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Denuvo DRM Challenges Game Crackers
jones_supa writes Now that the PC gaming community has grown very large, it has become only a matter of hours before the copy protection of a major AAA title is cracked and put up for download after its official release, or sometimes, even before. However, it looks like CI Games is having great luck with its recently launched next-gen video game known as Lords of the Fallen, as its PC DRM still remains uncracked now after 3 days of release. The DRM solution that the game uses comes from a copyright protection company known as Denuvo, and it is apparently the same one that has been used in FIFA 15, which is also yet uncracked. While this DRM has kept the game from being pirated until now, it has also been speculated that this solution is supposedly the main cause behind several in-game bugs and crashes that are affecting users' gameplay experience. To improve stability, the developer is working on a patch that is aimed at fixing all performance issues. It remains officially unconfirmed if the new DRM solution is really causing all the glitches.
Since years the hacker communities have raced to hack DRMs, and since even before DRM had that name it was that kind of `protection' that harmed the gaming experience of people who do pay for their software. EA should grow up and realise DRM is not harming sales; they are harming their customers. Of course we know EA doesn't care given that they like to harm their game devs as well as their own games as well. Join the boycott of these fools.
Why they continue to bother? If DRM is broken so quickly and so easily for the vast majority of games, why would you use it? Especially if it will make the game worse by introducing glitches and annoying performance issues?
P.S. I'd be willing to bet that they crack Lords of the Fallen within the next week.
-1 Comment Contains Portal Reference
I always assumed that the reason most DRM was cracked so quickly was because it was the result of contributions from the game developers. DRM is a marketing technique, not an anti-piracy measure - like all the Apple "leaks". After all, more exposure = more sales. Microsoft has taken the approach for over a decade that it's better for people to use pirated Windows than an alternative OS.
As a long time PC gamer (since the mid 80s) who has never owned a console, I've always bought my games. I LIKE having the box and the CD, and I have no issue paying for something that brings me hours upon hours of entertainment.
In the rare cases where DRM breaks the game (only seen it once personally), I just brought it back to the store.
Maybe nobody cared enough about the game, and this is just a new way to market the game. Regardless of how the "challenge" goes, they'll get lots of press out of it.
Don't buy, don't play and don't pirate games that use such draconian DRM.
A title hasn't been cracked for 3 days and made it to slashdot in that time.
that the biggest part of their entertainment value is in cracking the DRM.
Par is actually a few months.
Let me know if this Denuvo DRM remains uncracked for as long as Spiro: Year of the Dragon, which had various traps to detect incomplete cracks, and delay the crackers for the initial wave of sales to be completed.
... the only reason that it's not been cracked yet may be because of apathy.... more specifically, it isn't popular enough yet, or possibly not good enough to have warranted the attention of enough crackers to have made a working crack by this point. This story being on a tech journal might increase awareness slightly in that regard, and could conceivably act as an impetus that causes a crack to appear sooner rather than later, but I wouldn't suggest that is a particularly probable outcome, only that it is well within the realm of possibility.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
What do you think, will we at some point get a "Hackintosh edition" of PS4 or Xbox One, as they are based on PC hardware? Either run the game console OS on generic PC hardware, or the other way around: run a custom OS inside the game console.
The PC versions also crashes ALL THE TIME. It's so prevalent that you can see it crashing in things like rev3games first stream, being mentioned in reviews all over the place, etc. Only for the PC version from what I can tell.
I'm sure it's completely unrelated.
with the latest parameters for the Super Snapshot V5?
Mostly random stuff.
Without Bennett's insight I don't know what to think about this news.
People should only buy DRM-free games from companies like GOG that don't allow DRM in their store.
That's the only way to end the DRM problem. Put your dollars/euros/yen/rubles where you mouth is. You have to make DRM-free profitable, and DRM-encumbered unprofitable.
3 days you say – oh noes.
Let's add some moral outrage at maybe DRM involved in buggy behavior.
I am against DRM in general, but by the same token I'm not one to encourage other people to break it.
Jones_Supa gets an article posted, but perhaps is really trying to motivate the community to open this cookie-jar for him. Hidden agenda much?
Letter To Iran
How is three days worth an article? Can't anyone remember that StarForce kept Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory uncracked for over 400 days?
I'm curious to know what the process is for cracking a game - what do crackers usually have to do to find what the game is requiring for activation? Anyone out there with experience that would care to enlighten myself and other interested readers?
I wish people would stop saying 'community' when they mean 'market'.
Because now it's only a game for not the target audience intended (mass market)
- just for the some who bought it because they buy every Fifa game and win the World Championship in under two days, or now the difficulty level will be more hardcore (your team crashed)
- the crackers that have something very interesting to bang their heads on
The game misses marketing effect of a good working crack, that will drive the starting sales, well and what I read strike the good working.
So to conclude, warez and crackz are really a very good marketing strategy. And that game has nothing of it just the drawbacks. I would be interested in a sales graph showing sales of cracked games vs. resilient games. Very Hard DRM seems not to be a good investment, a medium hard cheap DRM is good, because totally without DRM would look like it's worth nothing.
Example for Crackz, Keyz, Warez == good marketing
If Windows 8.1 would be crackable the percentage of Windows7 would have decreased more. Answer yourself how Microsoft gained that WindowsXP dominance ? Well because the marketing guys at MS weren't such lunatics to kill the infamous "MSDN-Gold-Key" in over 7 years of it's existence! And don't tell me that they couldn't they just don't wanted to. But when Vista had adaption problems and win7 was on the verge, they kill the alternative. Fueling the legitimite used Software-License trading (which is legal in the EU).
I've been against DRM for years... the EFF has a good website on it so I won't go into all the specifics, if you're interested, read it here: https://www.eff.org/issues/drm It has been proven time and again that if manufacturers would sell their products at a reasonable rather than inflated price, people would buy in vast numbers. All DRM does is piss off your customers. When you buy a product, you want to be able to do with it what you wish. Telling customers the solution to a broken Blu-ray is to buy another is unacceptable. As an aside, I read recently where the MPAA is banning Google Glasses from their theaters to stop piracy. Like people who want to view a movie at home would be interested in viewing a Google Glass recording of that movie on their 60 inch Plasma with Dolby surround sound. If they do, it's because they're extreme fans of that movie and are going to buy it anyway.
I just looked online to see if there really was no crack for this title. No interest in playing the game mind you... free or not.
It has been cracked.
What they're saying is that in its cracked form it still has the crashes and bugs that the game has normally. They are suggesting that they are working on a more comprehensive crack that strips out the DRM completely enough that it not only permits game play but also improves it beyond what paying customers enjoy.
Also... nothing new. I've downloaded cracks for a lot of games that I bought because the DRM was so offensive that the only way to enjoy the game was to use the crack to strip the DRM off.
Anywho. DRM defeated. First law of computer security wins again.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
I don't pirate - I can afford to buy more games than I have time to play. My dedicated gaming PC does not have any of my work tools, so it is vanilla Win7 machine with absolutely nothing out of ordinary. Yet in the recent years I have been tripped by DRM more than once. Two times it was game-breaking bad.
Considering that average gamer is 30s-something with plenty of disposable income, why is gaming industry prioritizes stopping pirates over increasing legitimate sales? Even if it was possible to somehow stop piracy, do they really think it would meaningfully increase sales? People who buy games, and people who pirate games are not the same group of people!
when it's on sale for $5 bucks on Steam :). Seriously. I haven't bought a game for more than $10 bucks in years (Last one was Street Fighter x Tekken, they got $20 outa me). I've heard some devs say the trend worries them cause guys like me just wait for the sales...
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I stopped buying DRMed products after purchasing Unreal Tournament 2004 a decade ago. That game had two releases: the normal release (7 CDs) or a special collectors edition that shipped on a DVD and came with a ton of bonuses. This was one of the first big commercial titles to ship on DVD instead, and was supposed to be a super simple install process. The game was supposed to install faster, and no disc swapping during install! Clean and simple, right?
Well, the DRM that existed on the DVD version was absolutely broken. After a few hundred (maybe even a few thousand?) of us went to the Epic forums to bitch about the issue, they finally admitted that the errors occurring during install were related to the DRM, a bug which didn't exist in the CD copy. Yes, that's right. Only those of us that paid the premium to purchase the collectors addition were screwed in our asses due to the DRM.
After a few days, there was no fix, so a buddy of mine brought over a pirated copy he downloaded of the 'net, so I could play the game.
The game was still mass pirated. Those of us who legitimately purchased it were totally screwed over. This really helped the company, so I've yet to purchase any more of their games on disc since then, and never again will.
I give it 3 more days before cracked.
and it is apparently the same one that has been used in FIFA 15
The sort of people who have to have a new soccer or football game every year probably don't care about DRM anyways. Most of them are shelling out the money for a new version every year anyway.
The idea that bitchy DRM is what you need to make money is silly. The bitchier the DRM, the more it costs you in terms of implementation and support and, guess what, it turns out that a great many of those pirates just won't buy your game, they don't want it for anything more than free.
You can see some good examples in the audio industry, which has some really bitchy DRM. Like take Steinberg Cubase and Cakewalk Sonar. These are two of the long time DAWs, both dating back to the DOS days. Both still make money, both are still in active development. Cubase uses super retarded DRM. A dongle that Steinberg bought and customized (syncrosoft, now called Elicenser) that is checked when you do anything. Seriously like opening menus has checks to the dongle. Sonar has no DRM effectively. You need a serial and an activation code, but the activation code is per serial, not per computer. It is just so you register your product with CW. The serial and code don't change and it doesn't phone home. Yet despite that weak DRM, Sonar continues to be developed and sold.
Or in audio samples. The big name in virtual instruments is Native Instruments, their program Kontakt being the king of sampling. They have some fairly weaksauce DRM on their products. A challenge/response kind of thing that is cracked and pirated versions abound. Despite that, they make lots of money and are the unquestioned top of the sampling game. Then you look at EastWest who uses their own custom software with an iLok dongle because of evil pirates. They are too small for anyone to care about cracking. So no piracy, but they are tiny, a fraction of NI's size and profits.
Really all bitchy DRM does is increase the cost on the developer. You end up spending more programmer time implementing it, more QA time making sure it works, and more support time helping people when it doesn't. There's no good evidence showing it increases sales. Remember that decreasing piracy is not the same as increasing sales. You can drop piracy to zero and yet discover you get little to no extra sales because the people who were pirating were only doing so because it was free, and have no interest in paying for it.
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"The TPP would even elevate individual foreign firms to equal status with sovereign nations, empowering them to privately enforce new rights and privileges, provided by the pact, by dragging governments to foreign tribunals to challenge public interest policies that they claim frustrate their expectations." ref
Lords of the Fallen is performing so badly at retail, I am thinking the developer wishes there was no DRM. Then at least the developer could blame those damn PC pirates--taking all the game sales. Instead the developer just has to the face the fact the spent years creating a crapping game that no one is going to play. Heck at least if it had been pirated--some one would have enjoyed the effort put forth.
They finally figure out how to mitigate aimbots and wall hacks.
Wait, is this one of those threads where "hackers" mod hardware and "crackers" break into remote computers or one where "hackers" break into remote computers and "crackers" break copy protection?
They are unhacked because the protection scheme is brand new. A couple of titles down and hackers will have tools and understanding for this, so it'll only take a couple of days. It's been the same with pretty much every new DRM (except the really, really bad ones, that had some major holes easily usable and were cracked in hours)
The article is BS. It's cracked already.
But show me a 10 foot wall, someone will make an 11 foot ladder. the ps3 was basically left alone because you could toss linux on it. once that feature was removed it was blown wide open,
History repeats itself. :)
Me, I'm trying to get my games from gog.com
I apologize for the lack of a signature.
I agree that games are expensive. However, I have a job so I can afford $60. That having been said, I think you might find $60 a bargain compared to other forms of entertainment. I don't go to the movies anymore because I built myself a little home theater. Granted that, probably, cost me more than all the movies I would have gone to. But, there are other benefits. But, I digress.. My point is that a movie is $10-15 for the ticket (ignoring any popcorn or soda you might buy) for a movie that is roughly 2 hours. A video game, you tend to get at least 20 hours out of it. I like to play RPGs, so I tend to get closer to 40-60 hours. If you do the math on a dollar-cost per-hour, video games aren't looking so bad.
This is from the same team that made SecuROM (says so right on their website) so I wouldn't be surprised if it is what is causing the glitches.
wow
Man, I really wanted to play this game, but no way am I going to buy it after all the meh reviews. When this game fails, AND no one was able to pirate it, FOREVER. Maybe they'll finally figure it out... only good games make money. Pirates usually spend as much money as they can on games and things, not being able to pirate a game, doesn't magically create money in a pirate's bank account to buy the game. Honestly, I think piracy of good games really helps spread the word, and also helps pave the way for more profitable sequels.
Ah well, hopefully they will come out with a crack some day, but it's been a couple weeks now. *sigh*
hasn't been cracked mainly because crackers usually take a while to crack a new DRM scheme. After it's initially cracked, same scheme applied to other games has severe diminishing returns and is cracked very rapidly.