'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

Lesson learned

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait a week till DRM is cracked, get a better version of the game. Got it.

Can we stop calling it digital rights managment?

[Anonymous Coward]

Digital restrictions management is so much more appropriate.

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

[JaredOfEuropa]

It goes back further than that even. I remember some games that prompted you to enter "word x on page y" of the manual, which was printed on red paper to foil the photocopiers of those days. It was always nice if one could find a pirated copy somewhere so you wouldn't have to enter a word from the manual every time you started the game.

Just another example of that old inconvenient truth: DRM harms paying customers while doing very little to prevent piracy.

Re:By far not the first time

[Opportunist]

To be honest, that was actually what got me into breaking copy protection. If it wasn't so damn annoying, I probably wouldn't have bothered to learn assembler in my teen years and wouldn't be where I am today.

Yeah, DRM shaped my career... So who am I to complain about it?

Re:By far not the first time

[Dutch Gun]

There's no doubt that some sales are going to be lost to piracy, but it's just stupid to ruin the experience for your paying customers. Being a game development myself, and one who's put years of work into a self-funded indie game (and hopefully released soon), I'm sure it will be disheartening to see people passing it around without paying for it. Hopefully there will be enough people who enjoy the game and would like me to make more of them, and so willingly purchase the product even though they'll have every chance of getting a free copy if they really wanted to.

The way I figure it (and have heard other game devs more eloquently argue the point) is that people who pirate the game probably aren't my customers anyhow. Or, at best, I should perhaps think of them as potential future customers. At some point, I think you just have to write that off as a cost of doing business on open platforms.

Instead, game developers need to engender goodwill and support among their customers, especially on platforms where it's easy to make and distribute copies without paying. Hopefully enough people understand that they have to actively support developers whose games they enjoy if they want to see more like that.

Re:By far not the first time

[innocent_white_lamb]

Many copy protection schemes on the Commodore 64 floppy drive usually involved writing a deliberate error to one of the sectors. This would cause the read/write head to attempt to re-align itself and bang against the stop to attempt to read the bad sector. Over the course of time all of this hammering would cause the read/write head to go out of alignment, a common problem on 1541 floppy drives.

I've also heard of (but never personally seen) a floppy disk with a hole punched in it in an unused location so if you loaded the program normally nothing happened but if you tried to copy the entire disk the read/write head would drop into the hole and be torn off.

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

[Dutch Gun]

Some make that argument, but I don't buy it. There are those who simply want free stuff, even if they have the means to pay for it. I believe that some in the industry tend to highly exaggerate those numbers by counting every pirate copy as a lost sale, which is ridiculous. But I think it's equally ridiculous to think that, were the free version not available, none of those pirates would have purchased it. I won't even pretend to guess where between those two extremes the real number lies, as it's essentially unknowable.

Still, at least for me, it's a moot point because I don't approve of DRM schemes that often create more problems for customers. With all the PC configurations out there, plus supporting three different OS platforms, I've got enough on my plate to try to ensure the game works flawlessly for everyone.

I'm a bit more ambivalent on DRM on consoles, which is built into the hardware and doesn't really affect the user so much. The expectations are different between consoles and PCs though, as everyone understands that videogame consoles are a locked down platform to begin with. But DRM on PC is sort of... it's hard to explain... breaking the rules? Or perhaps violating an unspoken contract with the user, in which they expect that as long as they have a PC with a backwards compatible OS, they should expect to be able to play that game in perpetuity.

Re:By far not the first time

[onkelonkel]

Going from memory here so be gentle, but as I recall the idea was to write a bit that was sort of half magnetized and neither a one or a zero. The original disk would read different values if you read it several times, a copy would always give the same value. I recall it also got cracked.
 
I also recall a friend who's boss had a new-fangled C64 for his small business. He had an accounting package for the C64 which he had bought from a local software house. One day the software's copy protection errored and deciding his legit, store bought disk was a copy. It overwrote a disk with 8 months of payroll data with "PIRATEPIRATEPIRATE..." The developer of the software ended up having to hire someone to re-enter all the data.

Re:By far not the first time

[djinn6]

Being a game development myself, and one who's put years of work into a self-funded indie game (and hopefully released soon), I'm sure it will be disheartening to see people passing it around without paying for it.

Think of it this way, of the hundreds of other things people could be doing, whether it be lurking on Facebook, hanging out with friends, watching movies, going for a hike, or playing one of the thousands of other game titles out there, they chose to play your game. If they like it, they will sink days, weeks or even years into it. As a creator, you should be proud when you see someone sharing it, not disheartened. You made something great, and people recognized your creativity and hard work, so much so that they want others to try it too.

But then what about income? A business doesn't survive on good will alone.

Yes, income is critical to a business, but remember, every game company is in the same boat. They all managed to deal with it. In fact, the AAA titles are far more sought after and suffer far more from piracy, yet they still rake in millions. I also know many people who bought games after pirating it first, mostly to support the creator. Without a way to try the game, I doubt the developers would've gotten any of those sales. If everyone had to buy before they could find out whether they like it, most of them would go for the well known AAA titles that their friends are raving about. For most indie titles though, word of mouth really doesn't work, since everybody has their own niche they like.

In the end, the only thing that really matters is that people love the game. So go and make that game awesome and stop worrying about the rest.

Re:By far not the first time

[Opportunist]

No, but let's put it that way: In malware analysis, you need people who have a lot of experience disassembling and analyzing foreign code that is often heavily obfuscated and loaded with anti-debugging traps.

Question for 100: What kind of person am I talking about?

Re:By far not the first time

[Bert64]

And a game that becomes unplayable without a centralised server...
So you can't play it with poor or no connectivity, can't play it after the company shuts the servers down etc. Look what happened recently with simcity.

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:By far not the first time

[Opportunist]

Me? On his nice list of course!

What do you expect from a guy that bootlegs patented and copyrighted stuff in his secret north pole workshop?

Now read what they actually said

[JustNiz]

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.

Re:Now read what they actually said

[ckatko]

Except that's the entire fuckin' point of Denuvo. To prevent cracking.

If the game is already cracked, why would you shit on your existing users?

This sounds very much like a case of "The Publisher DEMANDED us use Denuvo and we hate it."

Why the hell else would they go out of their way to ENCOURAGE crackers to crack their game by telling them "As soon as it's cracked, we'll get rid of that thing you hate."?

Next time, before you tell the world your genius insight, spend an extra 5 seconds and thinking it through.

Insanity

[duke_cheetah2003]

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..

Re:Insanity

[Anonymous Coward]

DRM isn't about preventing piracy. That's just the marketing line to make it palatable to the larger audience. DRM is really about vendor lock in and controlling what the legitimate user does (or doesn't do) with software that they've purchased.

There will always be piracy, and the developers and publishers know this. But there will also always be a majority of legitimate users that can be locked down and forced to do the developers/publishers bidding, because the DRM forces them to. Oh you want software Y to do X task? Sorry, the DRM prevents that, you'll have to buy the X module for $299.99.

DRM: Snakeoil peddlers?

[duke_cheetah2003]

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?

Re:DRM: Snakeoil peddlers?

[StillAnonymous]

Nobody expects a system to provide protection forever. Most of a game's sales occur within a window that starts at the release date. I'm not sure what that window is these days, maybe a month? So if you can protect the game from being copied for at least a month, the idea is that you'll sell more during that critical window.

And to this end, some protections have been successful. FIFA 17 was released 7 months ago and hasn't been cracked yet, although with Denuvo being cracked now, it probably won't be long before this one falls. Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory went uncracked just over a year.

What bothers me is publishers who don't remove the protection after a time. I'm still pissed that they didn't remove the online activation from Bioshock like they promised they would, instead they diluted that promise into removing the activation limit instead. Not removing the protections causes problems down the road when you want to run the game on newer operating systems (Chaos Theory's Starforce implementation was never updated for 64-bit OS, so you were SOL without a crack) or on alternatives like Wine on Linux.

Re:Can we stop calling it digital rights managment

[Anonymous Coward]

It manages the OWNERS rights, not YOURS.

Re:How to profit ?

[Cederic]

does anyone really think that triple-A rated games would sell anywhere near their typical levels if DRM were not used ?

Yes, I think they would.

Two key factors:
1 - Look at the fall in music piracy rates once commercial streaming and download services became available and prices stopped being so gouging. This demonstrates that people are willing to spend money on their entertainment. A lot of piracy is also by people that just can't afford all of the games that they want, so no, they're not going to be spending money that they don't have.

2 - Computer games have always been available for free. I didn't buy all the games I played on my Vic-20, there was an entire sneakernet system for C64 and Amiga games and by the time I bought a PC the internet had releases from Razor 1911 and their peers easily and readily available. Nobody has ever had to buy computer games, but the market still grew to support these games with 8 and 9 digit budgets.

Bonus anecdote: Company of Heroes was released with no DRM. I've so far bought the game, bought the expansions, bought the Gold version, bought the game+expansions for a friend, bought the Gold version for a friend, bought Dawn of War as it was a precursor to CoH that I hadn't played, bought the expansions, bought the sequel, bought the expansions, bought the game for a friend. Yeah, that lack of DRM really hurt them there.

No way !

Yes way !

Re:How to profit ?

[Z80a]

All DRM does in practice is turning the pirate game better than the original product, which encourages people to get this instead.

The strategy that has been working and brilliantly is to just make the original more accessible, as steam/GoG does.
It's not always that you can find the game you want on the store (specially if you don't live on a big city in a first world country), and you need to go to the store in first place, while on the internet you just search, click and it is yours.
Before steam/GoG/etc, only piracy had that massive advantage but now you not only get the game, as you get an easy way to play multiplayer with your friends, achievments, bragging rights..

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...

Re:Can we stop calling it digital rights managment

[TheRaven64]

Copy protection is a subset of DRM. DRM also restricts how you can use the media, not just whether you can copy it.

Regression

[xarragon]

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.