Denuvo 4.8 anti-tamper DRM tech gets bypass crack

[HEXUS]

It has protected a lot of AAA games over the last few months.

Read more.

[Biscuit]

Really is quite baffling that this game of cat and mouse still continues.

[Kato-2]

Articles like this show just how well pirates are at social engineering, they did the same thing spreading fud back in the late 90's and early 00's on various schemes to combat piracy. Spread enough dubious claims and you can get the "PC enthusiasts to do the dirty work for you".

You don't own the game Steam itself is DRM. If you want to own games permanently go buy from GoG.

Piracy is a popularity contest the purpose of Denuvo is to be only a temporary fix, to block zero day warez releases after the popularity has died down the protection can be removed or let lax which is what typically happened.

So good job Hexus in promoting PC games piracy even if inadvertently.

[Tabbykatze]

Articles like this show just how well pirates are at social engineering, they did the same thing spreading fud back in the late 90's and early 00's on various schemes to combat piracy. Spread enough dubious claims and you can get the "PC enthusiasts to do the dirty work for you".

You don't own the game Steam itself is DRM. If you want to own games permanently go buy from GoG.

Piracy is a popularity contest the purpose of Denuvo is to be only a temporary fix, to block zero day warez releases after the popularity has died down the protection can be removed or let lax which is what typically happened.

So good job Hexus in promoting PC games piracy even if inadvertently.

DRM like Steam is fine to me, however when I found out Diablo required an internet connection to play which was pretty much solely for the licensing and DRM I did not buy the game as I want to play it offline on my laptop. You are right that Denuvo is only a temporary fix to prevent zero day cracks however it's the execution of DRM that rubs people up the wrong way.

Take Sim City, that was a train wreck of server drop outs and always online DRM issues impacting a launch.

Hexus isn't promoting PC Gaming Piracy, it's highlighting that a company who lauds itself as being near immune has been cracked again. That's news.

[Biscuit]

Piracy is a popularity contest the purpose of Denuvo is to be only a temporary fix, to block zero day warez releases after the popularity has died down the protection can be removed or let lax which is what typically happened

Citation please. Im not aware of protection EVER becoming more lax

[Tabbykatze]

Citation please. Im not aware of protection EVER becoming more lax

Some companies removed Denuvo and co some weeks after launch because it had done its job and was no longer worth keeping in. i.e. Bethesda removed Dooms Denuvo

[Biscuit]

Some companies removed Denuvo and co some weeks after launch because it had done its job and was no longer worth keeping in. i.e. Bethesda removed Dooms Denuvo

Right, so this is a very recent thing and not a historical trend throughout the ages of DRM.

The trend of DRM Is that it does more harm to the consumer than the pirates, and I dont see that changing any time soon.

[EvilCycle]

If a game is reasonably priced vs content then people will buy it.

If the game is too expensive and/or lacking content then it will not sell well.

People who only ever pirate games are only ever going to pirate games and those that are protected just won't get played.

Remove your DRM's and release complete, unbroken, reasonably priced games and watch your numbers rocket.

[virtuo]

Right, so this is a very recent thing and not a historical trend throughout the ages of DRM.

The trend of DRM Is that it does more harm to the consumer than the pirates, and I dont see that changing any time soon.

Historically some companies would remove DRM in the final update/patch for a game as a gesture of good will to the users. thinking SafeDisc/SecuROM days). That hasn't happened for a long time now, probably correlating with the arrival of Steam/digital distribution.

There was rumour that some publishers had "deals" with Denuvo that said they could claim a percentage of the cost of the protection back if the protection was bypassed or removed within a certain time period, provided the protection was removed in a software update. The claim was denied from both sides (Denuvo and the publishers), but there was a pattern of "remuvo" offical updates being releases shortly after the "pirate" versions, which is fishy.


I personally don't think DRM is as harmful to the consumer as a lot of people make out, today. It's the lack of foresight in to the DRM lifecycle over 1, 2, 5, 10+ years that worries me. I've already seen titles being rendered useless because online activation servers go down after a certain period, and enthusiasts have to "find a way" to play their games.

Publishers should plan to retire DRM after it has served it's useful life, but then with licensing these days, you aren't entitiled to anything anyway, and should thank your lucky stars every day you get to enjoy that thing you dropped 40 notes on.

[Zimano]

Egosoft do a 'No Steam' .exe file after their game has been out for a while.

[kalniel]

Neverwinter Night and Bioshock are two of my games that lowered protection after a while, and later became available on GOG/Humble as well.

[Saracen]

Really is quite baffling that this game of cat and mouse still continues.

Really?

It's a cat 'n' mouse that's been going on just about since computer games were released, and promptly copied. I can certainly reoate back to the 1970s, on Apple II products, years before the first "PC", and in IBM-compatible PC.

It's also what's more or less driven me out of gaming.

Once I've bought a game, and if piled my game boxes one atop another, it would certainly stretch floor to ceiling several times, I then expect to be able to install and play that game for as long as I have hardware capable of runing it. And I still have hardware capable of running every game I've ever bought, including those Apple II games.

I'm NOT buying a game that relies on a server existing to authorise as "valid". If that results in me not ever playing a game .... so be it.

In reality, it has resulted in me now only ever buying DRM-free games, once (and if) they reach GOG or some-such.


And actually, I'm quite grateful to such obnoxious, offensive and intrusive DRJ? it's saved me an absolute fortune over the years. I mean setioys money. Buy a car, put a deposit on a house, or take a 3-month world cruise kind of money. At a guess, and on average, I'd say around £200/month that I was spending on games, and for probably 20-ish years now. Oh, and you can add a chunk of change not spent on new CPUs and video card upgrades.

Instead, I buy a game here and there, and at more like £2 or £3 than £35-50.

So I guess I can say Im militanyly indifferent, these days, to DRM and 'cracks' alike. It's a game I gave up years ago, and now, I no longer bother even looking at new games releases. Until it appears on GOG, etc, it doesn't exust for me.

But I'm not surprised the cat 'n' mouse game goes on. Frankly, I'd be shocked if it didn't. Short of games being personalised, such as to DNA, retina scan, etc, at point of sale, I imagine people won't stop cracking until companies stop DRMing. Does a crack-proof tech exist? I doubt it. I've certainly long since stopped caring, either way.

[Iota]

I personally don't think DRM is as harmful to the consumer as a lot of people make out, today.

For me personally it has never been about DRM being harmful, I completely understand that publishers wish to ensure sales figures are optimised instead of funding a game, which then gets pirated.

To be perfectly straight forward about it, if someone is going to buy a game, they will buy it. If someone isn't going to buy it, or doesn't have the financial cognition to ensure they have the funds to buy something, they'll pirate it regardless of any protections in place. It isn't lost sales as the publishers try to make out, they never would have earned a sale on the product in the first place.

Which then leaves the honest consumers both having to contend with unknown software running, using resources that shouldn't be used in the first place, plus they're also having to partially fund the cost of those resources being used when buying a product. The publishers may pay for the DRM, however it's the honest consumer that funds it.

So regardless of the arguments I've ever seen from both sides, it's essentially the honest consumer that gets screwed over in all of the DRM fiasco. Not the publishers, not the pirates.

Hence, I'll accept games that don't have an "additional" layer of DRM on top of the "always online" requirements. Any game that is released with that additional layer of DRM simply doesn't get my money (and I don't pirate anything). So publishers lose sales by being obstinate and stupid.

[Rubarb]

God bless them for doing this , I can buy a ps2/3/4 game and switch from console to console same with the x-box and yet pc game makers all think we're going to copy the crap out of them.

Chances are there may be a few people that will but they are the same people that copy the above.

I suggest they take a note from share-ware success from the past like doom1, remember that first 8 lvls for free then you had to buy it, this was the reason I built my fist pc just to play that game

[Rubarb]

Just to add : anything on steam I avoid like the plague, why cos I dont want a launcher running in the background.
I'm quite anal about what I have running on my pc, if it smells of ass i don't run it

[Terbinator]

...I personally don't think DRM is as harmful to the consumer as a lot of people make out, today. . .

Fact of the matter is game sales are so front-loaded anyway that the DRM doesn't actually have any direct corrleation to sales - add to this the sale-centric market than Denuvo operates in and the suspected performance hit, it is a turd cocktail.