owner must comply without recourse. It's a big shift in the zero-sum power balance between players and publishers. Denuvo gives players nothing, it only takes away what they already have.

And it's especially galling how comparatively little the publishers currently stand to gain in relation to how much everyone else stands to lose. Denuvo's existence is justified as an anti-piracy measure (the idea being that legitimate owners should forfeit their rights for the justice of the publisher capitalizing on their maximum potential sales). Publishers have long claimed that piracy deprives them of 90% or more of their rightful sales on PC (Ubisoft has said as much as 97%). If that were true, eliminating piracy would directly boost their sales by a gargantuan degree, an order of magnitude or more. Now that Denuvo has arrived and successfully halted all piracy of many games over the last year, we can begin to see if those dramatic publisher claims of lost sales are even close to being accurate. Although specific sales figures are, naturally, tightly kept secrets by publishers, we can see via Steamspy that Denuvo-protected games have not shown any remarkable explosions in sales compared to similar titles without Denuvo. Denuvo games sell essentially on par with similar non-Denuvo games. In fact, publishers themselves who have been selling Denuvo games have not made any announcements of big sales growth due to their PC games becoming un-pirateable, a business success that one would think they'd be eager to extol (especially in the case of publicly traded companies) if such a thing were true.

The inconvenient truth, which ironically is not so hidden anymore now that publishers have gotten their wish of impregnable DRM, is that piracy was not systematically displacing large amounts of otherwise full sales, as publishers had claimed. I'm inclined to credit this to the exceptionally strong price competition on the PC platform in recent years. Whether publishers' claims had a kernel of truth a long time ago, before the current era of broad competition, there is sadly no data to shed light on things, but it is at least more plausible than today.

Before the innovative efforts of PC game distributors like Steam, GOG, Humble Bundle, and so on, pricing was far less flexible and availability was far worse, leaving many potential customers with no reasonable legitimate middleground between piracy and nothing. There were also no high-quality free-to-play games like League of Legends or World of Tanks to further mop up players with more desire to play than money to spend. To the extent that piracy was actually depriving publishers of real sales, it was predominantly a consequence of those publishers failing to meet the demands of markets that they didn't understand (practically the entire world outside of North America and western Europe). Now that great strides have been made to meet players halfway, with things like variable pricing, wider availability, and free to play, more players are playing games legitimately than ever before.

In turn, the number who pirate when they would genuinely buy otherwise has plunged. We see that those who do pirate are mostly either those who would not buy anyway (e.g. pirating as a hobby, or teenagers being teenagers) or those who do buy anyway (e.g. pirating for demoing or archiving/preservation), neither of which are additional sales being lost. Once Denuvo arrived a year ago, it was a strong-arm 'solution' to a problem whose essence was already well underway to being solved through the soft power of an increasingly flexible and competitive market. When Denuvo swept back the curtain of piracy, there was no towering treasure trove of extra sales ready to be reaped, there were only the dusty traces of players neglected by publishers a gaming generation ago.

Even if publishers were trying to sweeten the bitter pill of Denuvo for owners by doing things like sharing the profits of those mythical enormously increased sales through lower day-1 pricing, or ensuring that the Denuvo activation server check-in would automatically expire and be disabled after the game's launch window had closed, I still think Denuvo is a rotten deal for anyone who cares about and understands the enormous value to gamers of the PC being an open platform.

Denuvo is one of many efforts (Microsoft is especially guilty of such) to clamp down on the PC and corral its enormous distributed power into fewer hands for the sake of profit and control. Players and creators on PC wield more power than those on any other platform, which gets them more value for their money and effort, and invigorates gaming on the PC like nowhere else. It's no coincidence that most of gaming's new ideas, new technologies, and surprise hits all get their start on the PC. Denuvo and all other efforts by corporate rent-seekers to close the PC are poison to everyone who enjoys the benefits of gaming on an open platform.

I saw the announcement of Grey Goo receiving more or less an expansion pack of new content for free tomorrow and it got me thinking about the possible tragedy of that game failing despite the developers' best efforts and intentions. I'm not privy to any inside information about this game, so I'm just giving my perspective on what's publicly available. Though I have no real stake in the game's fate, I can see some reasons to wish it and its developers more success than they seem to have found with it so far. Though they certainly did themselves no favors with that name.

I'm glad I picked up Grey Goo last year for full price, even though it went on sale for 50% off a couple days later. I could have returned it and repurchased it on Steam to pocket the savings, but I had bought the game with the intent of voting with my wallet to support the kinds of games and developers I want to see more of, so I didn't return it.

Since before its release, the developers have been making an outgoing effort to try to do right by their customers and build the game as a passion-driven project, which makes the game's middling sales numbers depressing. To some degree, I feel sorry for them. They're trying to deliver a high-quality old fashioned RTS game, something that's been all but extinct for a decade (with the exception of StarCraft II), and do it without customer-unfriendly features that business people want to have in games these days (pervasive online, microtransactions, aggressive monetization, etc). As one might have reasonably/cynically expected, it's been tough going.

Petroglyph, the company that made Grey Goo, is a mid-size independent studio largely making PC-exclusive games, something that was almost completely killed off as AAA console games took over in the last two console generations. Their predecessor, Westwood Studios, was one of many victims of that period. That Petroglyph, which is a pretty similar company, has remained in the games business all the way through 2016 without any big hits is pretty remarkable. At times, they've made board games or card games to keep the lights on when funding for computer games wasn't available, but they're still around. They look like they've been one big canceled project away from bankruptcy since the beginning and they've probably teetered on the cusp multiple times.

Grey Goo strikes me as a bit of a desperation gambit, like the origin story of the Final Fantasy games, with no real plan B to fall back on. If this game doesn't pan out in the end, I wouldn't be surprised to see them downsize precipitously and start making mobile games or finally just quit the games business altogether, like so many other old developers have done.

To make matters worse, Grey Goo finding success seems like a real longshot. It likely has a mid-range budget and was made by about 100 full-time people, giving it the sales burden of a relatively large game, but without the serious marketing money or cutting edge production values that drive sales for truly large games from the familiar big publishers. It's also not piggy-backing on a hot trend that could aid in its discoverability or buzz; it's in a genre that has long since been declared dead. From a business point of view, this game looks like a terrible investment with no hope of making a decent profit or probably even breaking even. I have no idea how they secured enough funding to make it in the first place. I almost fear the publisher will, at any point, suddenly discover that their money was actually spent making a genuine RTS and not a microtransaction-riddled F2P MOBA, and pull the plug immediately.

Anyway, as a game-player who fondly remembers the RTS heyday of the late 90's, I'm pleased to see a little revival going on between this and the new expansion packs for Age of Empires and Age of Mythology. I hope Grey Goo is carving out a viable niche for itself, since it's a cool game that deserves a modest following, and the people who made it deserve some vindication for their efforts.

I also really appreciate that the developers' business strategy is largely centered on trying to serve their fans' interests as opposed to the business peoples' (again, no idea how they've got funding that allows room for this). Presumably, after adding fan-requested features and giving away substantial new content for free, they then cross their fingers and pray that the fans will return the favor with good sales. I love the principle there, though I recognize its probable foolhardiness. SteamSpy says they've got 145,000 Grey Goo owners on Steam, which seems so-so, but with the big price cuts they tried over the course of last year and the cost of the free updates, I can't imagine they're out of the red. But there are some success stories they can optimistically look toward. CD Projekt Red has seen big growth while continuing to embrace the same philosophy of generously serving their customers and, to a lesser extent, so have Larian and Flying Wild Hog. So, who knows, maybe Petroglyph can find a way to follow those examples.

I do hope that they get the chance to make a sequel of some kind can build upon the foundation that Grey Goo has set down. But more than that, I hope that it remains possible for small companies like Petroglyph to keep making mid-sized games outside of the mainstream molds while carrying on a customer-first attitude.