Denuvo Anti-Cheat, another new StarForce

[jagdtigger]

7 hours ago, JoostinOnline said:

Blame pirates

GoG and CDPR already proven that the whole piracy scare crow farce is brutally blown out of proportions......

 

/ON

Well one more game i wont buy..... (Starforce/SecuROM anyone?)

[JoostinOnline]

Just now, jagdtigger said:

GoG and CDPR already proven that the whole piracy scare crow farce is brutally blown out of proportions......

 

/ON

Well one more game i wont buy.....

LOL they definitely haven't. Ever wonder why there are almost zero new games on GOG?

 

It's funny how many people seem to think companies purchase Denuvo products just because they love spending money.

[jagdtigger]

2 minutes ago, JoostinOnline said:

LOL they definitely haven't. Ever wonder why there are almost zero new games on GOG?

Cant do anything with ppl who stuck in the past and think DRM does anything beyond a placebo effect..... Still CDPR released 3 games without DRM and they are swimming in money.....

 

3 minutes ago, JoostinOnline said:

It's funny how many people seem to think companies purchase Denuvo products just because they love spending money.

Reality shows that, denuvo gets cracked in a matter of days. Do you really think anyone who want to pirate it cant wait a few days? DRM never had any meaningful use beyond ripping off ppl with outdated thinking and never will. But this bone was chewed clean already. DRM wont do anything about piracy, only annoys legitimate customers. This is a fact and i wont argue about it any further.

[suicidalfranco]

since Valorant's anti cheat was mentioned: Vanguard disable on boot keyboard and/or mouse controller software and driver (i.e the ones made by OEM to set macros, rebind keys and what not), blocks the usage of tools like Afterburner, programs to manage your PCs RGB effect, Sound drivers

 

Can't cheat if you can't input jack shit on your rig

[KaitouX]

38 minutes ago, JoostinOnline said:

It's funny how many people seem to think companies purchase Denuvo products just because they love spending money.

They purchase it because they're afraid of losing money based on that weird line of thought that every pirated copy=one lost sale.

[RejZoR]

47 minutes ago, JoostinOnline said:

LOL they definitely haven't. Ever wonder why there are almost zero new games on GOG?

 

It's funny how many people seem to think companies purchase Denuvo products just because they love spending money.

Because idiots are stuck in the past and are too scared to try a new approach where you don't treat people as criminals by default. CDPR on the other hand, while not pretending no one pirates their games, The Witcher series still sold in many many millions. Later additionally boosted by The Witcher TV series. It's almost like giving a damn about your products and keeping up the lore alive and interesting is what sells the games and not generic yearly churning of new games with hardly any new content for 100€ and more. Like EA is doing with Star Wars franchise. Or with basically everything they cooked up decades ago and still milk to this day and not giving a F about it as soon as it's released. Which I can confirm with utmost fury when it ocmes to NFS franchise. Last 5 games could be amazing, yet they all stink like dog shit because they just plain don't give a F. And we're talking a day and night difference with just few tiny additions and changes. But no, they milked it and that's that. Next year with new game and new BS idiocies.

[Curious Pineapple]

I'll often play a cracked game and if I like it, I'll buy it. GamePass is a great idea, games can be made available for a short time to give people a chance to play. It can be removed later on but with the option to buy with a 20% discount. What happened to shoving out a half baked copy of an early version of the engine with most of a couple of maps? Demo's were great, chance to play before buying.

[Thaldor]

1 hour ago, Escanor said:

Whats the difference between denuvo anti cheat and easy anti cheat and battle eye cos i heard those are also ring 0 kernel

Easy Anti-Cheat and BattleEye both have only kernel level components, the majority of them is run in user-space. They have hooks to see what happens in kernel-space but they are not run in kernel-space unlike Vanguard and now Denuvo Anti-Cheat. It's not a big difference but it means that mostly if they were to go haywire (like develope a memoryleak) it will happen in user-space where Windows can manage them and they don't cause kernel panic by overwriting some system memory because there is memory managements that will restrict what memory the the software can access. It also means a lot less code is run in kernel-space which does lessen the chances of someone finding a hole in there or the chance of something going wrong in there.

 

Then there is also the trust vector. BattleEye is old system used by Activision-Blizzard and is quite battle hardened, everybody knows it and there hasn't been any problems with it. Easy Anti-Cheat has companies like Epic Games, Crytek and Microsoft using it, while it doesn't prove anything, it gives some assurance that they are doing something right when companies that have more than enough resources to make their own anti-cheat systems stand behind them. And then we have Denuvo... Company who's primary product that should be unhackable is hacked usually in hours, sometimes even before the product it should protect gets out (some games take longer to crack but still mostly Denuvo games are cracked at day 0; saying that it took a month to crack some game with Denuvo doesn't remove the fact that at the same time tens of games using Denuvo were cracked almost right after release) and their support in the anti-cheat side is Bethesda, which doesn't currently have the best track record on doing good choices as a company (yes, talking about disaster named Fallout 76 and then the fact that they pulled TES VI out just to tend the drunken masses at E3 and just last week their VP let out that the whole game won't even enter development stage in years and releasing a game and forgetting to put a DRM on it in one marketplace. Yeah, completely professional business there, they do very good decision in there, nothing to worry about).

[Koeshi]

I got Doom Eternal because Doom 2016 runs so well on Linux and with it using the same game engine I expected the same.  I have been happily watching the compatibility reviews on protondb continually improve over the past month and was planning to play it soon.  Now it is completely unplayable, worse than when it launched.  I suppose that is what I get for trusting companies to not fuck up based on their past release, but as someone who is really focused on just the single player aspect of the game it is a real kick in the teeth.

[RejZoR]

4 hours ago, jagdtigger said:

Cant do anything with ppl who stuck in the past and think DRM does anything beyond a placebo effect..... Still CDPR released 3 games without DRM and they are swimming in money.....

 

Reality shows that, denuvo gets cracked in a matter of days. Do you really think anyone who want to pirate it cant wait a few days? DRM never had any meaningful use beyond ripping off ppl with outdated thinking and never will. But this bone was chewed clean already. DRM wont do anything about piracy, only annoys legitimate customers. This is a fact and i wont argue about it any further.

Copy protections are mostly there to satisfy wishes of dumb investors who think that it somehow improves sales and they have no loss in profit because of it. Ppl who are not willing to pay will never pay. And there are people who pay, when they know they are not getting ripped off. I know quite some ppl who finished pirated copy and then bought the game. Or someone played pirated game and talked about it and someone with money bought it based on that recommendation. A % of pirated games certainly drive actual sales as they can act as free advertising. You invest nothing in their distribution (server costs, advertising), but ppl who played pirated one talked about it and that made some buy the game. I know I'm that person today. If game is good I'm gonna pay for it and I can't be bothered chasing pirated versions and finding working cracks. So I just go to the first store with games and pick it there.

[Doobeedoo]

Sucks because of cheaters really but at least it doesn't run with boot but with a game only. 

[JoostinOnline]

6 hours ago, jagdtigger said:

Cant do anything with ppl who stuck in the past and think DRM does anything beyond a placebo effect..... Still CDPR released 3 games without DRM and they are swimming in money.....

I never said you couldn't make money without DRM. It's just that the market suggests you can make more with it. If you haven't noticed, companies like Bethesda and Ubisoft are also swimming in money.

 

6 hours ago, jagdtigger said:

Reality shows that, denuvo gets cracked in a matter of days. Do you really think anyone who want to pirate it cant wait a few days? DRM never had any meaningful use beyond ripping off ppl with outdated thinking and never will. But this bone was chewed clean already. DRM wont do anything about piracy, only annoys legitimate customers. This is a fact and i wont argue about it any further.

Show me some hard evidence that companies actually lose money with DRM.

[leadeater]

 

[KaitouX]

1 hour ago, JoostinOnline said:

It's just that the market suggests you can make more with it.

 

Show me some hard evidence that companies actually lose money with DRM.

Can you show any evidence that they win more money with DRM? There's no proof for neither, but going by the fact that there are games that "leaked" without Denuvo/other DRMs and still sold really well, i have my doubts on that idea that DRM would help sales in any measurable way, and as a consumer I obviously want the option that doesn't fuck me.

[Skulltula]

Currently having the battle with Steam over this...I bought the game 11 days ago when it was 25% off. I have however played it for 4 hours and 50 minutes (which I enjoyed) which was foolish of me, clearly I should have been aware the goal posts would be shifted in this way. I mean, how daft of me to not expect I'd suddenly be required to install additional software I didn't need yesterday. Well now I have a game I can't launch unless I give Denuvo Anti-cheat permission to install (which it needs because already covered, ring 0). Which I have absolutely no intention of doing.

 

Currently 3 refund requests automatically closed because more than 2 hours played and I've got a generic help request open awaiting an actual human being. The really sour taste is that if it had been bundled on release I would have nope'd out there and then, either not buying or cancelling the install and taking the immediate refund with the game unplayed.

[divito]

13 hours ago, JoostinOnline said:

If pirates and cheaters didn't exist, there would be no market for Denuvo products.

Kind of putting the cart before the horse there.

Piracy is a market correction and has always been. It gained notoriety not because you could get free music or software, but was because of its innovation towards a new consumer paradigm. If any of the major labels (or software companies) had the interest and foresight into tackling real consumer problems, something like Napster might not have taken off the way it did. 

As for cheaters, some of that comes down to engineering. If you make a multiplayer game, a competitive game, someone trying to bend rules or find ways to be better will be inevitable.

[jagdtigger]

2 hours ago, JoostinOnline said:

Show me some hard evidence that companies actually lose money with DRM.

99.9% of games cracked at day 1.....  At that point anything they spent on it is a loss. Besides even the companies have no real proof if it even works, just a counter example at CDPR how you dont need it to make some pretty huge sales.

 

/EDIT

And just to add vinegar to the injury i am myself have to pirate some games even though i own them legally. It either uses some "you can activate x times" bullcrap or the activation servers are down. So yeah, in short: DRM needs to die.

Edited May 16, 2020 by jagdtigger

[Koeshi]

31 minutes ago, Hakemon said:

Does this mean then on a single player game I couldn't even use god mode if I wanted to or does this only pertain to multiplayer games?

At the moment they are saying that it only applies in multiplayer, so cheats in singleplayer will be detected but not stopped.

[kelvinhall05]

Cheaters are gonna cheat either way. This does nothing to stop them. All it does is make the game completely unplayable on platforms that aren't Windows and just makes everyone annoyed.

[Jaxseven]

This really pissed me off to see this not only because it's super scummy to implement a kernel level Anti-Cheat program for a game no one talked about the multiplayer for well after the refund window closes, but also because Doom has been sort of the showcase for DXVK Linux gaming. There was even a sale on the game the week prior to this happening! Confession, I haven't finished Doom 2016 because I have a massive backlog and I began my transition to Linux part of the way through the game. I held off buying it because I've recently gotten into retro collecting as I'm nostalgic for plug and play consoles. I already felt like I was relenting control of my own computer when I would reboot into Windows to be able to play a multiplayer game like Dead by Daylight, but now another game with kernel level access for the excuse to crack down on cheaters? Sorry, I'll take the cheaters over losing any more control over my PC. It's the exact reason I switched to Linux in the first place.

[Brooksie359]

20 hours ago, JoostinOnline said:

Blame pirates and cheaters. People like to say it only punishes legitimate customers, but Denuvo costs money. Publishers wouldn't pay for it if it didn't return their investment by a large amount.

This makes no sense. They already cracked the game because it didn't release with this stuff and that will only make people more inclined to pirate the version that doesn't have this cancer attached to it. 

[JoostinOnline]

6 hours ago, KaitouX said:

Can you show any evidence that they win more money with DRM? There's no proof for neither, but going by the fact that there are games that "leaked" without Denuvo/other DRMs and still sold really well, i have my doubts on that idea that DRM would help sales in any measurable way, and as a consumer I obviously want the option that doesn't fuck me.

Yes. Billion dollar companies, who never want to spend money on anything unless it at least returns its investment, keep buying it.  This isn't a free product that you can add on after.

5 hours ago, jagdtigger said:

99.9% of games cracked at day 1..... 

No they aren't.  And again, show me actual proof, not your made up statistics.

[Koeshi]

1 hour ago, JoostinOnline said:

No they aren't.  And again, show me actual proof, not your made up statistics.

Yes he is exaggerating, but this from 2019 gives a good example of how long it takes to crack Denuvo games:

Rage 2 cracked: Day 0 (non-Denuvo .exe uploaded)

Metro Exodus cracked: Day 4

Devil May Cry 5 cracked: Day 0 (non-Denuvo .exe uploaded)

Resident Evil 2 cracked: Day 6

Far Cry New Dawn cracked: Day 6

Ace Combat 7 cracked: Day 13

 

https://www.pcgamer.com/denuvo-cracks-2019/

[JoostinOnline]

23 minutes ago, Koeshi said:

Yes he is exaggerating, but this from 2019 gives a good example of how long it takes to crack Denuvo games:

Rage 2 cracked: Day 0 (non-Denuvo .exe uploaded)

Metro Exodus cracked: Day 4

Devil May Cry 5 cracked: Day 0 (non-Denuvo .exe uploaded)

Resident Evil 2 cracked: Day 6

Far Cry New Dawn cracked: Day 6

Ace Combat 7 cracked: Day 13

 

https://www.pcgamer.com/denuvo-cracks-2019/

They are getting better at it, but again, my point remains. If the cost of Denuvo was higher than the estimated cost of lost purchases, nobody would buy it. Of course there are some cool companies who decide to eat the cost of any potential sales in exchange for the community's goodwill, but that's not the same thing as proof of it being a waste of money.

 

Also, as anyone who's ever tried to pirate a Denuvo game knows, the cracked version runs significantly worse (I may or may not have tried it when I couldn't get my disc based version working). A cracked version doesn't mean Denuvo is removed, it means it's being counteracted. You also don't get any bug fixes.

 

If there were no cheaters, anti cheating software would be pointless, and if there were no piracy, anti piracy software would be pointless.

 

[Master Delta Chief]

48 minutes ago, JoostinOnline said:

If there were no cheaters, anti cheating software would be pointless, and if there were no piracy, anti piracy software would be pointless.

Never going to happen. Piracy is something that will always be there no matter what. I personally have much less of a problem with people pirating a game than cheaters. DRM's like Denuvo are known for causing problems by limiting not only the full potential performance of a game, but also the platform which is only going to be Windows. Linux and MacOS are left in the dark by Denuvo. It's a good thing that there are some gaming companies out there that release their games DRM-free in order to not limit the things I have pointed out earlier.