The Denuvo DRM Thread

[tmux]

Games as a service...

Fuck off. What does that mean exactly? Steam Early Access? Meaning the service they make you is that you get to pay for the game to sit in pre-alpha for several years and then get cancelled? What a service!

It usually means online multiplayer games, although the term might also be used for single player games that update with new content so frequently that pirating them would be stupid, or for single player games with microtransactions.

Yeah, if there's one thing that attracts people to videogames it's microtransactions in games you paid for.

 

[Infinitron]

Yeah, if there's one thing that attracts people to videogames it's microtransactions in games you paid for.

Well, many of the "good game with tons of fans liking them" that you mentioned above happen to be online games these days.

I'm not a believer in the effectiveness of DRM, but I hope nobody has any illusions that now that the battle against DRM has been won, we're going to get lots of COOL DRM-FREE GAMES FOR REAL GAMERS now.

"Denuvo is dead - beware the dawn of the PUBG age."

 

[tmux]

I'm not a believer in the effectiveness of DRM, but I hope nobody has any illusions that now that the battle against DRM has been won, we're going to get lots of COOL DRM-FREE GAMES FOR REAL GAMERS now.

Nice false declaration of victory, mr. industry shill. Why don't you crawl back into whatever israeli hole you crawled out of? Pirates always win - they always get the best content, hassle-free, with zero limitations, no artificial scarcity, and on their own terms. We will be getting that, charge-free, for the foreseeable future, and whatever microtransaction-infested shit you're talking about, it's very likely obnoxious and unplayable.

 

[Infinitron]

Joined:
Friday

 

[Abu Antar]

Voksi said Denuvo adds 30-40 percent more CPU requirements, from tests he did. I wonder does Prey still use Denuvo?

Is this about Assassin's Creed: Origins? They have another layer of protection over Denuvo.

 

[Astral Rag]

+ Uturd and also Steam if you buy the game in Gabe's store.

 

[Astral Rag]

Assassins Creed Origin DRM Hammers Gamers’ CPUs

Assassin's Creed Origins gamers are reporting massive CPU utilization. While the game is said to be quite resource-hungry already, game cracker Voksi informs TorrentFreak that anti-piracy efforts are to blame. With Denuvo in trouble, Ubisoft has called in reinforcements which are reportedly dragging down all but the most powerful machines. "It's anti-consumer and a disgusting move," he says.

There’s a war taking place on the Internet. On one side: gaming companies, publishers, and anti-piracy outfits. On the other: people who varying reasons want to play and/or test games for free.

While these groups are free to battle it out in a manner of their choosing, innocent victims are getting caught up in the crossfire. People who pay for their games without question should be considered part of the solution, not the problem, but whether they like it or not, they’re becoming collateral damage in an increasingly desperate conflict.

For the past several days, some players of the recently-released Assassin’s Creed Origins have emerged as what appear to be examples of this phenomenon.

“What is the normal CPU usage for this game?” a user asked on Steam forums. “I randomly get between 60% to 90% and I’m wondering if this is too high or not.”

The individual reported running an i7 processor, which is no slouch. However, for those running a CPU with less oomph, matters are even worse. Another gamer, running an i5, reported a 100% load on all four cores of his processor, even when lower graphics settings were selected in an effort to free up resources.

“It really doesn’t seem to matter what kind of GPU you are using,” another complained. “The performance issues most people here are complaining about are tied to CPU getting maxed out 100 percent at all times. This results in FPS [frames per second] drops and stutter. As far as I know there is no workaround.”

So what could be causing these problems? Badly configured machines? Terrible coding on the part of the game maker?

According to Voksi, whose ‘Revolt’ team cracked Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus before its commercial release last week, it’s none of these. The entire problem is directly connected to desperate anti-piracy measures.

As widely reported (1,2), the infamous Denuvo anti-piracy technology has been taking a beating lately. Cracking groups are dismantling it in a matter of days, sometimes just hours, making the protection almost pointless. For Assassin’s Creed Origins, however, Ubisoft decided to double up, Voksi says.

“Basically, Ubisoft have implemented VMProtect on top of Denuvo, tanking the game’s performance by 30-40%, demanding that people have a more expensive CPU to play the game properly, only because of the DRM. It’s anti-consumer and a disgusting move,” he told TorrentFreak.

Voksi says he knows all of this because he got an opportunity to review the code after obtaining the binaries for the game. Here’s how it works.

While Denuvo sits underneath doing its thing, it’s clearly vulnerable to piracy, given recent advances in anti-anti-piracy technology. So, in a belt-and-braces approach, Ubisoft opted to deploy another technology – VMProtect – on top.

VMProtect is software that protects other software against reverse engineering and cracking. Although the technicalities are different, its aims appear to be somewhat similar to Denuvo, in that both seek to protect underlying systems from being subverted.

“VMProtect protects code by executing it on a virtual machine with non-standard architecture that makes it extremely difficult to analyze and crack the software. Besides that, VMProtect generates and verifies serial numbers, limits free upgrades and much more,” the company’s marketing reads.

VMProtect and Denuvo didn’t appear to be getting on all that well earlier this year but they later settled their differences. Now their systems are working together, to try and solve the anti-piracy puzzle.

“It seems that Ubisoft decided that Denuvo is not enough to stop pirates in the crucial first days [after release] anymore, so they have implemented an iteration of VMProtect over it,” Voksi explains.

“This is great if you are looking to save your game from those pirates, because this layer of VMProtect will make Denuvo a lot more harder to trace and keygen than without it. But if you are a legit customer, well, it’s not that great for you since this combo could tank your performance by a lot, especially if you are using a low-mid range CPU. That’s why we are seeing 100% CPU usage on 4 core CPUs right now for example.”

The situation is reportedly so bad that some users are getting the dreaded BSOD (blue screen of death) due to their machines overheating after just an hour or two’s play. It remains unclear whether these crashes are indeed due to the VMProtect/Denuvo combination but the perception is that these anti-piracy measures are at the root of users’ CPU utilization problems.

While gaming companies can’t be blamed for wanting to protect their products, there’s no sense in punishing legitimate consumers with an inferior experience. The great irony, of course, is that when Assassin’s Creed gets cracked (if that indeed happens anytime soon), pirates will be the only ones playing it without the hindrance of two lots of anti-piracy tech battling over resources.

The big question now, however, is whether the anti-piracy wall will stand firm. If it does, it raises the bizarre proposition that future gamers might need to buy better hardware in order to accommodate anti-piracy technology.

And people worry about bitcoin mining……?

 

[Anomander Rake]

Is it a bad thing that honest people are getting punished though? People should start understanding that buying a game sometimes is endorsing shady practices, including getting punished indirectly by the publisher themselves that do not understand that piracy is an evil that will never get purged.

And if someone wish to play a protected game, there is no haste on doing so. Just wait for crackers to do their job, wait a year or so to get a mostly bug free game, and you win by paying even less. But you got to have a brain to do that.

So when I read about these people getting problems I honestly enjoy it and I get a lot of pleasure, reading how fool they are and that they were punished for buying a game on day one. Yeah, thanks for betatesting it for me and squashing the bugs for me for 60 €. They deserve it

 

[made]

Woooo now I can finally pirate all the great denuvo-protected games of recent years! Oh... wait...

 

[AwesomeButton]

Yeah, if there's one thing that attracts people to videogames it's microtransactions in games you paid for.

Well, many of the "good game with tons of fans liking them" that you mentioned above happen to be online games these days.

I'm not a believer in the effectiveness of DRM, but I hope nobody has any illusions that now that the battle against DRM has been won, we're going to get lots of COOL DRM-FREE GAMES FOR REAL GAMERS now.

"Denuvo is dead - beware the dawn of the PUBG age."

Brofisted for Thief reference.

 

[ColonelTeacup]

or games as a service.

Games as a service...

Fuck off. What does that mean exactly? Steam Early Access? Meaning the service they make you is that you get to pay for the game to sit in pre-alpha for several years and then get cancelled? What a service!

Yeah, sure, the industry lived with rampant piracy so far, but now, EXACTLY FUCKING NOW, it will die because Assassin's Creed will be cracked!
And if companies can't survive unless they sell their hundred million cinematic experience to half the Earth's population then they deserve to die and good riddance.

There are several different ideas for what it means. There is online multiplayer, as well as constantly updated single player games to make pirating pointless, most likely paying for new expansions, like Destiny, or massive amounts of loot boxes like Overwatch. Although the most common explanation i've heard is that these are simply stepping stones to actual games as a service, which will be renting games, or sections of games for a year or so, play and beat it once or twice, and then your lease expires and you need to pay for it again to play it.

 

[J1M]

"x as a service" means you keep paying for access to it.

 

[AwesomeButton]

Ever heard of Origin Access?

 

[jaydee2k]

XBOX GAME PASS

 

[fantadomat]

I am curious if those Austrian cunts are in panic,seeing how their stolen protection is being assfucked by a bunch of jobless mates.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.pcgamesn.com/denuvo-anti-piracy-cracked

"Denuvo-protected games will continue to get cracked faster and faster," piracy group says

Denuvo markets themselves as the “#1 application protection and Anti-Piracy Technology” in the world. Their aim is to “provide the longest crack-free release window compared to competitors,” protecting new games from hacking and piracy during their opening weeks and months, when sales are arguably most important and piracy is likely to have the biggest impact.

A year or two ago, Denuvo delivered on that promise. Their anti-tamper protection was so watertight that piracy groups were abandoning the scene, finding it impossible to crack Just Cause 3 quickly enough to remain relevant. For a while, Denuvo’s Anti-Tamper technology was doing exactly what the company hoped. As Denuvo’s sales and marketing director Thomas Goebl told us last year, that’s not stopping the pirates forever, but “to help publishers to secure the initial sales windows of their games, hence delaying piracy.”

In late 2015 to early 2016, Denuvo were delaying the work of pirates by weeks or months as they tried to get into games like FIFA 15, Dragon Age: Inquisition, and Lords of the Fallen. When Doom was released in May 2016, the anti-tamper technology was eventually removed from the game after it held up for four months, which Denuvo’s co-founder Robert Hernandez told Kotaku was “an impressive accomplishment for such a high-profile game.”

Since that time, however, the amount of time taken to crack a game using Denuvo has been falling. Resident Evil 7 was cracked within seven days of release, and in recent weeks, the time it has taken for Denuvo to be ‘beaten’ has fallen to mere days. On some occasions, workarounds have been available within hours of release; Middle-earth: Shadow of War was available inside 24 hours, as was Total War: Warhammer 2.

Pirates have been able to crack Denuvo so much faster because they have developed a new method of attack. Previously, games were cracked by a process of reverse engineering - reversing an executable, before modifying the game’s code to allow you to bypass, delete, or emulate DRM. Denuvo’s tech made that approach nearly impossible to achieve within a time frame short enough to be worthwhile for piracy groups.

A scene member who goes by the moniker Voksi told us that “[piracy] scene groups have found a way to get past [Denuvo’s] encryption and keygen files in just a day. They do not crack Denuvo, they simply keygen it, so Denuvo thinks nothing is wrong on the pirated version.” What that means is groups have found a means to replicate Denuvo-sanctioned keys for games, which can be churned out within hours of the game’s release, with little opportunity for Denuvo to fight back.

Despite its period of unparalleled success 18 months ago, Denuvo is facing obsolescence if it cannot dramatically change its approach to protection, which is why Ubisoft brought in a second level of protection intended to defend Denuvo itself with Assassin’s Creed Origins. The mod team on the Crackwatch subreddit told us that “we would say that the scene groups have figured out Denuvo and that their incremental patches might only distract them for a few days until they worked around those as well. In that case, unless there’s fundamental change in the way Denuvo works, which is not going to happen anytime soon, given that it took Denuvo months to upgrade from version three to version four, Denuvo protected games will continue to get cracked faster and faster.”

We reached out to Denuvo multiple times for comment on this story, but received no response. We also contacted representatives from Monolith, Bethesda, Creative Assembly, High Voltage, Respawn, Io Interactive, and Neopica, but they either did not respond, or declined to comment.

 

[Zenith]

Man, this thread's first post sure aged well.

 

[fantadomat]

I was just thinking about making a meme of how some pirate group is fucking denuvo in the form of a fat ugly dwarf,and then i realised that it will be a big insult to the creckers. Who would want to fuck a fat ugly dwarf,also denuvo doesn't go being some good looking slut.

 

[DemonKing]

https://www.kotaku.com.au/2017/11/assassins-creed-origins-unpirated-after-a-month/

The second coming? Seems like the latest version is holding up.

 

[abija]

Must have sold like hotcakes on PC, since all pirated games are actual sales and all that.

 

[cvv]

Not only does the game run on a fucking virtual machine, it continuously calls a "u cheating bro?" function.
It is theorized that this is what causes the game to be so obscenely CPU demanding. Shows how willing publishers are to fuck over paying customers.

What is an "obscenely" CPU demanding? I have a bog standard i5. Simple indie games take about 30% of my CPU. AC: Syndicate took 60% of my CPU, Ass Defect Andromeda 65%. Origin is taking 70%. Is that obscene?

Crackorz and anti-DRM hipsters are theorizing all sorts of shit. Most of the stuff that was said by crackorz about Denuvo turned out to be autistic twaddle (it destroys HDD!1!!).

To be honest, nothing is as comical these days as anti-DRM hipsters. People will make up the most preposterous horseshit to rationalize warez lol.

 

[GrainWetski]

You'd have to be retarded to be pro DRM.

 

[cvv]

You'd have to be retarded to be pro DRM.

10 years ago I was extremelly against DRM, as was almost everybody. With annoying shit like Tages or downright invasive cancer like Starforce yeah, it would've been retarded to be pro-DRM.

But today? When only Denuvo exists? When was the last time Denuvo gave you trouble? When you even knew the game you bought HAS Denuvo without googling it up?

Why exactly do people still identify as "anti-DRMers" today if not as a form of retarded hipsterism or virtue signalling or to keep access to warez?

 

[fantadomat]

 

[J1M]

You'd have to be retarded to be pro DRM.

10 years ago I was extremelly against DRM, as was almost everybody. With annoying shit like Tages or downright invasive cancer like Starforce yeah, it would've been retarded to be pro-DRM.

But today? When only Denuvo exists? When was the last time Denuvo gave you trouble? When you even knew the game you bought HAS Denuvo without googling it up?

Why exactly do people still identify as "anti-DRMers" today if not as a form of retarded hipsterism or virtue signalling or to keep access to warez?

The biggest problem with current DRM is the massive performance hit it causes for paying customers. It literally creates a worse gaming experience if you pay for it.