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

tomshardware.com

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

#171

Post by manytimesaway »

MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #31
manytimesaway wrote: post #12

Don't forget that the guy behing Denuvo is the same person behind SafeDisc, SecuROM and similar bullshit siblings from the past PC gaming world.

[flagged]

Ah, yes, a problem so huge it killed the industry… wait.

This is the same thing with music / cinema piracy : it’s a mix of "pirates will always pirate" (whatever the reason, be it financial issues or not), and anti-piracy solutions always hitting legitimate customers first.

People want convenience first and foremost. Piracy being a « massive issue is a lie defended by lobbies.

Case in point, I have a legit copy of a EA game I cannot play legitimately anymore, because SafeDisc relies on a vulnerable Windows driver (basically a free rootkit) that was blacklisted by MS. See also the other comment mentioning SecuROM that basically killed SPORE on launch.

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

#172

Post by ozgrakkurt »

kennethallen wrote: post #145
wilg wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What games that are on GOG without DRM have DRM on, say, Steam? (Many Steam games have no DRM.)

These games all released with Denuvo on Steam and DRM-free on GOG. (Some of them have subsequently removed Denuvo on Steam.) Mad Max Middle-earth: Shadow of War Deus Ex: Mankind Divided Yakuza: Like a Dragon

Need to put double spaces to have empty lines in HN

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

#173

Post by h4x0rr »

galleywest200 wrote: post #101
pdpi wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's still a difference — GOG provides you with downloadable installers you can archive, Steam doesn't.

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

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

#174

Post by h4x0rr »

Lalabadie wrote: post #117
Uvix wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's impossible to know which Steam games are DRM-free since Steam games without DRM are not marked in the store. They have to all be assumed to have DRM.

Steam flags kernel-level DRM in a game's store page. Denuvo is identifiable (and named!) this way. Recent example: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3357650/PRAGMATA/

Denuvu anti tamper isn't kernel level though

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

#175

Post by p0w3n3d »

Wow. Great. Congratulations. Achievement earned. You've persisted so long.

Now stop creating new DRMs. You can see what is the outcome. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.

The only thing that made me switch to Netflix from π-rated movies was the accessibility, availability, languages support, speed and quality. The same with games. I buy games from gog mostly because they are missing DRM (and because I'm an old dinosaur so not interested in the bleeding edge new games).

Please focus on the added value. And the wealth will come. Don't pay for denuvo - it's waste of money

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

#176

Post by KennyBlanken »

delecti wrote: post #67
Kuraj wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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").

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 for the first time or replay it. Sales going up means they can justify copy protection.

Denuvo has layers upon layers of obfuscation that inflates nearly every instruction and function call, extra code execution that does nothing to throw off someone trying to follow code execution paths, and constant moving around where the game stores stuff in memory, again, to throw someone off watching via debugger.

It's pathetic because one company has been almost entirely responsible for people needing to buy faster and faster CPUs and GPUs trying to eek out more and more performance. CPUs, GPUs, memory - all of it has gotten enormously faster, we have more cores, etc. Despite all that, every new game barely runs at 60fps.

Do you really believe that year after year game developers and game engines get worse and worse at performance? Of course not.

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

#177

Post by MrDrMcCoy »

not_a9 wrote: post #104
MrDrMcCoy wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>written by non-kernel-devs What exactly separates a kernel dev from a non-kernel dev?

One has experience writing secure, stable code for drivers, memory management, etc that is subject to broad review by other experienced devs. The other is looking at those things adversarially and pushes out whatever they think is good enough. Crowdstrike served as a useful reminder for who should be allowed in kernel space, and video game anti-cheat has far less justification to be there.

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

#178

Post by cermicelli »

ZekeSulastin wrote: post #102
cermicelli wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unhinged take I checked that was 2013 and the game cost almost as much as you you would pay in a month's rent in India in small towns. Most pirates aren't people who could pay for this stuff. This is utterly meaningless. So much in fact I don't even want to link counter examples to it. No/very few paying user pirates even single player games these days if they can afford it as a luxury please understand that. I would…

"simple steam drm, non trivial to pirate" Steam DRM is trivial to the point where you may as well not use it and just release on GOG. Until the one actual cracker in combination with the hypervisor guys showed up a few months ago Denuvo had been unassailable for years.

Alright I will like to ask you for the exact steps for every language other than steam DLL swtichroo which can easily proofed against.

It's not as trivial to crack for a relatively non invasive and easy to enable feature.

Denuvo is hardly uncrackable there's a big reason Rockstar went to their own anti piracy tools.

Seeing unhinged takes about Denuvo shilling on HN is nutz. Honestly well what I would expect from folks here.

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

#179

Post by gmueckl »

everyone wrote: post #71
duped wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One reason anti piracy companies make a living is because companies that buy it see concrete increases in revenue as a result. It may not be every pirate who converts to a customer but DRM solutions are priced to be below the expected additional revenue. And it's not always cheap.

Do you have any data to support that? I'd actually be really interested to see. There are a lot of weird ass games with Denuvo (like Handball 17, Bus Simulator 18) I think at least sometimes paying a big DRM subscriptions is part of a money laundering scheme.

Don't have public data, but industry contacts confirmed to me in private on multiple occasions that DRM increased sales. One really old example was a copy protected expansion pack selling much better than the unprotected base game that is required.
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