Dishonored 2 cracked by SteamPunks, could mean end of denuvo's current itteration.

[TetraSky]

11 hours ago, tlink said:

and two, it could potentially contain something nefarious besides the means to play Dishonored 2 for free.

And this, is the part that worries me.

When something is locked down like that, by pirates, assume that it's probably going to infect your machine with something else.

[Cheezdoodlez]

14 minutes ago, TetraSky said:

And this, is the part that worries me.

When something is locked down like that, by pirates, assume that it's probably going to infect your machine with something else.

Yeah there's a possibility that it contains something nasty.

 

But there's also the possibility that it's locked down so denuvo can't analyze it and counter it with a simple fix. Or just so the other groups just can't copy the code.. 

[jaggysnake57]

denuvo has some life left in it yet but it looks bad for them

[Zodiark1593]

What sort of encryption scheme does Denuvo use again. AES? 

[Doobeedoo]

Denuvo death approaches.

[mach]

16 hours ago, Blebekblebek said:

It's bad for consumers because it doesn't give benefit whatsoever and yet consumer are the one who's paying for it.

 

That's true to most other DRM too not a denuvo exclusive. I don't find denuvo particularly more hateful than many other anti-piracy mechanisms.

To be clear I hate DRM. Especially those make me login to a thousand fucking accounts before I can launch the game while the pirated version is just click and play. I pay yet I suffer that just doesn't make sense. 

12 hours ago, tlink said:

because you never really own the game as long as its there. you can only use it if they can confirm you are using it like they want you to use it.

17 hours ago, Jito463 said:

However, if I'm not mistaken, it has a "phone-home" activation system.  If those activation servers go down, then any games using Denuvo will no longer be playable.

Same story with every steam games. (and all those require internet for verification) No internet/ server down and you own the games no more. 

Offline mode in steam used to work well. But I recently observed that csgo closes itself in offline with bot match after I lost internet connection. (which is common in my area). Seriously they won't even allow me messing with bots...

[suicidalfranco]

just buy games from gog, and who knows, maybe one day it will be as big as steam and finally, consoles aside, drm will die on the pc gaming scene. 

[SteveGrabowski0]

On 6/8/2017 at 5:39 PM, Doramius said:

I think there is a place and use for DRM, but I do agree that it reaches far beyond what it should handle, and hinders more than it promotes.  It's just additional crap that the MPAA and RIAA want to use for them to legally rape your wallet, under their interpretation of copyright law.

The main problem I have with DRM is I feel like I don't own the game if it has uncracked DRM. By that I mean that if I want to play the game ten years from now and Denuvo doesn't have their authentication servers up anymore, I'd be shit out of luck. That's why I download cracked versions of games I buy. I'd have no problem with DRM like Denuvo if it would be removed say two years after release when the publisher has made the vast majority of the money they'd make from the game. At least for single player games. Obviously I don't think say Rockstar should be on the hook for paying for servers for GTA V so people who didn't pay for the game could play on them. But at least for single player games I think two years would be a good compromise between ensuring studios get paid for their work while players get to own what they paid for.

[SpaceGhostC2C]

What?? Are you telling me DRM can be cracked?? But I though it was the ultimate unconquerable barrier against piracy!! Aren't you all just surprised? 

/s

 

On 6/9/2017 at 0:39 AM, Doramius said:

I think there is a place and use for DRM

Hell?  

On 6/9/2017 at 4:43 AM, mach said:

Can someone shed some light on how denuvo is bad for the experience?

All these phone-home DRM systems break the golden rule of copyright enforcement: put legal users on a better position than illegal ones. As others have stated, you need to remain connected, their servers need to remain up and running, and you have to run a few more background bloatwares to enjoy your game.

Back in the day, with the dial-a-pirate style protection, or the "word 23, page 58 of the manual" style, pirates needed not just to copy the files, but also get photocopies of bulky manuals, drawings, etc, which were never as easy to use as the actual thing (because of the quality of a copy of a copy of a copy, among other things - distance to the original mattered a lot). But now we've moved to a system that imposes a higher burden (whether minimal or substantial, still higher) on the legal users than on the pirates. Sure, there is a cost to cracking things, but the cracker groups pay it, not the users. For the users, pirated copies are just download, install, play.

 

On 6/9/2017 at 4:43 AM, mach said:

The only time I got screwed by DRM was when fable 3 won't load my save because I did a windows reinstall.

There you have an example: that would not be an issue if you were using an illegal copy. How can that be? You should always be better off with a legal copy, but that's not how these systems work.

[jagdtigger]

Nice. DRM has to die... Instead of playing whac-a-mole game they should be focusing on delivering a good game and price it reasonably. Most pirates wouldnt buy the game anyway... (not to mention who dont have/have a very limited internet access so always online solutions are very bad for them)

[SteveGrabowski0]

16 hours ago, SpaceGhostC2C said:

Back in the day, with the dial-a-pirate style protection, or the "word 23, page 58 of the manual" style, pirates needed not just to copy the files, but also get photocopies of bulky manuals, drawings, etc, which were never as easy to use as the actual thing (because of the quality of a copy of a copy of a copy, among other things - distance to the original mattered a lot). But now we've moved to a system that imposes a higher burden (whether minimal or substantial, still higher) on the legal users than on the pirates.

Man I hate that style of copy protection. I remember I bought this great DOS baseball game called Earl Weaver Baseball in maybe 1987, and it had this wheel thing where it would give you a row and seat number and then you'd spin the wheel around to show the code associated with that seat to start a new game. Of course I lost this stupid wheel over the last 30 years and now I can't play it any more. 

 

But even when I had that wheel it was a pain in the ass to find the code every time I started a new game. 

[ThinkWithPortals]

On 2017-6-9 at 0:09 AM, shadowbyte said:

yep, played the first and loved it

played the demo for the second and it was fantastic

going to pick it up during the Steam sale

I got it about a week and a half ago and I've already finished it twice and am planning my third playthrough  Performance issues notwithstanding, it's an outstanding game, you should love it. It doesn't seem to run as badly as it used to (I stay mostly above 60fps at Medium with some antialiasing with a 4690K+RX480 @ 2560x1080)

 

The latest patch was suspicious though. Came out at almost the same time as Denuvo being cracked and the changelog was just "various optimisations"...

[Doramius]

On 6/11/2017 at 2:31 AM, jagdtigger said:

Nice. DRM has to die... Instead of playing whac-a-mole game they should be focusing on delivering a good game and price it reasonably. Most pirates wouldnt buy the game anyway... (not to mention who dont have/have a very limited internet access so always online solutions are very bad for them)

Agreed.  The current DRM needs to be ended.  Companies seem to push too hard on profit.  But it is a company, and people DO need to be paid for their time and work.  Pricing it reasonably does have to include those who work on it.  

Many times I agree with @SpaceGhostC2C and feel it's existence should burn in hell with all the lawyers wanting to enforce it to an extreme.

However, Copyright needs MAJOR restructure, and limiting the time to which they can receive marked up profits is definitely something that should be implemented.  I know there are already time limits, but they are way too long, and they keep getting extended because of an animated mouse that is recognized by the whole world and lives in the "Happiest place on Earth". 

[Snadzies]

I can't really blame the developers for adding in DRM to their games, piracy is huge and if I were responsible for ensuring I and hundreds or thousands of employees go paid so they could support their families I'd add DRM to my game as well.

 

I don't buy into that "Oh well most of those pirating the game wouldn't have bought it anyway".

I'm sure many people who pirate games would eventually buy the game as the prices dropped further and further.

And for the rest who wouldn't buy the game at any price? Fuck'em.

You shouldn't get to play the game if you don't pay for it.

[Jito463]

2 hours ago, Snadzies said:

I can't really blame the developers for adding in DRM to their games, piracy is huge and if I were responsible for ensuring I and hundreds or thousands of employees go paid so they could support their families I'd add DRM to my game as well.

 

I don't buy into that "Oh well most of those pirating the game wouldn't have bought it anyway".

I'm sure many people who pirate games would eventually buy the game as the prices dropped further and further.

And for the rest who wouldn't buy the game at any price? F***'em.

You shouldn't get to play the game if you don't pay for it.

I don't disagree with you.  The problem is, DRM does absolutely nothing to prevent piracy and very little to inhibit it.  It would be one thing if the DRM was only used at launch during the initial sales, but was later patched out.  Very few developers actually do that, though.

[SpaceGhostC2C]

3 hours ago, Snadzies said:

I can't really blame the developers for adding in DRM to their games, piracy is huge and if I were responsible for ensuring I and hundreds or thousands of employees go paid so they could support their families I'd add DRM to my game as well.

Why? Which evidence of DRM being an effective tool to deter piracy and "ensure those people's jobs" would make you take that decision? What, as a rational executive, would convince you that the anti-piracy benefits outweigh the potential discontent among your paying customers?

Or would it just be another case of "we thought of this with piracy in mind, so it must be useful, don't tell me numbers!"?

 

(On a side note, the gaming industry is more profitable and moves more money than ever, so it's not exactly at risk, piracy or not. But that's besides the point, although it provides some balance to the appeal to emotions fallacy).

 

 

21 hours ago, Doramius said:

However, Copyright needs MAJOR restructure, and limiting the time to which they can receive marked up profits is definitely something that should be implemented.  I know there are already time limits, but they are way too long, and they keep getting extended because of an animated mouse that is recognized by the whole world and lives in the "Happiest place on Earth". 

You can go even further: we have grown so used to copyright, that we sometimes forget it is a relatively modern artifact, and a separate concept from intellectual property, which is far older than copyright.

 

Intellectual property is about the author rights on his/her creative work, and violating it constitutes plagiarism. For centuries, plagiarism was really the only concern around IP. However, as we transitioned to industrialized societies and stronger market economies, all the IP-creating activity faced a major challenge from a market perspective: IP is a public good (which doesn't mean that is state-owned or anything like that, here the definition). As such, you can't typically make a profit out of it. However, IP was important for faster economic growth, not so much when it come to music or games, but clearly when we talk about inventions and industrial secrets. Hence, for the market forces to provide more IP, IP needed to be profitable somehow.

Simultaneously, the industrialization process brought with it mass production. Many of the applications of a particular IP involved products that could be mass-produced, although the technology involved in creating those products was still expensive and only affordable for large-scale operations. That's when the idea came about: let's reward new IP by giving its authors some form of economic benefit; in particular, let's grant creators a  monopoly over a certain good. Clearly, grating anyone who claimed to have written a song a monopoly on bread in New York wouldn't make sense. Instead, they could give a monopoly over the physical goods produced applying the relevant IP. Hence, if someone creates something nobody cares about, (s)he will still get nothing, whereas inventors of more valued stuff will get very profitable monopolies. Hence copyright was born: the monopoly rights over the production of copies of a physical good. It can be books, albums, medicines, dolls, etc. Anyone wanting to violate copyright would have to invest in the (expensive) mass-production technology and sell large quantities of illegal copies, which could be prosecuted with relatively ease.

 

The problem for some markets is technology changed in two ways: first, creating a copy of certain goods became cheaper and more small-scale friendly over time. Second, communications (internet) increased the possibilities to trade IP with others, and to ignore jurisdictions (remember: copyright is a state-granted monopoly over goods, and therefore its scope is in principle limited to the state granting said rights -then there are international treaties, etc). For some goods the technological change was extreme: the marginal cost of creating an MP3 file is practically zero, and even the total cost can be seen as zero as long as you were going to have a PC anyways. Same with games, and any other digital content: it's 100% creating the master cost, 0% creating a copy cost. And basically everyone has access to the technology to do it. It's a very, very different scenario than when copyright was born.

Hence, in many markets, copyright is simply obsolete. To the extent that the original goal (providing market incentives for IP creation) is still relevant, we will need to design new tools to provide financial incentives to IP creators in those markets, and perhaps we'll come up with something better for all markets.

[Snadzies]

2 hours ago, SpaceGhostC2C said:

Why? Which evidence of DRM being an effective tool to deter piracy and "ensure those people's jobs" would make you take that decision? What, as a rational executive, would convince you that the anti-piracy benefits outweigh the potential discontent among your paying customers?

Or would it just be another case of "we thought of this with piracy in mind, so it must be useful, don't tell me numbers!"?

 

3 hours ago, Jito463 said:

I don't disagree with you.  The problem is, DRM does absolutely nothing to prevent piracy and very little to inhibit it.  It would be one thing if the DRM was only used at launch during the initial sales, but was later patched out.  Very few developers actually do that, though.

 

So far these games that have Denovo seems to take 6 months to a year before they are cracked and those months are the most critical as those are when you have the best opportunity to sell the most games since it is new and exciting and the most people are talking about it.

There is also usually a sale of some sort during that time giving the game a nice secondary bump in sales.

 

You can't stop all piracy for ever, but if you can make it difficult enough for long enough I think you can make it worth it to have DRM in your games and other media and I think that is what Denovo is doing.

Heck, even after it is cracked it still prevents casual easy piracy, Fred from Idaho can't just upload his copy of a game to a file sharing site and give a link to all his friends.

Fred and his friends would have to navigate many sites looking for a cracked copy that is not infected with some virus, malware, ransomware and what not and that is enough to deter many people and get them to buy the game when it is at least on some $10-$20 Steam sale.

[Majestic]

I'm not sure why they do this. They could just do something like Serious Sam or Mirror's Edge and make the game impossible to play if it's pirated.

That way honest buyers don't have it the worst...

 

And for anyone that doesn't know. Mirror's Edge (original) had a slowdown right before a long jump, causing you to fall.

Serious Sam spawned an immortal monster that raped your HP in a few seconds.

[WereCat]

On 10. 6. 2017 at 2:59 PM, suicidalfranco said:

just buy games from gog, and who knows, maybe one day it will be as big as steam and finally, consoles aside, drm will die on the pc gaming scene. 

yea yea... except that many games are not on gog

[suicidalfranco]

4 minutes ago, WereCat said:

yea yea... except that many games are not on gog

are we even looking at the same store? 

[SpaceGhostC2C]

13 minutes ago, Snadzies said:

So far these games that have Denovo seems to take 6 months to a year before they are cracked

I thought would-be-pirates could wait that long for prices to come down if they had to obtain them legally  

13 minutes ago, Snadzies said:

and those months are the most critical as those are when you have the best opportunity to sell the most games since it is new and exciting and the most people are talking about it.

Well, that allows you to conjecture some effect, but my point remains: is this theory confirmed by evidence? I don't mean evidence than revenue is higher in that period, but evidence that games that use DRM generate more profits that those which don't, other things equal.

 

13 minutes ago, Snadzies said:

Heck, even after it is cracked it still prevents casual easy piracy, Fred from Idaho can't just upload his copy of a game to a file sharing site and give a link to all his friends.

That's so '90s... nobody gets their stuff from Fred these days  

 

13 minutes ago, Snadzies said:

Fred and his friends would have to navigate many sites looking for a cracked copy that is not infected with some virus, malware, ransomware and what not

I guess your misconceptions on this matter prove that you are indeed a very, very honest consumer when it comes to games 

 

7 minutes ago, WereCat said:

yea yea... except that many games are not on gog

And many are not in PC, many are not in PlayStation, many are not in XBOX, many are not in Linux, many are not in Mac... But you know, you can always not buy the games that aren't in the platform of your choice - that's how companies decide which platforms to serve.

[WereCat]

8 minutes ago, suicidalfranco said:

are we even looking at the same store? 

Most games I play or I am interested in are not on GOG, so saying "just buy from GOG" is not an option.

9 minutes ago, SpaceGhostC2C said:

And many are not in PC, many are not in PlayStation, many are not in XBOX, many are not in Linux, many are not in Mac... But you know, you can always not buy the games that aren't in the platform of your choice - that's how companies decide which platforms to serve.

Uh... obviously.

[suicidalfranco]

2 minutes ago, WereCat said:

Most games I play or I am interested in are not on GOG, so saying "just buy from GOG" is not an option.

Uh... obviously.

but when they are, you're better off buying them from GOG than Steam or Origin or cancer windows store. 

 

The Witcher 3 is on both (Steam and GOG), i got it from GOG cause no DRM is indeed a nice thing to have or not have should i say. Same with Tyranny, Torment, Crusaders King, Shadow Warrior 2, Sexy Brutale and many many more that are now growing my collection on gog and catching up to my steam library.

[Jito463]

45 minutes ago, Majestic said:

I'm not sure why they do this. They could just do something like Serious Sam or Mirror's Edge and make the game impossible to play if it's pirated.

That way honest buyers don't have it the worst...

 

And for anyone that doesn't know. Mirror's Edge (original) had a slowdown right before a long jump, causing you to fall.

Serious Sam spawned an immortal monster that raped your HP in a few seconds.

In order for that to work, there still needs to be DRM that must be cracked.  Otherwise, how does the game know if it's a pirated copy or not?  Also, they need to make sure it doesn't affect legitimate purchasers accidentally, such as the case of the exploding bases in C&C: Red Alert 2.

[Majestic]

14 minutes ago, Jito463 said:

In order for that to work, there still needs to be DRM that must be cracked.  Otherwise, how does the game know if it's a pirated copy or not?  Also, they need to make sure it doesn't affect legitimate purchasers accidentally, such as the case of the exploding bases in C&C: Red Alert 2.

Have it tied to a unique signature from the serial key. Duplicate = trololo 

I'm sure they can think of some interesting way to make sure it's genuine.