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Denuvo has been cracked in all single-player games it previously protected

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Re: Denuvo has been cracked in all single-player games it previously protected

#61

Post by stereolambda »

MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #50
keyringlight wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a long time now I've found it weird that people who like single player games on PC (and to a lesser extent older consoles which had piracy enabling mods) didn't acknowledge the long game consequences of their actions, or at least were willfully ignorant to them because everyone loves getting something for free. It seems to be a variation on Goodhart's law - you get what you reward - if the reward for a company (b…

[flagged]

This looks weird in the context, because the grandparent comment's argument was purely interest-based? You probably mean there's a propensity for tragedy of the commons.

Regardless I'd argue gaming may be the one media category left (after the recent decade's value decline) where piracy remains to seem like more hassle than buying a copy^W license. I would also guess it is more concentrated on a few popular titles compared to music or films. Nowadays I hear more of people collecting games on Steam, to never play them, than of legitimate pirates.

Re: Denuvo has been cracked in all single-player games it previously protected

#62

Post by ThatPlayer »

MrDrMcCoy wrote: post #17
cyanydeez wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i think your underwstimating the anticheat value that still exists. many of the online games are trash when theres not strict cheat control.

Run anti-cheat server-side. Give us private servers again. There's no reason we should have to put up with client-side rootkits written by non-kernel-devs to play a game.

Community servers don't want server-side anti-cheat either. Hell they invented client-side anti-cheats back in the day. Even current day community servers like Face-IT have additional anti-cheats, not less. Same with modded GTAV FiveM (even before the main game added anti-cheats)

Re: Denuvo has been cracked in all single-player games it previously protected

#63

Post by figmert »

lousken wrote: post #41

I would hope publishers would take note and remove it, having hundreds of megabytes of junk in the executable is just wasteful to put it mildly

Why would they care for a few hundred MBs when the games are in the 10s of GBs?

Re: Denuvo has been cracked in all single-player games it previously protected

#64

Post by akiselev »

figmert wrote: post #63
lousken wrote: post #41

I would hope publishers would take note and remove it, having hundreds of megabytes of junk in the executable is just wasteful to put it mildly

Why would they care for a few hundred MBs when the games are in the 10s of GBs?

CPU cache space for code is much smaller than GPU memory for models (and the former is more important for performance since many CPU operations like pipeline parallelism are latency bound, not compute bound).

Re: Denuvo has been cracked in all single-player games it previously protected

#65

Post by Capricorn2481 »

keyringlight wrote: post #49
bigbinary wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely, this has nothing to do with the fact that live service and subscription games generate more revenue, whether or not piracy is involved.

For a long time now I've found it weird that people who like single player games on PC (and to a lesser extent older consoles which had piracy enabling mods) didn't acknowledge the long game consequences of their actions, or at least were willfully ignorant to them because everyone loves getting something for free. It seems to be a variation on Goodhart's law - you get what you reward - if the reward for a company (b…

> For a long time now I've found it weird that people who like single player games on PC (and to a lesser extent older consoles which had piracy enabling mods) didn't acknowledge the long game consequences of their actions, or at least were willfully ignorant to them because everyone loves getting something for free

Why are you equating people who like single player games to pirates? Are you suggesting devs who made single player games were caving under some kind of market pressure that was ultimately unhealthy for them?

The difference in global, high-speed internet access between Quake and Fortnite is huge. I think that explains why live service games are a recent thing more than piracy. That, and Valve set the blueprint for gambling and loot boxes with TF2.

Regardless, I think the jury is out on Live Service games being "safer" to make. There's certainly a lot of people chasing what Fortnite has, but there's a lot of graves and layoffs. It seems like the single player studios are shutting down less because they were unprofitable, and more because building a sustainable business on selling good products doesn't sound good to investors trying to make an exit.

Re: Denuvo has been cracked in all single-player games it previously protected

#66

Post by josefx »

MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #45
bigbinary wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely, this has nothing to do with the fact that live service and subscription games generate more revenue, whether or not piracy is involved.

To give you an idea of the scale of the problem: Greenheart Games famously released a "cracked" version of their own game (Game Dev Tycoon) onto torrent sites on launch day. In this version, the player's in-game studio eventually goes bankrupt because "pirates" steal their games. The Data: Within 24 hours, 93.6% of players were playing the pirated version. The Consequence: The developer's blog post highlighted the ir…

> The experiment proved that even at a low price point ($8), a massive majority of the PC audience will choose "free" regardless of the developer's size or struggle.

Several points:

* A pirate can pirate infinity +1 games for free, that will skew any statistic compared to legitimiate buyers that have to manage a finite budget. It also means that you aren't looking at 93% lost sales.

* It wasn't a new indy game, but a port of an existing mobile game, so I wouldn't be surprised if legitimate buyers weren't in a rush to get their hands on it on day one. The steam statistics from the first month mention a peak concurrent player count of over 7000 so it certainly didn't stay at 200 copies.

Re: Denuvo has been cracked in all single-player games it previously protected

#67

Post by delecti »

Kuraj wrote: post #43
lousken wrote: post #41

I would hope publishers would take note and remove it, having hundreds of megabytes of junk in the executable is just wasteful to put it mildly

The bigger problem with Denuvo is that it appears to significantly impact game performance as well

It can, but that seems to be more related to poor implementations by the game devs, and not inherent to it. There are plenty of examples of games with Denuvo that still run fine (give or take your opinion on whether the presence of DRM is inherently "impacted performance").

Re: Denuvo has been cracked in all single-player games it previously protected

#68

Post by everyone »

Fyi, most of them have not been cracked, but bypassed using a hypervisor that operates in ring-1, so it is certainly a security risk..

Personally I've been voting with my wallet and *never* supporting DRM, so there have been some games where I'm just "Well, I guess I'll never play that game." At least I have an ethical option to play certain games now, I'm just gonna use a seperate blank pc cus these bypasses are novel.

Re: Denuvo has been cracked in all single-player games it previously protected

#69

Post by Capricorn2481 »

akimbostrawman wrote: post #28
h4kunamata wrote: post #16

I find it ironic people mad at Denuvo and yet play games like Battlefield which enforces kernel level spyware nonetheless haha

There is a user argument for anti cheat as a user = less cheater. There is no user argument for DRM, if anything there are many against it = higher game price/less money for the actual game and devs, indirect funding of DRM software, worse performance, higher system requirements, worse preservation, worse privacy, longer loading times, online requirements, worse usability, machine activation restriction, bugs...

Pretty strong to say there's no argument. I don't agree with it, but I imagine people would say reducing piracy leads to more money for the studio, which means more resources that can be put toward the game. Lots of people believe that, and we don't have a lot of data on opportunity costs for games including Denuvo.

I personally just hate it and think Piracy is overblown. The only other industry I've seen be this hostile to users is Music/Photoshop. Putting an iLok key into my computer feels bad.

Re: Denuvo has been cracked in all single-player games it previously protected

#70

Post by Jtarii »

everyone wrote: post #68

Fyi, most of them have not been cracked, but bypassed using a hypervisor that operates in ring-1, so it is certainly a security risk.. Personally I've been voting with my wallet and *never* supporting DRM, so there have been some games where I'm just "Well, I guess I'll never play that game." At least I have an ethical option to play certain games now, I'm just gonna use a seperate blank pc cus these bypasses are nov…

Cracking refers to all methods of circumventing copy protection. Bypassing is just another way of cracking something.
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