'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.

Comments

By far not the first time

[Opportunist]

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...

Re:By far not the first time

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe this was Cubase, and the DRM in question was syncrosoft elicenser.

Re:By far not the first time

[sjames]

I soon discovered that cracking the game was more fun than playing it.

Re:By far not the first time

[TheRaven64]

Not sure about the more recent versions, but in the original Quake this was for portability. The developed the game on UNIX workstations (not sure if they were still using NeXT m68k machines then) and originally shipped it for x86, but this bytecode meant that the same mods worked on x86, PowerPC, and any other architecture that you wanted to run them on. I remember playing the Mac port of GLQuake and being very pleased to discover that all of the mods that I'd collected on DOS still worked fine (though the game did cache some generated geometry files in native byte order mode, so you got completely messed up rendering if you didn't delete them!).

Re:All car has always a backdoor, the 3rd or 5th d

[ChoGGi]

According to a RiME developer it "ensures the best gaming experience for RiME players"
https://i.redd.it/7uf386xpkwzy...