Do the cracks still need you to disable Hyper-V (which leads to disabling WSL and whatever else)? In addition, I’m not sure why they’re enabling test signing instead of using kdmapper or the like. Sure, anticheats will get way more mad at you having a manual mapped driver, but one imagines rebooting once (after playing your cracked video game) beats rebooting twice (to enable test signing, then after playing the game…
“A friend of mine” told me that disabling hyper V and all that stuff is needed to play Crimson Desert cracked version.
During the time of the Soviet Union, it was an urban legend that during supply shortages, Soviet factories would have no real work, but workers needed to keep up the appearance of working, so they would have one line of workers continuously assembling devices, feeding into another line that would continuously disassemble them, all in a loop where nothing gets produced. In many ways, it feels like we are seeing this t…
That assembly line workers are constantly being kept fresh on their skills and processes. If you can't get some component for 3 months, new units can almost immediately be pushed out of the factory when the component does arrive. If you bring on new workers, you train them on the disassembly process first and then move them onto the assembly line once they understand the construction. The only downsides are paying th…
> The US does something similar with the national defense manufacturers.
You also see this with the European space industry especially in the rocket building. A lot of money is poured into the industry even if there are no massive returns or advancements just in order to keep the people and skills. If you let these slip, rebooting the sector would be a decades long affair so doing busy work sometimes is the better option.
Heck, even most large tech companies do this type of busy work assignment. They hire en-masse but many of those people are never really put to work. Their greatest value is that they stay out of the competition's hands, if there is a massive project coming up the people are already there, and they can be dumped in case of emergency to prop up the stick price.
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").
Isn't Denuvo actually implemented in a game by the DRM developers, though? I remember reading that they have a process where the game dev sends Denuvo an unprotected executable, who adds the DRM to that executable and sends it back. Thus, I believe the poor implementations are directly the fault of Denuvo.
I think that used to be the case years ago but isn't anymore.
You can archive the installed files from Steam though. An example is the pixel art program Aseprite. The devs said just to copy the binary out of the Steam folder and place it elsewhere if you wish.
But it won't launch without being logging into your steam account
99% of games that use that sort of protection can be cracked in about 5 minutes by simply copying a steam emulator library into the game folder.
There's still a difference — GOG provides you with downloadable installers you can archive, Steam doesn't.
If you really want an installer, just pack the files into a self extracting archive. But IMO the loose files are easier to work with than an installer. Or are you misunderstanding the fact that you can just copy/back up the Steam game and play it anywhere. That's why I say many people have that misconception about Steam games
The real difference is that for Steam the bulk of the catalog is made up of DRM games and that sends a message. As far as I know Steam isn't actively doing anything to promote "DRM free" in general, they just don't say no to the opportunity to sell those games too.
GOG on the other hand takes an active stance on promoting and supporting DRM-free games. Once storefronts like GOG disappear I don't think Steam will pick up the torch and fight the DRM-free fight. Once Gabe is no longer in charge it might just get overall worse for everyone, although fingers crossed Steam can at least continue as it is.
The “keep up the appearance of working” story feels like a misleading comparison to me, because the motivations are pretty much reversed. In the hypothetical factory, there's an external social element requiring the appearance of working, some observer to whom it looks good that this is happening: the way I read it, the assemblers and disassemblers may well be cooperating with each other to produce that appearance, s…
DRM authors and implementors know it doesnt work. The decision is made by people in suits based on traditional business culture that doesnt fit the digital world. The same people making denuvo are also the ones breaking it.
Are you grouping the implementors with the crackers because they understand the limitations of the technology, or are you saying they're directly working with each other to scam the publishers and/or audience (and that this is sufficiently common to overturn the whole framing—a conflict can have some proportion of double agents and defectors while centrally remaining a conflict)? If the former, even supposing that many individual implementors and crackers would agree that the technology is inefficient/breakable/whatever, I still think the driving conflict that causes the implementation and the cracking to happen at all is between a broad cluster of agents around the game publishing activity (including managers, investors, game developers and artists, and more indirectly DRM implementors, integrators, and salespeople) and a broad cluster of agents around the unauthorized copying activity (including people who do ripping and DRM cracks on a technical level, distribution channels, and people who look to those channels to play games without buying them the authorized way). That there are principal–agent inconsistencies within each cluster seems like more of a sideshow; a war doesn't stop being a war because enough of the soldiers have realized that their weapons don't work very well, or because they realize that in some other world they'd have been on the same side.
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").
The games run terribly on release because they have Denuvo, and then when the sales volume no longer justifies the licensing costs of Denuvo, the devs strip it out and sell it to the players in patch notes as "optimizing performance." Someone else mentioned GTA getting more aggressive copy protection out of nowhere. It's not out of nowhere. With GTA6 ads out for a while, sales of GTA5 are up as people either play it…
> With GTA6 ads out for a while, sales of GTA5 are up as people either play it for the first time or replay it. Sales going up means they can justify copy protection
How does that justify it? Adding stronger DRM when cracked copies of the same content are already out there is like trying to get insurance after your house has already burnt down.
This will be used as reason to introduce remote attestation to games.
That already is how it works. Denuvo can not authenticate your game without internet access.
well, right now Denuvo "remote attests" in a Play Integrity "MEETS_BASIC_INTEGRITY" sense that it has no hardware backing and relies on checking your runtime enviroment for signs of tampering manually and obfuscating said checks.
The endgame is certainly flexing the machinery that is being built up over the last 20 years and spawning a SEV-SNP container on your machine that cannot be debugged, inspected and modified in any way. I don't think this is possible as of writing though.
But it won't launch without being logging into your steam account
99% of games that use that sort of protection can be cracked in about 5 minutes by simply copying a steam emulator library into the game folder.
thus is not truely DRM free.
I love steam but even if it can barely be called a DRM, it still is. People not into computer science will have no clue how to do it, and that's what matters when talking about owning your own games, you should not require knowledge to keep something you paid for