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'Rime' Developer Keeps Promise, Removes Denuvo DRM After Game Gets Cracked (cinemablend.com)
An anonymous reader quotes CinemaBlend:
Tequila Works and Grey Box had previously announced that the DRM for the PC version of Rime would be removed if it were cracked. Well, in just five days the DRM was cracked and a cracked version of the game was made available online. So, now the DRM will be removed...
Five days after the PC launch of Rime, the cracking scene managed to get into the executable and spill all of its guts, removing the DRM and putting the exe back together so it could be distributed across the usual sites. One of the things noted by the cracker was that he found Denuvo executing hundreds of triggers a second, which caused major slowdown in the performance of Rime on PC. This form of digital rights management resulted in every legitimate customer having to deal with a lot of slowdown and performance hiccups... The sad reality was that those who pirated Rime and used the cracked file essentially gained access to a game that had improved performance and frame-rates over those who actually paid for the game.
Five days after the PC launch of Rime, the cracking scene managed to get into the executable and spill all of its guts, removing the DRM and putting the exe back together so it could be distributed across the usual sites. One of the things noted by the cracker was that he found Denuvo executing hundreds of triggers a second, which caused major slowdown in the performance of Rime on PC. This form of digital rights management resulted in every legitimate customer having to deal with a lot of slowdown and performance hiccups... The sad reality was that those who pirated Rime and used the cracked file essentially gained access to a game that had improved performance and frame-rates over those who actually paid for the game.
Denuvo is dead! Long Live Denuvo!
Tekken 7 was cracked before release. It's private you can't have it. The guy bought the game and cracked it to play early, not for piracy.
Sometimes there is Reason with the Rime
Wait a week till DRM is cracked, get a better version of the game. Got it.
What does DRM? It's unknown for me.
Digital restrictions management is so much more appropriate.
I remember a certain audio editing program that used to be a standard that actually came with its own virtual machine that ran some of its code which was a bastardized version of x86 assembler code, which was reverse engineered and "cleaned up" by crackers. The net result was that that cracked code, that would now run on the x86 CPU rather than the (poorly written) virtual machine was actually faster and more stable than the DRMified code.
I also remember quite a few legitimate users who cracked their legitimately bought software because it improved performance and stability...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Hello Mr Stallman.
Eradicating world hunger isn't entertaining enough. Maybe if you could innovate a way to gamify charity then people would be willing to fund your charity.
What they actually said was "we will be replacing the current build of RiME with one that does not contain Denuvo".
This is absolutely NOT the same as saying what they will replace it with will be DRM-free.
Question:
Was the cost of adding and then removing that DRM really worth the "extra" sales (even if fabricated statistical anomalies) that it supposedly makes possible?
I'm guessing not.
The problem with DRM is not "wanting to protect our sales". It's that it is universally, always, completely counterproductive.
Performance concerns aside, just the hassle associated with licensing that stuff must surely be more than any potential lost sales from piracy if it only buys you a week of grace. Pirates aren't paying for the game on Day rather than wait five days because it has DRM. They're getting the game when it becomes available on the pirate channels.
I really can't think that any cost-benefit analysis of this could possibly show an advantage.
I'm going to go pirate this tonight. Fuck them for including the malware in the first place.
Game blows and i want my money back.
Seems unlikely without epic fails involving police states, so I'll pass and choose to play games instead. Take your virtue signaling ass back to your SJW safespace.
DRM is pure insanity. Insanity is often defined by doing the same exact thing and expecting a different result.
Will they ever learn? DRM is not useful. It does not protect your content. It annoys your legitimate users, and does ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to curtail, hinder, or even discourage piracy. Hell, I'm going to go as far as to say it ENCOURAGES PIRACY. Those cracker dude, they just love a challenge. Nothing to crack? Borrringgg..
In any other industry, something that fails to perform it's claimed function is often called fraud, snakeoil, a ripoff.
Does Denuvo's creator guarantee this crap is going to work? Why do publishers keep falling for this snakeoil? DRM has NEVER worked, not even once. EVER.
Are they really that stupid?
On Slashdot, the majority sentiment seems to be that apps should not have DRM at all -- regarding DRM as a "defect" ("defective by design"). Indeed, this particular story mentions that having DRM caused some slowdown or hiccups of a game.
As a consumer, I dislike DRM as much as the next guy, but does anyone really think that triple-A rated games would sell anywhere near their typical levels if DRM were not used ?! No way !
I do believe the studies which conclude that widespread free music/movie sharing (e.g., YouTube) has actually increase music/movie purchases (e.g., so that people could get higher-quality versions). But, I don't think the same dynamic is significant for applications/games. If someone is crazy enough to run a cracked application on their computer (natively, not in a VM), they're definitely not going to ever pay for the application. Part of the value of paying is some assurance that the application is not serving the wishes of hackers (Sony rootkits and other DRM schemes notwithstanding).
Did they make a mistake in how they implicated Denuvo? I heard it is a pretty tricky beast to crack, I was following Syberia 3 and heard the only reason the game got cracked eventfully was that it was not implemented correctly.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
It manages the OWNERS rights, not YOURS.
Copy protection.
"Digital Rights Management" sounds so.. PC.. Go listen up some George Carlin on language.
According to a RiME developer it "ensures the best gaming experience for RiME players"
https://i.redd.it/7uf386xpkwzy...
To all the shitheads that "DRM is not useful boohoo mommy I want free gamez"
Take any AAA title
See how much it sells on consoles
See how little sells on computers
Find a mirror and spit on ur fugly face
Do you just speak in buzzwords you heard on the Internet?
World hunger is just a bunch of victims of circumstances who don't wish to change for whatever reason.
It's really irrelevant to mention, those game companies only make that money because they make games, not food or delivery service.
Yeah, I came up with a good one if you check the 2nd thread. You might have to lower your threshold cuz I got no karma.
Copy protection is a subset of DRM. DRM also restricts how you can use the media, not just whether you can copy it.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
you can in fact get a complete copy of all ps4 games...its drm has not in fact been cracked and looks like no one cares for doing it , you deserve what you get with consoles as PC IS THE MASTER RACE
I don't fully buy your argument. Most games from the Windows 9X era and forward used to have a dialog where you could customize the input on any device, including joysticks and gamepads.
It was the influence of consoles coupled with Microsoft's push to XInput that really began to make games streamlined control-wise. This strengthened their position as people got used to the Xbox 360 controllers on PC. They got to sell hardware, developers would not bother with any other controllers and users got accustomed to the gamepads. The old lock-in at play again.
There are some good aspects to this, but it limits your controller inputs and forces people to use the controls in the way the developer dictates.
This is not progress; it is one step forward and two backwards. A better solution would be to make XInput able to handle any mappings from any controller and make this transparent to the game's being played. Today this requires third-party software emulation.
Paid reputation management activities- what we used to call psy-ops - where corporations offer disguised PR activities for clients like Denuvo -are in full flow in every forum where Denuvo is discussed at the moment.
Denuvo was created by notorious black-hat hackers - the old poacher turned gamekeeper trick. So Denuvo has its 'reputation' managed by a bunch of ammoral creatures who will use any PR trick to keep their services in use. And this company is now desperate, since the x64 tools whose lack meant Denuvo was originally hard to crack are now plentiful as dealing with Denuvo forced white-hat hackers to up their game, and learn better methods of reverse-engineering the root kits, ring 0 and VM methods used by Denuvo.
In partial response, Denuvo is conning publishers by lying about the DRM method, and stating that massively increasing Denuvo's queries per second will make it harder for crackers to defeat/remove. So Denuvo (in its latest version) is using incredible amounts of run-time resources, killing game performance on anything below a fast 4-core gaming PC. But Denuvo is increasing being used by indy casual gaming publishers whose customers have much weakers gaming systems- ruining the game for fans.
This is why major gaming sites claim not to see the issue with denuvo. They all test games on ultra high end Intel/Nvidia boxes, with 7700K overclocking Intel CPUs, and 1080TI Nvidia GPUs. On a title like RIME, Denuvo could be using 95% of the resources of such a box and still run well.
But the average customer of Rime probably games on a 2-core laptop with a modest GPU. For them the impact of current Denuvo is ruinous.
'Baldman', the hacker who remove Rime's DRM, has infinitely better coding skills than the game devs. He provides a terrifying technical breakdown of how the latest version of Denuvo works, like any good engineer. To remove the DRM, he had to monitor in exacting detail just how the DRM functioned. Yet as I type, paid reputation management personnel are flooding all forums discussing this with the "Baldman is a pirate so cannot be trusted" nonsense- doing what Denuvo pays for in the pathetic hope that Denuvo will continue to be used.
I prefer "Digital restricted media"
Smells like slashvertizement for a company that is trying to pick up sales from people who are concerned with online activation obsolescence. People who it spits on by only allowing legitimate customers a fair product when they no longer have anything to gain by screwing them.
Copy prevention
I suspect DRM costs them more money than it saves. People that will buy it will buy it, people that won't won't. Sure some people might be convinced to buy because of the DRM, but there will also be people like me who would have bought the game but don't, because of the DRM.
Since draconian always-on authentication BS like Steam and Windows Activation became an acceptable thing (Oh how times change), my purchase of games has dropped by over 90% compared to even the old securom days, where I'd check for a crack before buying the game.
I literally only buy games from GOG or indies that self-publish DRM-free through e.g. humblebundle nowadays because I don't want to worry about having an active internet connection for steam or denuvo or some shit.
I learned my lesson from things like Tribes and GFWL and anything else that relied on a third-party internet server: Don't buy them if you want to be able to play them in the future because there is no guarantee they won't support you after a few years.
And anyone thinking Valve will unlock their games for you if they ever fold and the steam service goes down is just delusional; You will just lose all of those games, and any request for help will just be met by smartasses telling you you are stupid to expect companies to support their game for more than 3 years