Of course, Denuvo maximizes profits. Gamers losing ownership rights to their purchases is at best acceptable collateral damage, at worst a desired obsolescence feature to maximize repeat sales.

Consoles manufacturers have becomes masters at this and most of the PC gaming market is an apt student following in the masters' footsteps.

It blows my wife's mind that I've yet to play any of the Zelda games after the SNES. She's simply underestimating the extent to which I despise these crooks.

whats wrong with N64?

everything

Artificial fragmentation of the market with exclusivity deals, brand name momentum and proprietary non-portable apis rather than superior hardware.

Forced obsolescence though deprecation of an non-open platform not just at the software layer, but hardware layer as well.

Basically, if you bought a Nintendo 64 game 20 years ago (by which time I'm assuming your console went kaput), the only way you can legally play your game now is though the resale market. There is no legal portability layer for Nintendo 64 hardware the way there is with aging Windows software.

Technically, you have pure software emulation of consoles which is legal, but it doesn't matter, because all adapted game files for said emulation are illegal and there is no way in hell they'll give up even the tiniest amount of control by releasing them legally even if they'd rake in some money by doing so (I'm sure they'd much rather way until the ip rights run out and then just torch everything).

So, if you want to play that aging title, you got a couple of choices:
- Get a second hand Nintendo 64 (every time crossing your fingers it works properly) and hope the market for those doesn't dry up or become prohibitively expensive
- Get a non-official 100% illegal software port of your game through shady channels
- Make sure to buy daddy's latest console iteration and pay him some more money for those games you already bought 20 years ago on some anthology package. Aren't you just excited at the thought that you (and your kids and grand kids at least for a part of their lives) will probably pay daddy again for the same thing in another decade or two (sure, they ported it on some higher resolution... totally excruciating work I'm sure)

Weren't they already doing exclusive deals with snes too though vs genesis? Also wasn't snes closed too?

Yeah, but I was a pre-pubescent kid who didn't know any better then. I got my first PC at 13 :P.

Oh for f*** sake, I'm getting tired of all this, all my components worth less everyday because companies think that another layer of protection that kills your CPU processing capacity is good for their games...

Far cry from a microtransaction in Fortnite and something like Prey: Mooncrash. "DLC" is a worthless catch-all term at this point and we need to go back to "expansion" for real stuff.

Anyway... lame, but if the game has Denuvo already then not that earth shattering.

Never understand why publisher are so stupid to think that the peoples who pirate games will buy them if they they protect them, and most of the games are cracked a few weeks after the release so they will wait until the games is cracked and will never buy their games.

At least they should remove the drm when the sales are low if they realy want to protect their games for the first weeks or month.

A few things ... though I still love my N64. I even bought a second new one as spare when they were being discontinued.

That said, I haven't used the N64 in ages.

We especially liked to play Goldeneye and Mario Kart and Diddy Kong Racing with friends and family.

I agree. My point is that when someone plays an MMO or the like the kind of mentality is different from a singleplayer DRM'd game. It would be something like: "I'm playing this game and I know it's supposed to only work online, connected to a server, and if something happens, I'm aware that I will lose everything I put into it. Except, maybe, memories with friends." :P

I disagree here partially. But then we would start to debate what is DRM in the first place I think.
Steam in itself is already a layer of DRM for me. So, even if you can download and play your game completely offline, or with various kinds of workahounds to play it outside of Steam, you still need a launcher to be installed and authenticate your download.You can't install it without internet, like with GOG offline installers.

That expression 'behemoth of drm software' refers to how Steam is, it seems to me, trying to monopolize the online software market. Not only with games but also with other kinds of softwares like video editors, image editors, game engines and so on. This is kinda scary to me if it keeps following this path.

Imagine a world where you can only download and install your video editors, image editors and so on through Steam-like launchers to authenticate your purchase. This is a nightmare for software preservation in my humble opinion.

With GOG games I use only offline installers and lgogdownloader (which is really handy for fast downloads).
And I agree with you, this drm situation is just the tip. User/Consumer freedom and true ownership of everything they buy is at serious risk.

I'd like to add that between single-player and MMO, there is a large category of smaller scope (ie, say less than 10 players) multiplayer experiences that can feasibly be drm-free as well.

Culturally, we're conditioned to view to those experiences as gated online-only, but there is not practical reason why this needs to be so.

I think AAA games were going to go in that direction no matter what, but Steam was a major helper in two ways:
- It legitimized/normalized online drm with the mainstream (would have been a much harder sale if that had been a fragmented experience across dozens of publishers rather than a centralized experience from a single vendor)
- It pushed a lot indie devs (who have more limited resources to fully develop features like multiplayer themselves) toward that model as well

So while not the only cause, Steam was/is a major factor and for that reason, I would not throw them any money out of general principle.

That's true. "We" are so used to the idea of centralization of services that "we" forget that descentralization is also an alternative, even for mmos. Hard to think that any big company would do something like this though. Through their own community, share mirrors of their servers and their code for personalization. A truly FLOSS MMO with enough dissemination to reach thousands of players.

At least, I don't know any.

The way that Steam did that is the problem. True too. Specially for indie devs. In the online department and singleplayer alike.

I remember asking an indie developer if he would bring his game here, to which I received a disappointing answer:
"I cannot strive for something whose risk is greater than the likely return." - (paraphrased)
Can't blame him.

That's the thing I don't understand, even if it act like a DRM (because of the online authentication) Denuvo is technically an anti-tamper, so if the game is protected then that include the base game and all its potential DLCs, so why need to create one specifically for "DLCs" ?

Unless it's in the idea to protect DLCs for games who didn't use Denuvo originally.