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Assassin's Creed Origins is crippling gamers' CPUs due to anti-piracy DRM

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Re: Assassin's Creed Origins is crippling gamers' CPUs due to anti-piracy DRM

#41

Post by conanbatt »

eat_veggies wrote: post #18
ajuc wrote: post #6

Talk by CD Projekt's CEO about not using DRM, and dealing with piracy: https://kotaku.com/some-real-talk-on-piracy-from-a-witcher-3... Their approach always made so much more sense to me.

I pirated the Witcher 3 originally, but it was so good I ended up buying it just to support the company. Step one in stopping piracy is to make something actually worth paying for.

The thing is that what you believe is worth paying for is proportional to the ease to find pirated content.

In argentina, people pay netflix and share accounts between friends, and some play hbo go for GoT, but thats it. In the U.S., its very rate to see pirated TV.

A sandwich might be worth 5 dollars to you, but if there are free sandwiches next to it, you will think "I would pay it if it were worth it"

Re: Assassin's Creed Origins is crippling gamers' CPUs due to anti-piracy DRM

#42

Post by conanbatt »

hashmal wrote: post #24
dkersten wrote: post #13

This is why I don't buy games with DRM other than steams default DRM (although I mostly play games on PS4 nowadays anyway) and why I generally tend to avoid Ubisoft games (amongst others). I might buy a second hand copy at some point, or if its very heavily discounted, but I'm certainly not pushed to get this game, especially with this news.

> This is why I don't buy games with DRM other than steams Valve did an amazing job at building their reputation (by doing things the right way.) Very few can do DRM without pissing off people.

Its terrible, DRM is one of the low points of steam. I got windows games I paid for I can't play anymore because of it.

Its garbage that reduces the value of games. It just increases Steam's profits.

Re: Assassin's Creed Origins is crippling gamers' CPUs due to anti-piracy DRM

#43

Post by ChoGGi »

iaml wrote: post #34
Sephiroth87 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I know, the "crack" for Denuvo, simply emulates the correct server responses, so the game can run normally. So unless the dev remove the DRM themselves, everyone loses...

No, what you describe is a bypass and it's not considered a crack by the scene. Denuvo has been completely removed from some games, but I don't keep up with the news so I can't say which.

Well there's a scene group called steampunks, who "crack" denuvo games by generating a correct key for the offline version of denuvo (normally if you play a denuvo game offline it'll send you to a website with a key to enter in a game prompt).

Their releases are scene releases, even with denuvo remaining as is.

The bypass "crack" Sephiroth87 is referring to is from (I believe) a non-scene person called baldman.

Re: Assassin's Creed Origins is crippling gamers' CPUs due to anti-piracy DRM

#44

Post by eps »

The fun fact time.

Denuvo DRM happens to be... a repackaged VMProtect. Moreover VMP devs were suing Denuvo for illegally repackaging and selling a _single copy_ of VMP that Denuvo bought from them and then actively trying to evade paying licesning fees. Apparently prior to that Denuvo was talking to VMP about doing some custom development work, but they weren't able to agree on terms. [1]

VMProtect itself is a well-established virtualization-based DRM solution and it does dramatically increase the complexity of cracking of binaries. It's been around for a while now and it's popular in shareware circles as a successor to Armadillo protector, which too was a form of a code virtualizer. From what I've seen said about VMP, it is stable and reasonably light, so Assassin's Creed maxing out CPUs is more likely the Creed's own problem rather that of the VMP.

[1] https://rsdn.org/forum/shareware/6733344 (in Russian)

Re: Assassin's Creed Origins is crippling gamers' CPUs due to anti-piracy DRM

#45

Post by LeoNatan25 »

skocznymroczny wrote: post #22
ajuc wrote: post #6

Talk by CD Projekt's CEO about not using DRM, and dealing with piracy: https://kotaku.com/some-real-talk-on-piracy-from-a-witcher-3... Their approach always made so much more sense to me.

They seem to be nice now, but during Witcher 2 release they had heavy DRM issues and threatened to go after pirates (while many of pirates were just people who wanted to play the game they bought).

Huh? I bought The Witcher 2 on release day from GOG with no DRM.

Re: Assassin's Creed Origins is crippling gamers' CPUs due to anti-piracy DRM

#46

Post by ajuc »

LeoNatan25 wrote: post #45
skocznymroczny wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They seem to be nice now, but during Witcher 2 release they had heavy DRM issues and threatened to go after pirates (while many of pirates were just people who wanted to play the game they bought).

Huh? I bought The Witcher 2 on release day from GOG with no DRM.

Physical copies in some countries had DRM because of publisher. There were problems, and they reacted to that poorly (threathening players who pirated). They apologised later.

Re: Assassin's Creed Origins is crippling gamers' CPUs due to anti-piracy DRM

#47

Post by jorvi »

emsy wrote: post #37
emptyfile wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>A pirate is not always a buyer, but gamers are notorious for not paying if they can. But they often will if they can't. [Citation needed]

This so much. Especially since we know from iTunes that people DO pay for content if the can. The burden of proof lies with the proponents of DRM!

People don't pay for content, they pay for convenience. When streaming was still non-existent, and if you weren't a college or high school kid, buying an album on iTunes was less hassle than torrenting it (especially for the non-technically inclined). Now that there's Spotify et al, iTunes sales have massively slumped.

The same goes for games: Steam killed a big chunk of piracy, as having to crack the game and crack again after each update (not to mention no achievements and no official multiplayer) is less of an user experience than just using Steam. However, if as in this case using the Steam version comes with a 40% performance cost... then yeah, piracy gets attractive again.

Re: Assassin's Creed Origins is crippling gamers' CPUs due to anti-piracy DRM

#48

Post by UnoriginalGuy »

bdz wrote: post #31
RobLach wrote: post #2

"Ubisoft has also implemented VMProtect, a piece of software that protects code by executing it on a virtual machine with non-standard architecture [...] tanking the game's performance by 30-40 per cent" This feels so extreme.

Here is the post by the cracker https://image.prntscr.com/image/_6qmeqq0RBCMIAtGK8VnRw.png https://np.reddit.com/r/CrackWatch/comments/79pd62/update_on...

That's circumstantial.

People are blaming the DRM because the DRM simply exists; all the breakpoint proves is that VMProtect does what it says it does (decode sections of the game in the VM). It doesn't however prove that the DRM causes the stutter or performance issues, for all we know that could be a bug in the game's engine itself.

Hopefully time and more data will tell us for sure either way. We aren't there yet, although no lack of proof will stop the tech media from reporting on it.

Re: Assassin's Creed Origins is crippling gamers' CPUs due to anti-piracy DRM

#49

Post by maccard »

eps wrote: post #44

The fun fact time. Denuvo DRM happens to be... a repackaged VMProtect. Moreover VMP devs were suing Denuvo for illegally repackaging and selling a _single copy_ of VMP that Denuvo bought from them and then actively trying to evade paying licesning fees. Apparently prior to that Denuvo was talking to VMP about doing some custom development work, but they weren't able to agree on terms. [1] VMProtect itself is a well-e…

According to VMProtect, that's not true [0]

[0] http://vmpsoft.com/20170606/vmprotect-and-denuvo-gmbh/

Re: Assassin's Creed Origins is crippling gamers' CPUs due to anti-piracy DRM

#50

Post by bdz »

UnoriginalGuy wrote: post #48
bdz wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is the post by the cracker https://image.prntscr.com/image/_6qmeqq0RBCMIAtGK8VnRw.png https://np.reddit.com/r/CrackWatch/comments/79pd62/update_on...

That's circumstantial. People are blaming the DRM because the DRM simply exists; all the breakpoint proves is that VMProtect does what it says it does (decode sections of the game in the VM). It doesn't however prove that the DRM causes the stutter or performance issues, for all we know that could be a bug in the game's engine itself. Hopefully time and more data will tell us for sure either way. We aren't there yet,…

There is more reasonable technical theory but it's all speculation now

>Anvil Next engine has been rewritten with a bindless model for shaders but their DX12 renderer that goes hand in hand with this tech is only ready on Xbox One. On PC this cannot be handled so they use an extra binding wrapper to communicate between D3D11 and their renderer, this was co developed by Intel and Ubisoft. This goes against what AMD and Nvidia recommends to developers, uses a lot of extra CPU power and render their cards' power useless in certain situations (e.g. city areas in Origins).

http://developer2.download.nvidia.com/assets/gameworks/downl...

https://np.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/79qxxt/assassins_cree...

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