Broadly speaking, the price of games for console and PC is more or less established, and in the case of the PC, the new triple A titles that are launched are priced at 59.90 or even 69.90 euros. However, in the past the price was much lower, and one of the reasons why they go up in price is because of the increasingly complex anti-piracy systems that are implemented with them. In this article we are going to tell you how much it costs to implement one of the most popular anti-piracy systems , Denuvo , and how its cost impacts what users pay for games.
Denuvo is one of the most widely used anti-piracy systems in games, and one that has given a lot to talk about. It was shown at the time that games with Denuvo had an impact on the performance of the title, and it was also shown that on some occasions the games were hacked on day 1 despite having it, while on other occasions it has not been possible to crack the game thanks to it. Be it one way or another, developers who decide to implement Denuvo in their games must assume an additional cost that we are going to summarize below.
How much does it cost to implement Denuvo anti-piracy in games?
Some time ago an official document was leaked whereby Crytek agreed with Denuvo to implement its anti-piracy system in Crysis Remastered and Crysis 3 Remastered, a document in which you can clearly see what developers pay to implement this system.
From the information in said document, we extract the following costs as a summary:
- 140,000 euros for the first 12 months of protection.
- 2,000 additional euros for each month of protection from the first year.
- 60,000 additional euros for products that receive 500,000 activations in 30 days.
- 0.40 euros for each unique activation on the WeGame platform.
- 10,000 euros extra for each digital platform on which the game is published.
This means that if for example a developer releases a new game with Denuvo anti-piracy protection and it comes out on Epic Games and Steam, and the game is successful and sells more than 500,000 units during the first 30 days after launch, they would cost 220,000 euros , nothing more and nothing less, and even if the game did not sell 500,000 units in the first month, the cost would be 160,000 euros.
If we assume that we are talking about a triple A game that sells 500,000 units in the first month (for reference, for example, God of War on PS4 sold 5 million units in its first month after launch) and that has a cost of 59.90 euros for buyers, we are talking about an income of about 30 million, so those 220,000 euros do not seem too much in comparison. However, keep in mind that not all games have the success of God of War (which is also on the console, not on the PC).
Also, Denuvo prices have gone up quite a bit of late; According to reports, in the past a triple A game that sold more than 500,000 units had a cost of 100,000 flat euros, while if it sold less the cost was 50,000 euros. For Indie games that sold less than 100,000 units, the cost was 10,000 euros.
How is the price of PC games increased?
Before we have talked about what a developer “earns” from the sales of a game, but the income is not equal to the benefits because obviously, in addition to Denuvo’s anti-piracy system, they have development costs, such as payment of licenses, physical material and of course the salaries of the workers. To put this in perspective, Grand Theft Auto V had a development cost of $ 137 million and they also invested $ 128 million more in marketing, bringing its total cost to $ 265 million.
Another example is the famous Cyberpunk 2077, of which there is still no data on its marketing investment but it is known that it has cost more than 121 million dollars to develop it. What is obvious is that games are becoming more complex and better graphically, and their cost is increasing so that this, added to the additional costs of marketing and of course anti-piracy systems and coupled with inflation makes PC games are becoming more and more expensive, and although right now the stipulated “normal” price is about 60 euros for PC, it will inevitably end up rising more.
