I'm just coming from Steam where I was about to preorder Humankind, but then I noticed Denuvo and decided not to.

I'm in love with Amplitude since the first Endless Space and was even part of the old G2G platform. I'm a founder of Dungeon of the Endless and Endless Space 2 and both founder badges are proudly highlighted on my profile! I own every single Amplitude game, every DLC, participated in some contest and played every game for hundreds of hours (except ES2).

I made contact with E.N.F.E.R., enjoyed some "Quality Time with Jeff" and some "Quality Cocktails with Jeff".

Endless Legend is my Nr. 1 strategy game of all time! And I have one of the highest G2G scores, being on the leaderboard on page 1 for some years now (even top ten for a while). Damn, I even played "Love Thyself: A Horatio Story" and unlocked all achievements, just for some extra G2G points.

Yesterday I bought another copy of Dungeon of the Endless and Endless Legend and gave it to a friend, just so I could

unlocked the "The other great Escape" achievement and the "Cage Match" achievement with him.

Now I try to get the last missing achievement in Endless Legend, before I finally go to do the same with the last four Endless Space 2 achievements I'm missing.

So yes, I'm a BIG BIG Amplitude fan boy!
And this is a real gaming love story because I love turn-based strategy games, roguelikes and Sci-Fi settings, and well, you make turn-based strategy games and roguelikes with Sci-Fi settings (with clean and sexy interfaces). It's a perfect match!

However, today you broke my heart. I avoid games with Denuvo, for reasons other people have already mentioned:
Performance issues, security issues, no offline play, messes up the system...

To be fair, I totally understand why Denuvo was chosen (probably by SEGA). I understand how important it is for sales to protect the game around release, but PLEASE Amplitude, PLEASE consider to remove Denuvo after some months!

Every game you ever made has become significantly better over time, so waiting a bit longer for Humankind is okay for me (and many others), but please just remove it at some point.

I'm one of your loyalest and longest time fan / customer. And I put my heart into this message (edited it more than a dozen times).

So it would be wonderful if you could respond in some way or another.

Sincerely, Khaar.

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UPDATE:

OMG, what did just happen? None other than Romain de Waubert de Genlis himself (CCO & Studio Head) has answered us here in this post.

Long story short, he announced that Deuvo will NOT be in the release version of Humankind anymore!!!

SpaceTroll wrote:

That being said, our priority is always the best possible experience for the players who buy our games and support us. Denuvo should never impact player performance, and we don’t want to sacrifice quality for you guys. 

We believe that it’s possible with the right integration, which is what we wanted to test during the Closed Beta. However, we found that the way it was currently integrated was not good enough, and it’s not something we can fix before release. So, we are taking it out.

Holy Macaroni, I just can't believe it! Not only didn't I expect an official answer from Amplitude at all, but also wouldn't I have thought that Romain would be the one answering. This fact alone should show us all how important our feedback was and how important we are to them as a community!

I also want to use this chance to say thank you to all the people who have up-voted this thread and used it to discuss this topic. 

I know, I know, Amplitude didn't decide to remove Denuvo just for me, but because Endless Legend is my favorite strategy game of all time and Humankind has a very similar look and feel to it, I can barely hold back how happy I am right now :)

The only thing that would make me freak out even more would be if Jeff Spock would invite me for a Beer2Gether, LOL.

After reading Romain's respond I INSTANTLY opened Steam to preorder Humankind!
This a very special thing to do for me because for years now I'm preaching people not to preorder games and wait for initial reviews. However, Amplitude has always been the exception of the rule for me since I fall in love with Endless Space 1.

So here I proudly present to you: my preorder of Humankind! 

Thank you Amplitude for fixing my broken heart: 

Sincerely, Khaar.

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UPDATE 2:

There was a lot of discussion over the last few days about the wording of Romain's statement and whether or not it means that Denuvo will get back to the game after the release. The answer is NO! Amplitude made a clarification post (Link):

Natco wrote:

There are no plans to add Denuvo to Humankind after launch 

Sorry if the wording on that was unclear :)

This is it guys, the ultimate answer from the Devs we were waiting for: Denuvo is gone once and for all!

Thank you Amplitude for being such a great team of dedicated developers, thank you for listening, thank you for caring about your community, thank you for all the great games you have made for us.

And thank you to everyone being part of this discussion.

Enjoy your day and if you haven't done already:

PREORDER HUMANKIND!

.

And since Amplitude said in their official statement that Sega for them is "a dream come true" and "SEGA is a company that offers its support to the creators, positioning itself as a service provider, helping studios to reach their goals with only one objective in mind: Quality!" it means that both Sega and Amplitude love the Denuvo move and for them is quality stuff. I was thinking that Amplitude is another kind of company but since they turned around and are now so in love with the Sega way of doing things i`m kind of disappointed. We will see what happens in the end

reich238 wrote:

Is this not all a bit of self selection in terms of discussion? I never knew anything about Denuvo until this has been discussed here back and forth.... yet still I don't quite see the issue with it.... just another RAM consuming app that runs on your computers anyway....

Just research about the subject a bit more as there is a lot of info about it on the internet and even on other Games2Gether posts. To give you a bit of info about it:

Denuvo is heavy DRM solution that degrades performance to a level where even some devs complained about it, adds regular online checks, has a dubious EULA that as mentioned limits the number of your installs, how you use the product that you bought with your own money and can persist on your PC even after you uninstall the game that used it, not to mention if Denuvo servers ever shut off you can`t access the game you paid for just like what happened a few days ago with Might and Magic X game by Ubisoft with a similar heavy DRM solution: after just 7 years the DRM servers got shut down. People who just bought the game recently or had it for a long time can`t access the game content anymore and they don`t get refunded. Some never got to play the game or finish it. They just have been scammed and paid for a product that can`t be accessed anymore. And these are just a few of the drawbacks of a heavy DRM

reich238 wrote:

Is this not all a bit of self selection in terms of discussion? I never knew anything about Denuvo until this has been discussed here back and forth.... yet still I don't quite see the issue with it.... just another RAM consuming app that runs on your computers anyway....

You'll definitely notice the issue when Denuvo shuts down and you can no longer play the copy of Humankind that you paid for...

Alice99 wrote:

GlorySign wrote:

And since Amplitude said in their official statement that Sega for them is "a dream come true" and "SEGA is a company that offers its support to the creators, positioning itself as a service provider, helping studios to reach their goals with only one objective in mind: Quality!" it means that both Sega and Amplitude love the Denuvo move and for them is quality stuff. I was thinking that Amplitude is another kind of company but since they turned around and are now so in love with the Sega way of doing things i`m kind of disappointed. We will see what happens in the end

I'm heavily against denuvo, and also would never buy the game with that. But I also think that's reading too much into things. If you're a studio that depends on the parent company for money, of course you're going to be positive about them in your communications. You don't want to sour the cooperation. Amplitude making some generic statements about how much they love working with sega says nothing about how much they love denuvo, or even about their real feelings about sega.

I absolutely agree with you, but let`s not forget that they were not forced to be a "studio that depends on the parent company". They willingly talked to Sega when they were an independent company and said: hey, buy us, we want your money and if you do that we will sign a contract where we do anything you please, we don`t want a contract where we keep most of our independence and we will tell the community "don`t worry, nothing will change moving forward after we sell ourselves to Sega". Or if they really signed a contract where they keep some of their independence maybe it`s Amplitude who came up with the idea of Denuvo

kryton24 wrote:

Sega doesn't even use this for it's total war games, or any other games that I can see on steam so why is it being pushed to Humankind? What is the worry / purpose?

Maybe Sega was not the one who wanted Denuvo maybe it was Amplitude who wanted it. We don`t know for sure although most people say Sega wanted it. It could have been as well Amplitude who wanted it or maybe they both agreed that it`s a good idea. As very well kryton24 points out Sega does not want Denuvo on Total War strategy games

And yes, how SpikedWallMan also very well said maybe another company comes up with a better DRM solution and Denuvo goes out of business shutting down their servers and you won`t be able to access the games you paid for anymore

I bet most of you played HK OpenDevs/Beta and didn't even notice it had Denuvo.

If i have to guess only Poe had Denuvo if that is true and that is why a lot of people complained how bad it works on their systems. Also it is for the first time in Poe when the game started crashing to windows also loading saved games crashed the game to windows form time to time, never had those in Lucy/Victor on the same system. And if it is true we were not notified about it, nobody knew till recently that they add Denuvo

GlorySign wrote:
"don`t worry, nothing will change moving forward after we sell ourselves to Sega".

They didn't say that, they said it shouldn't limit their creative process, like interaction with community via G2G.

Sublustris wrote:

GlorySign wrote:
"don`t worry, nothing will change moving forward after we sell ourselves to Sega".

They didn't say that, they said it shouldn't limit their creative process, like interaction with community via G2G.

Well they really said that, just search the internet. Look at a quote: "Update 6 Jul, 2016: Speaking to PCGN, Amplitude COO and creative director Romain de Waubert says that Sega’s buyout is purely publishing support, not a change in how their games are made." So outside of publishing Amplitude decides when to launch games, how to do them, in what state (finished or not) to release them, at what price and what DRM to use and so on

Also we are waiting for the interaction with the community via G2G that you mention, hopefully they will give us more details about the subject