I had to learn more about it after that short clip and found an overview page which is fun to read if your browser can translate it: https://www.dentsubo.net/circle/spe256.html
I love how parkplace is literally the kind of single-minded insanity this article talks about (which is significantly longer than 2 paragraphs btw)
Like, skimming through their articles and you get stuff like this https://thatparkplace.com/wish-actor-harvey-guillen-says-he-believes-disney-will-make-a-queer-princess-in-his-lifetime/ where they relay the quotes then immediately jump to:
If this does indeed happen it’s likely to lose The Walt Disney Company millions of dollars as seen with Lightyear.
I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.
Yes, it is perfectly possible that the studio’s writing work might be a bit shit, I dunno. If you find they are consistently involved with writing you don’t enjoy, then sure, whatever. The point of this article is the absolute insanity this kind of stuff gets taken to, like it’s a massive conspiracy rather than just the work of another studio managing the struggles and interests of our age.
To quote the 2+n paragraph article:
It’s a conspiracy theory that checks all the boxes: It conveniently explains pretty much everything happening right now, ties it back to organizations of which people are understandably suspicious, links it to a much larger ongoing panic (DEI), validates preconceived notions like “go woke, go broke,” sprinkles in a few kernels of truth regarding powerful interests, and – most importantly – provides a clear and identifiable enemy. It’s also almost entirely bullshit.
I think from their perspective Tuvok and Neelix weren’t “dead”, which was why they were more inclined to “correct” the situation at hand and save their crewmates while they still had the chance to do so.
Regardless, it’s a fucked up decision, I don’t envy it.
It’s been genuinely distressing to see people condoning such horrific behaviour. Thank you for the small dose of sanity.
For those kind of allegations, investigation will take significantly longer than a month.
They is, and has been for a very long time, perfectly valid for singular use.
Most people I’ve encounted do it all the time without noticing between sentences.
That’s awesome, the series absolutely felt like it was meant to be a movie but executives demanded it be extended. Excited to check this out!
There’s also the simple social factor which gets underestimated. I used to get worked up at work when people would ask questions about stuff I had written documentation about, until I understood that some folk just want that little social connection. They want a person to communicate something to them, whether they’re concsiously aware of it or not.
It’s also fairly common for people to just not be that good at searching for things. You have to word things in specific ways and learn what kind of sources to avoid and ones to trust. So asking people who do can be a huge timesaver.
GPM J1839–10 takes 22 minutes between pulses.
End Times starts playing
Or worse, find a way to use “The Final Season” thematically in the narrative to retroactively look like they planned it all along (unless this is already explicit in the manga).
Either way, their use of “parts” since Season 3 has been super annoying and misleading. I hope nobody pulls this shit again.
According to the article:
Irdeto has a plan, however: a program that will offer media outlets two versions of games to benchmark independently, with and without Denuvo Anti-Tamper, which he believes will prove “the performance is comparable, identical” between both. Apparently they hope to begin it within the next few months.
To me, this is a pretty good way of going about it. It gives people with professional and established testing methodology access to make the comparisons. Basically a “see for yourself” approach where its impact (or ideally, the lack of it) can be tested per-game.
One of the big problems historically with pre and post denuvo-removal comparisons is time. Casual benchmarkers run tests between older versions with DRM vs new versions without, which obviously have recieved a bunch of other optimizations. Some people don’t even re-run the old tests, which brings their own system differences into the equation (e.g. BIOS and driver updates). Nor is testing between cracked / non-cracked versions perfect; DRM that’s been circumvented is not necessarily prevented from running at all.
This is important to get right because, not only does actually good data take a LOT of work that casual benchmarkers wouldn’t even think of, there aren’t many definitive answers as to Denuvo’s universal effect on games. Sometimes it appears to have had no effect, then sometimes it does, which may be related to different generations of it and how well the devs implement it on a per-game basis.
An example the article gives is [PCGamer] hiring Durante (a prolific PC modder and developer famous for their work on Dark Souls) to benchmark Final Fantasy 15 with and without, finding no definitive measurable difference in gameplay but a possible ~6.7% increase in load times.
The question I have though is whether Denuvo themselves offer these versions or if it’s a program whereby every game with it is obligated to provide these versions to press. In the case of the former, Denuvo would likely have the power to only show off best-case scenarios, whatever the conditions for that may be. If the latter, we may get a positive effect whereby, if they don’t already, Denuvo’s contract with a dev requires that their implementation is done properly and meets their standards, otherwise they don’t allow it. As a company, they do seem hung up on the perception of performance issues, so it wouldn’t surprise me.
Putting on a tin-foil hat, if they’re really scummy they could deliberately impose a performance limit on the non-Denuvo version. Say, something that is designed explicitly to mimic its runtime behaviour. That would be pretty insane though, not only is that tactic likely illegal, it wouldn’t take much for it to become public. It would be a significant risk given how confident they are in its lack of performance impacts (which as we’ve said, appear to be backed by professional testing). If they’re working to resolve their PR problems, it would be an utterly stupid thing to do.
Overall though, I look forward for what this means for testing going forward. Frustrations about DRM aside (I much prefer without for a number of reasons) from a technical level I’m interested in whether this approach will prove the performance impacts a myth or not. Either way, it’ll give us more insight into how it actually works and what it’s doing under the hood.
I’d say it’s a matter of preference than anything “next-gen”. I really liked using a hybrid approach with the Steam Controller a few years back for some third person games with archery, but it has its own drawbacks and complexities so I could see why people would prefer the simplicity of the good ol’ analogue stick.