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'Rime' Developer Keeps Promise, Removes Denuvo DRM After Game Gets Cracked (cinemablend.com)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the achievement-unlocked dept.

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.

13 of 133 comments (clear)

  1. Lesson learned by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

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

  2. Can we stop calling it digital rights managment? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Digital restrictions management is so much more appropriate.

  3. By far not the first time by Opportunist · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.
    1. Re:By far not the first time by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

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

    2. Re:By far not the first time by Dutch+Gun · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

      --
      Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
    3. Re:By far not the first time by sjames · · Score: 4, Informative

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

    4. Re:By far not the first time by TheRaven64 · · Score: 3, Informative

      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!).

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    5. Re:By far not the first time by Opportunist · · Score: 3, Funny

      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?

      --
      We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
  4. Re:Now read what they actually said by ckatko · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  5. Insanity by duke_cheetah2003 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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..

  6. DRM: Snakeoil peddlers? by duke_cheetah2003 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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?

  7. Re:All car has always a backdoor, the 3rd or 5th d by ChoGGi · · Score: 3, Informative

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

  8. Regression by xarragon · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.