No idea if they all can be fixed. To be honest, if you mod away the forced civilization switch when eras change (which is by far my biggest gripe with the game), what's left is a game that plays and looks like Civ VI. I am not even sure I understand the purpose of Civ VII. My guess is that they killed the very idea of Civ ("Build a civilization to stand the test of time") because they needed an excuse to release an update to the franchise, and couldn't come up with an actually good idea what to change.

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Didn't realise this was Funcom, one of the more controversial publisher's out there. Their moderators are... concerning. Some of the Conan stories I've heard are really worrying.

I played Secret World and Age of Conan back in the days and I cannot recall this being a problem? Do they have a different team now?

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So funny that GOG can do what Steam cannot: Support good security.

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There was another obvious fix available from the beginning. Not running Windows.

At least not handing Microsoft control over your computer by enabling Secure Boot. But I really wonder for how much longer they will even allow it to be disabled.

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Even if you add a compile option to enable/disable your Deunvo integration (like is commonly done with Debug/Release builds), and you get a performance difference, all you know is that you have a performance difference, but crucially you don't know why.

Well, if I compile the game without Denuvo and that's literally the ONLY change made, and I get a performance difference on the same machine used to test, I think it's pretty safe to say that the cause of the discrepancy is indeed related to Denuvo.

Due to the way Denuvo is integrated in the game, what I don't know is if I integrated it in the best possible way and whether or not the performance impact can be lessened by moving some of the integrity checks elsewhere.

At the end of the day, it's pretty ridiculous of some people to claim that Denuvo doesn't impact performance. It executes complex code that without using Denuvo, would not get executed. The performance impact of such systems is always greater than zero. The big question is whether or not it is noticeable enough to be a problem.

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Well you really don't own the game. You buy a lease / license to be able to play the game. GOG is the closet you will ever come to owning games and that is there no user account required to play the game.

I am not sure why this always, always is brought up more or less every time subjects like this or similar ones are discussed.

Correct, you don't own the game. But you DO own the right to use it. And if I can't use it because they arbitrarily took the right from me and locked me out of the game I have a right to use, that's still a problem.

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I'm not sure how effective that logic is in practice, which I think most of us would find very dubious in modern times, but at least publishers seem to think so.

I think the reason for Denuvo's popularity among publishers is really that it's the first ever DRM system that's for all practical purposes undefeated.

I do not have numbers on how much (if any) additional revenue Denuvo protected games gain over similar releases not using it. The economics of piracy is complicated. Not all pirated copies would have translated into a sale, had the game been harder to pirate. But some probably would have. On the other hand, some people do boycott DRM protected games, so they're losing some sales as a trade-off. But it's hard to say how many.

Developers seem to believe the net effect is positive, so there is that.

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I can never imagine in a million years losing my cellphone or having it be stolen. I've been using cell phones since the very early 2000s when all they could do was play that snake game.

I got my first cell phone in the late 90s, never lost one or got one stolen, either. Statistically, both of us are still very anecdotal evidence, because LOTS of people lose their phone every year. 2FA security needs backups just as much as your hard drive, and that's what many people don't seem to understand. I have multiple YubiKeys for that reason. If I lose one, I still have access to my stuff, because I got a backup elsewhere. Now if Steam would just support them... *sigh*

The idea to have a single point of failure in any security scenario is revolting to me. But then again, I am not the one who will have to talk to Steam support for months to get their account back if they lose their phone a.k.a. single point of failure token. *shrug*

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I haven't seen their app, but last time I checked their 2FA FAQ it was using your phone (more precise, your phone number) as a security token and JUST that. Which is an extremely stupid thing to do, for reasons I stated above.

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Imagine a world where Steam would have support for hardware tokens, or at least passkeys. Anything remotely close to state of the art security really.

What they offer is... SMS "2FA".

Who in their right mind would ever want to use the one item in your possession with the greatest probability to get lost or stolen (which is your phone) as a security key anyway?

smh

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