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Pirates Finding It Harder To Crack New PC Games (engadget.com)
schnell writes: Engadget reports that a few recent top-tier video game releases using updated DRM technology have gone uncracked for more than a month and left DRM hackers stymied thus far. The games FIFA 16 and Just Cause 3, using an updated DRM system called Denuvo, have thus far frustrated experienced Chinese crackers' best efforts far longer than the usual 1-2 weeks it takes for most games to be cracked. Although the article is light on technical details about what makes the new DRM system harder to defeat, it does note that "Based on the current pace of encryption tech, 'in two years time I'm afraid there will be no free games to play in the world,' said one forlorn pirate."
They are only gaining some critical time at launch
My other signature is a car
... because then the studios won't have a boogie man to blame when their crappy game doesn't sell.
Studio Exec: Oh noes, our awesome game isn't selling because people are pirating it instead.
Random Underling: Sir, no one has cracked our DRM yet....
Studio Exec: Oh shit, hurry up and leak a crack before the shareholders notice our 80 million dollar game sucks
Metal Gear Solid V.
Took forever to get a crack out, and when a crack did come out by 3DM it took a few more days for a version 2 to be playable. Only when you set your timezone to a chinese one were you able to play. Sometimes on a specific set of hardware you needed a new crack made. You had to skip certain chapters of the game because they crashed.
And after 5 days or so? Music started playing. Shifty crack, even in the pirate world, never fully working scene release even to this day.
As a pirate, I can only salute the guys who made Denuvo.
Think constantly morphing executable in memory with thousands of triggers built into the game to crash or cause issues when a certain check fails.
Even if they delay the piracy of a title for a month, they've won. They gain additional revenue from sales if nothing else.
Don't know why parent was modded down so much. He/she should be modded up.
I don't agree with DRM, but the proper response to DRM'd games (if you don't believe in DRM) is simply not to buy them. It's not to steal them.
Probably because he sounds like a "tough on crime" advocate. Putting marijuana users in jail was bad enough. If you put every pirate in jail, then half of the US would be in jail right now. I'm not sure how you'd fund that.
"OMG, The Horror of expecting to be able to run a game I've paid for, but the DRM mess up so I can't and have to rely on third party cracks to get it to run"
- Don't do what I do, it's probably not healthy nor safe. -
'in two years time I'm afraid there will be no free games to play in the world,'
There are tons of free games.
Many games studios open up there engines to be used by indy game makers and you can find make great games to play tho not cutting edge on the graphics.
Tremulous - tremulous.net
Renegade X - renegade-x.com
Stream has a ton of free to play games just check out there website (Team Fortress 2, Dota 2, Warframe)
Play real free games if you don't want to buy not cracked games.
Privately, of course.
... greedy, selfish, irresponsible and abusive corporate suits are just thieves producing a lot of over-priced and under-supported crap. These corporations couldn't compete in a free market, so they have to corrupt and control their way to domination.
Perfect partners for FIFA, then.
Requires the stolen object to be missing.
Pirating is copyright infringement. Why does the government even protect copyright?
Many people would rather live in a world without copyright.
In that sense I think anarchy would be great. Those who want copyright can live in a city where those monopolies are protected.
Thank you, Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden and so many others, for courageously defending humanity, my freedom and more!
Probably because he sounds like a "tough on crime" advocate. Putting marijuana users in jail was bad enough. If you put every pirate in jail, then half of the US would be in jail right now. I'm not sure how you'd fund that.
The problem is how you define "pirate".
Personally, I believe that everyone should pay for the content that is consumed be it a game, video, music, digital book, etc. Where I disagree over DRM is a combination of fair use and public rights. The DRM laws, as they stand today, are in direct conflict with the fair use doctrine and they prevent creations from becoming part of the public domain when abandoned. Under the current law, anyone bypassing DRM for these otherwise legal uses would still be branded a "pirate".
So, while I agree with the stance that crime should not pay, I can't, in good conscience, agree with the "tough on crime" stance given the current bad laws.
Cracked games were a thing back at the schoolyard, when we could barely afford the blank floppies to copy the 12 discs of "Another world" or so, Fiddling with cracks and P2P to download stuff isn't simply worth the time anymore when after a few weeks, you can get the game at a decent discount at Steam.
bickerdyke
Except that most pirates are nothing like Jessie James. In fact, most evidence i have seen, both from studies and from my own experience is that the same teen and 20something pirating games 20 years ago is paying top dollar today now that he has a job and less time to play games.
In fact, the only people I have seen continueing to pirate much past that point have been both poor and physicaly disabled. Leaving them no extra money but plenty of time to consume volumes and volumes of media.
So basically.... as far as I can tell very little money is lost to piracy because anyone who can afford the game and wants to play it buys it. The only people who pirate it are the ones who wouldn't have otherwise bought it, generally because they couldn't afford to anyway.
So I can't imagine this issue actually matters at all, since the net result of it being different is almost 0.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
That article sounds suspiciously like an advertisement for Denuvo. Low content, high keywords, no research...
No, stealing stuff is leftist, unless you're stealing land out West to graze your cattle for free. Then it's divinely inspired patriotism.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I raise you a blog post by the head of an actual game development company: http://www.lar.net/2012/01/02/...
Donate free food here
If companies want to glorify pirates, then let's all pirate Sid Meier's Pirates, Pirates of the Caribbean, Jake and the Never Land Pirates, and One Piece.
Consider for a moment that those of use who are doing the cracking have already bought the game. It's not about piracy or theft for some of us, it's a puzzle. Since becoming a Dad I haven't had anywhere near enough time to be familiar with this scene, but from what I remember it can be extremely engrossing. Piracy is a byproduct of cracking, not the otherway around.
Just wait for the sales and you can get that $60 game for $14 (or less). Unless you play on a console, in which case you don't care because your parents are paying for the games anyway.
Steam, GOG and others have made gaming reasonable enough for anyone.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I believe that everyone should pay for the content that is consumed be it a game, video, music, digital book, etc.
Then who should pay when works are forced on me, such as a roommate blaring the TV or a store playing popular music? And who should pay when William Shakespeare's plays are performed?
and they prevent creations from becoming part of the public domain when abandoned
Copyright term extension does a fine job of that by itself, thank you very much.
don't count abandonware / people who don't re buy software (in our eye you are a Thieve for not re buying the game that comes with dosbox) when you use your old cdrom and dosbox.
It could also be that these aren't exactly A-list games (regardless of how much they might want to hype up "Just Case 3"), so there are less people working on a crack.
Piracy getting harder? That's not a problem.
Videogame abundance and the mass-move towards indie-development makes pirating obsolete anyway.
I get all my Games for 10 Euros or less out of the bargain bin. The occasional totally DRM-free 15 Euro download for Shadowrun Hong Kong (Kickstarter Project / Indie Game) adds to that. I'm OK giving 15 Euros for a very neat DRM-free game to an indie studio. It's still dirt-cheap.
Currently I'm playing Deus Ex:Human Revolution for XBox 360. Cost me 9.99 for an original mint copy of the directory cut special edition. Awesome game, pricepoint is a steal.
No one needs piracy or the triple-a publishers in a time where Gamedevs are going indie left, right and center (Hideo Kojima anyone?) and games drop hard off the 60 dollar benchmark as soon as they're published on non-current gen platforms or mobile or the novelty effect has worn off.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
The local Microsoft store generously donated an XBox 360 to our school's charity raffle, probably 6 months after the XBox One was released.
We didn't own any gaming system at all, and my son immediately griped that there would be "no games because its old". The day after we got the console, we went to a local pawn shop and bought 5 games for $30, all of which played just fine. I think we might be up to about 15 games now, and I'd doubt that even with the 2 games my son has bought new, we're out more than $150 on games.
I think with consoles, this is the way to do it -- there are so many used games for the previous model that if you stay just slightly behind whatever's current, you have an endless supply of cheap games.
Maybe this is a problem for someone who's really into gaming, wants the latest and greatest, but honestly, for an 11 year old boy (and a 49 year old man...) I have a hard time understanding what you're missing on a brand new console for the extra money.
Copyright infringement is NOT theft. Read the legal definition of theft:
"n. the generic term for all crimes in which a person intentionally and fraudulently takes personal property of another without permission or consent and with the intent to convert it to the taker's use (including potential sale)."
To be the legal definition of theft, you must remove the item from the person's possession. That is why legally, it is called copyright infringement instead of "petty theft" or "grand theft" which would be the charges if it met that legal definition. So, for the hard of understanding, if I come and take your physical copy of your software without your permission, depriving you of its use, then it is theft; if I make a copy of your software, with or without your permission, but, do not deprive you of its use, then it is copyright infringement. Many companies have tried to make a case that copyright infringement is theft to the courts and they have failed to convince even one court that it is theft. Which is why they cannot use the term theft when talking about pirates because that is libel or slander (depending on the medium) as they would be accusing them of a crime they did not commit.
As far as the lost sales, the RIAA and MPAA's own studies showed that piracy does not typically hurt profits. Often the most pirated titles are also the highest grossing titles and the most prolific pirates are also their highest paying customers. There are exceptions such as bad movies, music and software. Once people realize how horrible something is, they're not going to pay money for it. Thanks to the internet, it is much harder to pedal garbage and make a profit. Between the internet and Germany changing their tax laws, it broke Ewe Bowl's business model. He couldn't make a profit on crap movies anymore so he went into the lawsuit business (extortion) instead.
"Be particularly skeptical when presented with evidence confirming what you already believe." -
It's possible to acquire a large number of games that are not encumbered with DRM - between free games, re-releases on sites like gog.com, small developers that can't afford DRM technologies, sensible developers that understand economics and realise DRM doesn't help their overall revenue and ethical developers that choose not to fuck over their customers, there is a tremendous amount of choice available.
lol I think 2005 was about when I started getting most of my games through steam. However, I still go to stores and see box software and games, so I assume someone buys it and....I dunno, do they still do that?
I thought the rage now was to sell the DVD with only partial content so an internet connection is required anyway. The DVD is essentially little more than a partial installer cache to speed up the install.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Nah, if you wanted to be the ultimate tyrant, you'd make The People fund their own oppression.
I used to crack my legally purchased games to avoid DRM, and I won't argue there aren't other fringe cases for cracking DRM, but let's not be dishonest to suggest that that's why these people are cracking DRM. The vast majority of it is for people to play games without paying for them, and that' s just not cool.
Nowadays the DRM I've encountered is much less annoying. Having to look up some code on a code wheel in order to play a game was bad enough - I had one game that would just stop in the middle of game play and give you a page, paragraph, sentence and word number to find in the manual. It didn't do it just once, just randomly during game play. I was ridiculous - and it negatively affected game play. But that's just not true anymore, that's not how modern DRM works.
I do have a problem with companies that don't consider long term rights, and I applaud all the programmers who've been able to keep old Nintendo, SEGA, and PS games alive through emulators and hacking, so I'm not suggesting these people should stop trying to crack DRM. But let's face it - the vast majority here are cracking games because people don't want to pay to play a game. This isn't stealing bread to feed your family, it's a f#@king game, and if one can afford the game console or the computer to play it, then one should pay for one's games.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
Ever since game devs started using Denuvo, I've refused to buy anything that uses it on the grounds that it unfairly punishes the paying end-user. The devteam behind Lords of the Fallen, which was one of the first games to use Denuvo, admitted that they were sacrificing large amounts of performance (as much as 10 to 15 percent framerate) in order to use it. There were also a lot of concerns from SSD users, because Denuvo uses up a ton of read/write operations due to constantly encrypting and decrypting files, putting far more stress on an SSD than a non-Denuvo game does.
If game developers are going to sacrifice performance and the potential for mod support to use the most draconian DRM they can find, I'm not going to be buying it.
Personal property includes IP, and why the courts use the terms "theft of IP" all the time. They don't turn around and look at the lawyers and say "nuh uh, you can't steal IP."
That said, the equating of copyright infringement to piracy is the poster child example for hyperbole.
I also think that DRM is anti-consumer, your RIAA and MPAA examples are the best examples. They spend millions of dollars on DRM - licenses to use DRM, DVD and BluRay players have to license and build the technology to decrypt, and who ultimately pays for all of that? The consumer... so the consumer legally buys some media (that includes a price for the DRM built in) and a player (that includes a price for decryption) and can't make a legal copy (device shift), or they move to a different country and buy a new player and their library will no longer play. All because they want to prevent people who wouldn't have paid otherwise anyway from making a copy. And the consumer is forced to pay for the technology restricting their rights. Then the millions these companies pay lawyers and all the millions of tax payer dollars they use going to court... it's all incredibly counterproductive.
That said, there's simply no excuse for copyright infringement in order to play a game without paying for it. None.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
Which is why they cannot use the term theft when talking about pirates because that is libel or slander (depending on the medium) as they would be accusing them of a crime they did not commit.
"Piracy" is the act of robbery or criminal violence at sea. Therefore, calling copyright infringers "pirates" is just as slanderous as calling them thieves.