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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.
Because publishers care about money. They are the recording industry analogs in the gaming industry. They don't care about the artists (developers) or the art (games).
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
that the biggest part of their entertainment value is in cracking the DRM.
... 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'
The way I've heard it told is that companies don't care about having uncrackable DRM. What they want is DRM that won't be cracked during that initial sales rush that comes upon release of a new game. If the game's DRM is cracked a month or more after release that won't impact the sales in the way that having the DRM cracked in the first week would. That's why some companies have even removed DRM from games that have been out for some time. (Admittedly the games were out for years but still.)
In an extremely general sense:
Somewhere in the program the validation code will either pass or fail. This is done with a conditional branch instruction in the assembly. Crackers use a debugger to find where this branch is, then change it to an instruction that will always branch to the pass condition.
Of course there are countermeasures used, and sometimes crackers will be able to reverse-engineer the validation check to create a keygen, etc, but the general process is still to disassemble the executable and modify or inspect the validation check.
Not a sentence!
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.
'According to New Zealand's current Trade Minister, Tim Groser, full disclosure of what is being discussed would likely lead to "public debate on an ill-informed basis before the deal has been done"'
"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