SpaceTroll wrote:

Hi everyone,

Thank you for all your feedback on this, we have been following along and having internal discussions before getting back to you. Based on data from our trial during the Closed Beta, we have decided not to include Denuvo in Humankind at launch.

 First, let me explain the reasoning behind our initial decision including Denuvo – We work really hard and pour our hearts into these games we make, and pirating really does affect our ability to keep creating games with you guys. 

We’ve been working on this game for more than 4 years now and personally it’s been my dream project for 25 years. We’ve been one of the most wishlisted games on Steam this year, so we know we’re going to be targeted by pirates, more so than any of our previous games. If Denuvo can hold off a cracked version, even just for a few days, that can already really help us to protect our launch.

 

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. 

 

I hope this answers your questions. Thank you as always for your support, and we can’t wait to see you all at launch (and beyond!)

 - Romain, CCO & Studio Head

Thank you for your post and clarification as communication always is the key to most things in life so we appreciate it.

I am also against piracy and I understand it can affect you, but a DRM solution that hurts the legit customers that buy your games as I bought all your games that you guys made I don`t think is the best solution

If you add Denuvo or something as heavy after launch at least let us know what will happen after their servers will go down forever, will we be able to play Humankind in 30 years from now with our children, grandchildren, friends and so on or we will never be able to play the game we paid for again like in the case of Might and Magic X that can`t be played anymore after just 7 years.

Also will there be Denuvo files left on our PC after we uninstall the game that used them and why, what data will it extract from our PCs, how many installs will we have until we ran out and have to buy the game again and so on as I believe these are legit questions for most of the customers

I am also so hyped about what you said a 25 years old dream project from a company with the potential that Amplitude demonstrated in their other 4x games and not only there and I am a little scared after what I saw in the closed beta as it feels a lot more simplistic tactically and strategically and also quest/story wise compared to your previous games, I hope you can add more on these fronts to at least make Humankind more on par (but not similar or the same) to your other great 4x games when it is released

One other thing, Humankind needs more information about how things work. A lot of information is hidden, unexplained and you have to guess about it. You should never guess about how things work in a game. Like the streamer Shenryyr also very well said: In Humankind you have sometimes to guess what things do, I told chat I believe what the game describes here will do “x” and chat said no, it will do “y”, when we tried it it seems in reality it does “z”. Like what is coreligion? What does redistribute food from a city to the other mean and how does it calculate? show us, make the math for us and so on. Also there are a ton of stuff that the game does not calculate for you. There is a wonder that says it gives you bonus 1% science per technologies researched but never said what is the bonus in value for you now or how many tech you researched till now, you have to do all that math and that is not a good experience

Anyways I want you to know that we are here giving feedback on the things both good and not so good when is the case and also ideas on how to improve things on our spare time because we love what you do and appreciate what you stand for as you are pretty unique in this industry and this goes beyond the money we offer you for your great games. So we would not want those fundamental values of yours to change that attracted us to come here in the first place. I hope we can also meet you guys and talk in happier moments as we did before in your streams, events and also here in G2G and hopefully a lot more to come in the future.

Sublustris wrote:

Xenon- wrote:
I'm a legit owner of RE Village too and you guys probably know what happened to legit owner vs pirated version.

Just so you know, it was CapCom's own DRM that borked performance in RE Village

That is very true, sometimes people confuse heavy DRM between themselves but they all seem to have this common denominator that they affect performance, among other stuff they do. As @SpaceTroll also said even Denuvo kind of broke performance and quality in Humankind`s Closed Beta and could not be fixed in the months left till launch which is a considerable period of time. Who knows what issues may appear if it gets added again in Humankind. But we will see how things go, i hope it will all be fine in the end.

Well I will now happily pre-order Humankind. Thank you to all at Amplitude for your response.

And done...1 more sale to your balance.

This is great news, i was starting to worry that our concerns werent gonna be heard.

kryton24 wrote:

Perhaps it's time to flip the thread title to how Amplitude has revitalized OP heart lol?

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.

PS: Please don't ruin this happy ending by implementing Denuvo or another heavy DRM later after the release. This only hurts your paying customers, not the pirates.

.

YuukiZorah wrote:

As nice as this is lets not forget here that the main reason was not the feedback by the sound of it but that they could not implement it in a way that it does not affect performance on an acceptable level by the sound of it, which still leaves the door open at a post release implementation.

I am sorry to say that the wording is very PR ish there and leaves that avenue open. For now I am cautiously optimistic.

Yes, in theory this could be the case regarding to Romain's words "not to include Denuvo in Humankind at launch".
But just like Elhoim already explained, the point of implementing such a heavy DRM like Denuvo is to protect sales at launch. I've mentioned this in the OP and Romain confirmed it in his announcement:

SpaceTroll wrote:

If Denuvo can hold off a cracked version, even just for a few days, that can already really help us to protect our launch.

So implementing it way AFTER launch doesn't make a lot of sense, because most people willing to pay full price have probably already bought the game at this point.

And also would it cause a lot of negative PR when a game gets a performance consuming DRM as an update, causing decreased performance and maybe some other trouble. That's quite the opposite of what Amplitude wants!

They want both critics and players to highly praise the game to generate HYPE, so later they can sell the game at a discount to people who can't pay full price and also to sell DLCs and big expansions. Both is more unlikely when the game gets worse over time...

.

Khaar wrote:

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..

That is a very smart thing to do. From my experience with the industry i NEVER preorder stuff or buy Early Access stuff. I only buy fully released games that are good, after watching gameplay footage about them and making my own considerations, also reading/watching reviews from sources that i found reliable consistently and are not just PR machines. 

Well, of course the exception to that is Amplitude. I always buy/preorder from them and not for the product they make now, but for what they did in the past. I would have bought Humankind for what they did until now even if it was not a game but a 60 euro jpeg. But once you`re cheated with a jpeg instead of a game (LOL) or you get Denuvo DRM or similar, or the game is hyped as the best they can do and it turns out to be barebones/simplistic strategically and tactically also with less features, less quests/storytelling and less mechanics than your previous games, than that trust can disappear and it would be such a shame as it happened to a lot of similar companies in the past that changed who they were. I hope Amplitude will always keep who they are and honor their promises and the great community that they have as they did now, with the removal of Denuvo in the game launch phase. I applaud them for what they did now and i hope the trust that i`m talking about will remain there forever so i can keep buying/preorder their products, recommend them to friends, family and also in chats/forums and whenever the situation arises as i did till now