Readit NewsThat's an extremely naive take that shows some stark ignorance of the tech and market forces at work.
From a tech standpoint, Denuvo negatively impacting performance has been debunked many times over (see my previous post about that).
On the economical side, you need to realize that whenever you are playing and enjoying a game, it's most likely due to the fact that the previous games sold by that developer have been successful in making money, which was most likely made possible by Denuvo.
In other words, making piracy harder allows the next generation of games to be created.
That's an extremely bold claim. There are many games which are successful and don't use Denuvo. In fact I'm quite sure there are more successful games that don't use Denuvo, then those which use it - so I don't believe that "whenever [I'm] playing and enjoying a game" it was "most likely" created thanks to Denuvo.
And then there are people like me who simply refuse to play any game which uses Denuvo. There are thousands of excellent games out there, why should I waste time on those which treat me as a thief?
This is an interesting statement to me, and I think the truth of it is debatable. It's certainly true if you're only looking at a specific sort of player experience, but there are other sorts of experiences some people want which is greatly enhanced by the use of reference material.
Why would a game designer want to reduce the appeal of their game to those sorts of players? Players who want the "pure" game experience can simply not look things up on the wiki.
Surely, in the end, game designers want to make games that are fun and engaging, so if the use of a wiki makes a game more fun and engaging to some, why would a game designer object to that?
Unfortunately it's not so simple, if you need wiki to search for the most basic information, because they game doesn't provide it. It's what the author actually describes as "terraria problem" and I fully agree with that sentiment: in Terraria you can craft things, but the game doesn't show you what you can craft, unless you are near the correct crafting station AND have sufficient resources on yourself to craft it. So in order to play without wiki you'd need to:
1. stuff your inventory with all possible resources you'd otherwise store in various chests
2. go to each of your crafting stations
Needless to say, it is extremely tedious and still you might not see that some item can be crafted at a given station, because for example you only have 99 pieces of some resource and that item needs 100 pieces of that resource.
So I'd say it's fine for some cryptic or more advanced mechanisms to be covered on wiki. But when I need to go to wiki simply to get a list of craftable items, then there's something seriously wrong with the UI design in the game.
For example, markets statistics to see live market information in game for trading, you have to use a user created website.
Want to see what components will get your ship in the configuration you want ? Third party tool.
Want to plan a nice scenic route somewhere with some interesting/valuable finds on the way ? Third party tool.
Want to go mining and be in anyway profitable, maybe looking for a particular resource, you guessed it, only through a third party tool.
On one hand this has brought the community much closer together as the tools for that in game don't exists. But it's ridiculous that core gameplay loops depend on user created tools.
I'm sure I would be more efficient, if I'd use 3rd party tools, but it still didn't prevent me from actually playing and enjoying the game. I'd say it's much different to the "terraria problem" mentioned in the post.
If you don't have an expectation of Terraria, you don't know the depth and therefore play the game as it is.
The only thing that is harming your fun is knowing how it could be by watching videos, streams whatever.
Saying "it is impossible to play without a wiki" is entirely self inflicted by wrong expectation management. Of course people want shortcuts but a person without internet access wouldn't call Terraria unplayable without a wiki.
A person who lived under the rock and found Terraria one day, probably wouldn't call it unplayable, having nothing to compare it against. I remember back in old days, where you'd have to figure out many cryptic mechanisms on your own in the old games. But yet here we are - decades later, and yes I do expect modern games would fully learn from mistakes of the past and provide such basic functionality as crafting lists in the game itself.
In all of those examples I'm figuring things out myself and using a wiki and sometimes other community tools such as calculators etc.
I would be really amazed if this person makes a good game when their focus is make players do A rather than B instead of "how do I make this game as much fun to play as possible". It's also likely that the gameplay systems are really shallow if they feel they would be harmed by people searching for information in a wiki.
Would you consider Terraria a good game? I think at one point it was the highest rated game on Steam. And yet that game is exactly this way - it makes players do A rather than B: it is pretty much impossible to play it WITHOUT the wiki, because of the design: there is no list of all craftable items in-game.
And because of this I could never really get into it, because I had to tediosly collect all my resources and then go to each crafting station one by one, simply to see what I am able to craft.
I think in the linked article there's a good real-world example of that with a valve:
> opening the gate of a gate valve (of rectangular cross section) by 1 mm for 10 seconds yields the same absement of 10 mm·s as opening it by 5 mm for 2 seconds. The amount of water having flowed through it is linearly proportional to the absement of the gate, so it is also the same in both cases.
The reason is simple: i want to have access to the games i bought regardless of Steam and when i buy a game there i also make a separate offline copy for my own archival. Denuvo - or any DRM really - makes that impossible. Fortunately most games (like pretty much all indie games, which are what i mainly buy these days) have no DRM at all on Steam and the few that do make enough of stink for me to know and avoid them.
So yeah, Denuvo is reliable for making me ignore a game (until it is removed at least - amusingly enough that'd often be after a bunch of patches have been released and the game had a bunch sales/price drops)
I'd probably buy a game with Denuvo if i REALLY wanted to play it (e.g. i bought Prey 2017 despite Denuvo) but i'd do that only after the price has dropped to "sandwich levels" (e.g. i bought Prey 2017 at a handful of dollars). Note that i also put money where my mouth is and when a major game that i want to play is released on GOG (which has DRM-free games) i do buy it full price or close to full price.
Could you let me know which curator it is? I'm also actively avoiding any game that uses Denuvo, so I'd certainly find such a curator useful.
* there is one caveat to that though - if you have a VR headset, then there are many people reporting performance issues on Linux with those headsets. And personally I also find VR performance subpar on Linux (although it still improved in the last year).