Hitman 2's Denuvo DRM Cracked Days Before the Game's Release (arstechnica.com)

thegarbz writes: Denuvo, the darling of the DRM industry was once considered by publishers to be the final solution to piracy. Slashdot has documented the slow decline of Denuvo from stories in 2014, and 2016 where publishers were praising Denuvo's success at mitigating piracy for weeks, to its slow decline last year where games were being cracked within "hours" of release. The popular wisdom of publishers in the past considered DRM worth while as it thwarts piracy during the critical sales spike when games are first released. Last week saw Hitman 2, the latest Denuvo protected game get cracked in a short time. The kicker, the game isn't officially released until this Thursday.

Publishers are now eroding the potential sale day advantage of DRM through the latest practice of offering games for early release in an attempt to secure an ever larger number of pre-orders for popular titles. This leads to the obvious question: Does DRM make financial sense to include in titles if they risk being cracked before release date? Conversely, does releasing games early to selected customers make financial sense if it results in the DRM being cracked before release?

Comments

Does it still slow games to a crawl at random?

[rsilvergun]

I seem to remember several folks tracing performance problems in Batman Arkham Knight to Denuvo, but I could be wrong. I know they swear it doesn't impact performance but I find that tough to believe given how it works (it encrypts the entire game and decrypts it on the fly).

Re:Does it still slow games to a crawl at random?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've seen tests that show that some types of DRM do impact the performance of games, Denuvo being one of them. I've seen results from a 5 to 10 frame drop, or larger. That is not trivial. DRM is not stopping piracy. As it is now, the pirates are getting the superior product. Games that are DRM free will always get more money from me than games with horrible DRM.

It's all bullshit...

[blahplusplus]

... the reason Denuvo is even possible is because the internet fundamentally alterated the relationship between PC game buyer and PC game seller. Developers and publishers have all the power now since customers are 100's of miles away and can't simply storm their offices and force the drm and evil server locks out of their AAA games. High speed internet was the biggest cheat code ever granted to game companies by the laws of our universe. Once they make a game they can just keep it on their servers while giving you only half the game you paid for, while giving you the big shit sandwitch.

The tech industries (and hence game industry) eternal quest was to get rid of software ownership and to take control of the customers PC/software to exploit them for profits. They've been doing a remarkable job and this all began with Ultima RPG's on the PC back in the 90's, they rebadged RPG's as mmo's to get a gullible gaming public to pay monthly for the same fucking game because they know the public is stupid and illiterate as fuck.

Denuvo, mmo's and steam could only exist in a world where the average person is bumfuck retard level stupid in the head. All the cool things we used to get in the 90's like QeRadiant for quake and level editors have been dialed back completely because, the worlds technology illiterate got locked down smart phones and high speed internet.

That enabled companis to put gambling interfaces into software and reach the 3% of the population that is, the super rich, the super dumb and super impulsive. Let's remember League of legends model has a conversion rate of less than 3%, so that means most gamers aren't stupid enough to hand Riot money. The same thing you see on Mobile games where these mobile games have a gambing/gacha interface. THe internet allowed game companies to simply keep the software and disposess the public from owning and controlling the software so they can just exploit the 3% willy nilly and make super profits.

Watching this all go down for 20 years was pretty alarming, I never thought the camel getting it's nose into the tend would mean the entire game industry would clean up 20 years later because of locked down smart phones gave the access to the global population with too much money and people with impulse control problems, allowing game companies to be incentivized to never give people the full software they are paying for ever again.

False premise for DRM.

[Ecuador]

The basic premise for the need of DRM is false. It assumes people who would buy the game the moment it comes out are the same group as the people who would pirate it. Which is quite sad, the companies basically believe their customers are pirates and they would not pay if they were given the chance. Which has been proven false in many ways. In fact, from personal experience, the people who would pay for a game would only pirate it if there is a reason, like DRM making their life difficult.
I know I am just preaching to the choir here...

Re:False premise for DRM.

[alvinrod]

I think it's even worse than that. For years, the piracy figures were so blown out of proportion that if you bothered doing the math it wasn't unusual to end up with a dollar amount that rivaled the world's GDP. If you're a CEO or manager, it's pretty easy to blame piracy for failed expectations and shareholders might go along with you on it. Of course at that point, you now need to try to do something about the piracy that you've told everyone is destroying your business, so you buy some useless DRM, but what the hell do you care since it acts as a good cover and when it inevitably fails, you can just point to that failure as another excuse.

Eventually though, investors will realize this is just a load of shit. Just make good games and you'll get showered with money. There was just a story here about Rockstar having the largest weekend haul with their new game. Or look at companies like CD Projekt Red that are selling their games on GoG without DRM and they've grown from a small studio to a massively successful one and their newest game has a massive amount of hype behind it. Their games are easier to pirate than any other since it has no DRM on it, yet they've made massive amounts of money as well.

Re:Simple solutions

[DRJlaw]

When the game boots have some data structures with critical assets that must be loaded from data that is only available on servers.

We've found our next publisher-industry consultant folks, call off the search. "New idea" that retreads concepts that have been in use for years -- product activation and/or required-all-the-time internet access -- CHECK. Consumer hostile mechanism that ensures that once the publisher loses interest and takes down the servers, the consumer loses their ability to use what they've purchased -- CHECK.

Release day should also be the day that a new protection layer is introduced, so even if the pre-relase DRM had been cracked, somehow; folks would have to start over after release.

Updating DRM on the release copy while magically thinking that the previous version wouldn't have roadmapped how to defeat it -- CHECK.

You're the trifecta, man. Get your resume out there.

Shamus Young has an insightful appraisal of Denuvo

[Lanthanide]

One of my favourite gaming authors has an insightful appraisal of Denuvo and how effective it is. His conclusion is that it's already proven all the publisher's claims about piracy to be lies and in doing so has made itself redundant.

If you want to learn more about what Denuvo is and how it works from a games programmer and (good) author, then it's well worth a read.

Here's the main thrust of the article:
> On the other hand, I stand by the point I made four years ago: Denuvo is so good it proved it was useless.
>
> For years, consumers complained about intrusive DRM. It locks you out of your legitimately purchased product.
> It creates bugs and slowdowns. It’s a hassle. It makes it impossible to run the game years later when the servers
> go down. It punishes legitimate customers while doing nothing to inconvenience the pirates.
>
> In response to these concerns, publishers would tell us that strong DRM was necessary because of rampant piracy.
> Piracy was blamed for high prices, or for a refusal to port games to the PC. Developers claimed that between 90%
> and 95% of players were using pirated copies. This led publishers to make absurd claims that game prices would be
> lower or that they wouldn’t need to close so many studios if there weren’t so many dang pirates,. The assumption was
> that if 90% of players are pirates, then games would make ten times as much money if we could stop piracy. All those
> pirates would run out and buy legitimate copies and it would usher in a golden age of low prices and profitability.
>
> Tomb Raider 2013 pre-dates Denuvo. Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Rise of the Tomb Raider were both protected
> by Denuvo. And yet we haven’t heard about any miraculous sales spike that caused the second two games to massively
> outsell the first. If Denuvo makes any difference at all, it must be very slight. Is it even enough to offset the loss of
> potential customers? If Denuvo was actually making a measurable difference in terms of sales, wouldn’t all games be
> using it by now?

https://www.escapistmagazine.c...

I'll tell you it makes me not want to buy games

[rsilvergun]

at launch. A lot of times the patches remove the DRM, since they charge per install and why keep paying for DRM 3-6 months after launch day when the pirates have moved on. But that means I'm buying on Gog or on sale, and a lot of games don't launch day 1 on Gog if at all.