Slashdot Mirror
Denuvo's DRM Now Being Cracked Within Hours of Release (arstechnica.com)
Denuvo, an anti-tamper technology and digital rights management scheme, isn't doing a very good job preventing PC games from being copied. According to Ars Technica, Denuvo releases are being publicly cracked within a day of their launch. From the report: This week's release of South Park: The Fractured but Whole is the latest to see its protections broken less than 24 hours after its release, but it's not alone. Middle Earth: Shadow of War was broken within a day last week, and last month saw cracks for Total War: Warhammer 2 and FIFA 18 the very same day as their public release. Then there's The Evil Within 2, which reportedly used Denuvo in prerelease review copies but then launched without that protection last week, effectively ceding the game to immediate potential piracy. Those nearly instant Denuvo cracks follow summer releases like Sonic Mania, Tekken 7, and Prey, all of which saw DRM protection cracked within four to nine days of release. But even that small difference in the "uncracked" protection window can be important for game publishers, who usually see a large proportion of their legitimate sales in those first few days of availability. The presence of an easy-to-find cracked version in that launch window (or lack thereof) could have a significant effect on the initial sales momentum for a big release. If Denuvo can no longer provide even a single full day of protection from cracks, though, that protection is going to look a lot less valuable to publishers.
within hours / maybe minutes.
DRM is like the delusional gambler. No matter how much money he loses he refuses to quit, because quitting would be and admission that he has failed and lost all his money. And, he is convinced that if hes sticks with it long enough he will eventually hit that big jackpot.
And I don't expect the companies using DRM to change their minds any time soon.
Denuvo isn't going to just quit and go away. Next year, Denuvo will will promise the game companies them that they have developed a new and improved DRM. It will be a lie. It will be nothing more than digital snake oil, just like all DRM, and the game companies will buy it, because they are just like the delusional gambler.
1. Release game
2. Let 'em copy
3. Let 'em play
4. Let 'sm hooked on the game play
5. Release game extensions, available only through authorized channel
6. Profit !
Maybe DRM is important to ensuring people buy their products but I won't bother buying anything with DRM. I've got software purchased that I can no longer use, not because the software is not compatible with my computer, it's the DRM that is no longer compatible. I don't pirate games or software. I'll do without if DRM is involved. It's a huge pain in the neck.
They are probably thanking Denuvo for providing them one!!
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
Reading this makes reading some of the snippets from Denuvo's main site rather amusing:
* "Recent release of [Denuvo-protected] Just Cause 3 has pushed the Chinese piracy group's (3DM) cracking abilities practically past their limits. "In two years' time I’m afraid there will be no free games to play in the world."
* "Chinese hackers have admitted defeat in their attempt to pirate a new video game release and warned that increasingly sophisticated software could wipe out piracy in the gaming industry altogether. "
It may be business saviness, or the naive hope that "this time, it may work" or "it's better than nothing", which keeps developers & publishers buying into their product, though short a fundamental re-thinking of how their technology works, I can't imagine integration of their Denuvo into new games continuing to accelerate like it did in the back half of 2015 and on through 2016.
What affect it will have on future releases, I don't know. AAA games previously only the domain of consoles began to come to steam before Denuvo hit the market, and I would presume that will remain the case, though it may some companies from bringing some titles.
I do expect that if Denuvo "goes away" though, that (for gamers) will be a self-defeating, since any future solution will replaced with something only more draconian.
Denuvo is the reason DooM wouldn't run on Linux for the first year after release. The DooM beta ran on Linux just fine. So I cheer for Denuvo being broken.
We will see more games require an internet connection for "cloud processing" or just claim to (like SimCity.) I'm actually not opposed to online-only games when it's a design choice instead of an anti-piracy strategy. Toys to life can be pirated with nfc tags but at least as far as dlc/drm goes it can be fun.
The reason Denuvo shilled comments from the very poor asian cracking group 3DM was because they paid off the group to release the comments to suggest Denuvo would be worth using in the future. In reality 3DM had one half-hearted kid cracker who had made some progress with early versions of Denuvo, but had already moved on due to real life issues.
For 3DM, taking Denuvo's money was a no-brainer- they were never going to release decent cracks anyway.
As others have said, Denuvo- a product of black hat hackers- exploited the fact that earlier PC games had all been 32-bit and ran on far more primitive x86 ring services. Effcetively the games were early NT/XP class.
Going to 64-bit, game companies could exploit the far more robust 64-bit protection services of AMD and Intel processors. Denuvo is a 64-bit root kit. But all that was needed was for the crackers to produce 64-bit tools to circumvent the DRM- and once these tools were coded there was no more hardware services left to exploit on x86 CPUs. Single-player DRM is thus dead.
But publishers have also moved on to gambling and loot boxes via online services. And with DRM dead, the incentive to make the core game need online when possible (for multi-player- or streamed data from world datasets with constant new content) will be the focus. Saint's Row, for instance, had online access to user customisation of character.
But making a game so good gamers want to exploit the online options is very hard. And pure online games can also fail hard- as the recent Lawbreakers proves.
PS Denuvo had a terrible impact on gaming performance. Denuvo spent a LOT of money lying about this across forums and tech sites.
Why do these idiots still bother? It doesn't make any sense, it costs money to develop and support those who actually try to work with DRM, and eventually it will be cracked and leads to press about how incompetent you are at this.
I feel so sig.
Encryption is the art of getting information from Alice to Bob such that Charlie can't read it.
DRM is the art of getting information from Alice to Bob such that Charlie can't read it, Except with the further constraint that Bob IS Charlie.
GENERATION 667: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation
The others will not, whether they get the game cracked or do not get the game at all. The whole model used for the economics of copy protection is wrong. It is inspired by greed and a deep desire to control. It is not based on facts. The facts are that most people have a certain budget for entertainment and they cannot really exceed that. At the same time, they also have a time-budget. In the end, except for some special cases, copy protection loses you sales and loses you quite a bit of money.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
DRM is about delaying the inevitable copying. If you get months, it is a success. Weeks would be well worth it. As we see here, just a few hours can make the presales worth it.
You are misrepresenting the purpose to paint it as a failure, when this article clearly says otherwise. When that happens, look for a different purpose.
This particular DRM team ran out of variants, another one will become more popular and suffer a similar fate. Meanwhile, publishers make money.
Do not argue about DRM free games making more money, I am not a publisher. The goal is to hold off the invaders as long as possible, not crush them and stand victorious.
That shit again? Please.
What does someone do who is a die-hard fan that wants the game more than anything? Preorder. Without even knowing what DRM the game will have or if at all. Because he doesn't give a shit. I wanna, shut up and take my money!
Anyone who gets convinced by reviews and information from peers will get that information a few days after release. When the crack is already available. So if this person so pleases, he can get the cracked version instead.
So tell me again, who does that DRM keep from getting the cracked version? Yes, it's true that most sales happen in the first few days. But not because of DRM but because of fanboys who preordered.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
denovos goal is just to convinve 1-2 execs that its worth it to pay them or else they lose money.
it is very convinient that measuring said lost money is actually impossible. many times in piracy the lost money NEVER existed in the first place.
there are no good games produced anymore .. or maybe I have PTSD and cannot enjoy them .. I don't know .. help me find out .
So why are the idiotic journalists destroying our language by continually using the words 'see' and 'saw', where they are not appropriate? Because most journalists are illiterate idiots who can't be bothered to look up the correct phrase they are looking for, but are too stupid to remember.
Hence we get the likes of 'Nasa' and 'Aids' instead of 'N.A.S.A.' and 'A.I.D.S.'. Is it really that difficult to remember?
But other than that one "rich friend", I don't know anybody who buys games in the launch window, especially not "triple a" games, at those are $80 to $130 here in Canada. Just because the CAD's USD value went down, somehow that makes it so we magically have more money in our pockets to afford that ridiculous price point.
Those games were cracked in under 10 hours no less, they had a good run but CDProjekt showed how wrong the whole DRM scheme is. If you make a good game people will buy it, if you make shit people won't.
Yup I totally agree.
If you've made a good game and there are tons of fan liking it, they'll line up to buy it EVEN if it is DRM-free.
A cracked game, if the game is good won't necessarily cause a big drop of sales.
(Some people might decide not to pay for it, but it's going to be a small fraction of the fans. On the other hand another fraction of the fans might finally decide to buy it, now that there's a way to take their legit copies and "disinfect it" from the DRM : that might end up being my case regarding Sonic Mania and Denuvo)
If your game is shitty, it's a stupid excuse to blame it on piracy.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Because with review embargoes until the day of release, with downloads meaning the day of release overloading the ability to load the game to play on the day, with online meaning on the first days of release the servers are unable to let you on and there's no offline playing, the games are increasingly becoming, especially for AAA titles, unplayable on the day of release and an unknown quantity for days after. So even if it still took three or four days to crack, it would take longer for you to know if the game is worth it, download it and play it.
How much money could have gone into development? Or paying their staff better? Or rolled off into the budget of another game?
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Since copyright makes the price non-negotiable and a monopoly rent, the only alternative offer is to "pirate". Look at the various pay-what-you-want sites.
See also Steam sales where you can get a game 75% off. Those sales are because the RRP is too high. A sale converted them from piracy to purchase. See also the White Box et al. Full games at £3-5. Without those avenues, you are right to choose piracy. It is the only option left as a counter offer in a free market.
It's how many bought it that matters to a publisher. A pirate copy costs nothing unless the pirate demands support (so make support require registration, rather than install, with a per-disk key? CDProject does that) or it's an online game. And with an online game that's entirely based on multiplayer, the player count makes the game worth playing, so to an extent again, it doesn't matter who pirated your game, just how many bought it, to make the endeavour worthwhile. F2P games have 100% "piracy" and use in-game transactions to pay for the game. AAA titles are now using in-game transactions to pay for the game.
Why DRM a customer out of buying digital tat for their game? Just have the AAA titles pre-buy in-game currency when registered with a unique ID if you want to charge for the base game.
Then at least I'd be able to buy games. As it is I have to be bothered enough to check up what DRM it uses. If DRM were useful, the price would be cheaper and since they tout DRM to their investors, they are clearly proud of using it, so why hide it from their customers? Open disclose that shit, boys.
Nothing has changed... a game was out for C64 or Amiga, a few days later you had the cracked version on some BBS then circle friends...
"Science will win because it works." - Stephen Hawking
But even that small difference in the "uncracked" protection window can be important for game publishers, who usually see a large proportion of their legitimate sales in those first few days of availability.
"Oh, I was going to find a cracked version of this game on launch day, but because I can't find one, I'll pay the full retail price of $40 to $60 right now, instead of waiting a few more days for the cracked version", said no pirate ever.
Someone with a UID that's the same number of digits as mine. I'd begun to suspect we were all, like, put out to pasture or something.
I often see crack availability as the reason for the bulk of sales being the initial sales. I have a different explanation, though: advertisement and quality.
Initial sales are entirely due to advertisement: only professional reviewers at best may have access to the actual game for better judgement, and even they often have different versions from release and can't possibly be able to determine how the game feels in the long run, because their lead isn't long enough. Advertisement then drops off immediately after release, to the point that only game browsers may actually still realize the game is even for sale.
Once the game is widely spread, it will gain a reputation. If that reputation is mediocre or worse, the game will stop selling. If a game is high quality, though, people will continue to buy it for ages. Reputation will determine long-term sales, if you continue to make your product available for sale. See e.g. gog.com.
Of course abandoned or otherwise unavailable (e.g. due to region locking) products will be pirated; there is no choice. Of course people with no money will pirate, but this does not mean a "lost sale". Of course people with little interest will pirate rather than give you money; if the game is worth it, this may translate into a later saie. Of course people who only pirate will continue to do so; you'll just have to live with it.
So it requires that they take my machine away from me. Since I own bob, and I AM bob, this is either even more shittiness from DRM (stealing my computer) or a non difference (so I am still bob in the scenario). Choose one.
Remember, the game publisher isn't called "Alice", nor am I called Carol. Or my machine Bob. So they are analogies, not identities, and your "correction" relies on mistaking A B and C as identities.
I've been saying for YEARS that any sort of 'DRM' or copy protection you can spend any amount of time developing, someone will have cracked within a matter of days. It's always been this way, it'll always BE this way, and they're wasting their time and money. Just accept that there's going to be some copying going on and get over it.
and yeah, Denuvo isn't doing that right now. I'm pretty sure Ubisoft's system is though. Their solution is to download the game in chunks as you get futher along. It's also why their games are often barely playable at launch. It works, and the 'barely playable' part doesn't seem to hurt sales. Me? I won't buy an Ubisoft game until 6 months after launch. I did that before I knew about their DRM scheme too. It had nothing to do with principle, I just knew too many people who couldn't play the game until months after launch. Now I know why. But like I said, the impact on sales is negligible.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/