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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...
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'
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.
You're talking about Windows 8 here, my bet is no one had any interest in trying to crack that piece of shit.
Technically, what they care about is control of distribution, because in their (relatively tiny) minds, that equates directly to profit. Loss of control is likewise perceived as inevitably causing loss of profit. That they might make even more money with a less dickish business model is way outside their comfort zone, because all they understand is what always worked before.
So yes, they are analogs to the recording industry. Those legitimate customers who are harmed by the quest to control content distribution are acceptable collateral damage.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
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.)
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
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?
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 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.
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.
Because many game's sales over time tends to look like a logarithmic curve. Sales are stacked at the launch and drop dramatically after that, flattening into a long tail. My guess is they don't care about what happens after a few weeks, so long as they can maximize the profits during the initial sales period.
Still, from my perspective (as a game developer and player), it's not really worth it. Any sort of reasonably effective PC-based DRM is, by nature, going to be intrusive, because it's not built in as a seamless part of the platform (which is why fewer gamers mind the less intrusive DRM of console games or even Steam's DRM, IMO). I'm certainly not planning on releasing my game with any DRM, since I think that's a selling point for many players. Honestly, I'm more interested in the long tail anyhow, since my games have lower up-front development costs than big AAA games.
A DRM-based fight is really a no-win battle in the long run, so it seems pointless to fight such a war in the first place to me, especially 100% of the collateral damage is your paying customers. Just make peace with the fact that some people won't want to pay for the game. Instead, focus on building a community that wants to support your development efforts in order to encourage development of more of the games they like. You know... don't be jerks, don't be greedy, listen to your customers, and build quality products. Radical stuff, I know.
To be honest, one of the things that's baffled me over the years is how entertainment-focused companies and even entire industries can generate such hatred and loathing. You would think it wouldn't be so hard to have a favorable public opinion when your entire business is delivering entertainment products that people willingly spend their discretionary income on.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
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.
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