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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.
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.
Microsoft has taken the approach for over a decade that it's better for people to use pirated Windows than an alternative OS.
AFAIK Windows 8's WGA hasn't been cracked yet. We don't have a "Daz Loader" like we have for Windows 7. All the pirate activation solutions for Win8 are some kind of KMS (Key Management Server) running inside virtual machine or a similar workaround solution.
All in all, I would say that these days some really sophisticated copy protections can be engineered, such as WGA or SonyPS3 (which took very long time to crack). Whether this is a good or bad thing, I'm not sure. The times when I have had to activate Microsoft products over phone while entering the long-ass string of numbers using the phone number pad, I would say that it's a bad thing.
It's interesting you should observe that, because in the end, It's the bottom line that allows game companies to pay their developers to continue to develop more titles, and what the actual customer experience is going to be is a direct reflection of how many titles they actually sold, not necessarily what people think of the experience afterward. Customer experience only impacts them to the extent that it might theoretically influence future purchases from such customers, but as you've observed, DRM isn't particularly harmful to sales in the first place, so any bad customer experience from it isn't actually giving such game companies sufficient disincentive to stop them from continuing to use it.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I've been out of the scene for a while, but asking around, Denuvo == Sony DADC/SecuROM peeps. It's just the new version of SuckuROM. Yawn.
They're quite proud of how twitchy their protection is. Bugs in this case are indeed often due to the protection hooks and false-positives, but it sounds like this game is also unfinished and buggy. I guess that's one way to complicate testing.
There's a tool ready for DNV, back from FIFA 14 (took almost 2 months for RLD to develop the tools). FIFA 15 is probably just being tested. My guess is that nobody really cares until something major's done, and no, "oh look another football game" isn't major. Then it'll be a race between the big-time groups, but my money's on RLD.
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.
One classic method for weak protections like CD keys etc. looks something like this (details can vary heavily based on personal preference though):
1) Deliberately put in a bad key to get an error message like "Sorry, the CD key you entered is invalid. Please check the key and try again.".
2) Find that string in the executable (with e.g. a hex editor) or the in-memory image (with a debugger).
3) Search the executable for pointers to the string (this usually means applying an offset for the base of the executable in virtual memory) or set a read watchpoint on it with the debugger to find the "bad key" subroutine.
4) Search for jumps/calls to the bad key subroutine (or follow the stack back if using a debugger) to find the key check subroutine.
5) Read the key check subroutine to find the conditional jump that decides whether the key is valid or not.
6) Depending on which way the condition is set up, either change the jump to an unconditional jump or change it to a NOP (or if you're extra-lazy, reverse the condition of the jump, which breaks valid keys)
As "verification" techniques become more complex and specialized, so do the reverse-engineering techniques. The fundamental approach is to figure out what the developer has done to break the program, and then fix it, iterating and testing as necessary to find all the places where they broke it.
Let me know when it's on sale for $5 bucks on Steam :).
Actually you can use steamalerts.com for that. It allows you to set an arbitrary price point for a game and when it goes under that, you receive an e-mail notification.