I haven't pirated games since I was in highshool, but this nonsense has resulted in the worst UX for games I have paid for - with no recourse on my part. I guess it's like Cloudflare: some people have to suffer because other people don't behave nicely
I also haven't pirated games since I was a child, but I run Linux, and I game on Linux, whether desktop or on my ROG Ally (Bazzite).
The experience for me, when I buy a game, is that I either don't buy one with DRM, or, I buy one that _might_ work, and then I spend a little while trying to get the right version of Proton that runs correctly, and get banned / blocked temporarily for switching my machine identifiers or something too much.
It really is a sick joke that the experience for gaming, music and video is all far, far better for those who _don't_ pay than for those who do.
> It really is a sick joke that the experience for gaming, music and video is all far, far better for those who _don't_ pay than for those who do.
Denuvo is effective enough that if a game has it, it is almost impossible to pirate. So in most cases, it is either pay or do not play the game at all.
There was one key player who knew how to crack Denuvo DRM. They went by the name Empress but haven't cracked anything in the past year, and also mentally deranged, often including very transphobic rants in the NFO file of the torrents they release.
> it is either pay or do not play the game at all
That's still a net win for the pirate I'd argue; for them it's zero steps to "don't play the game at all", for someone like myself it's pay->waste time trying to get it run and fail->refund/no-refund.
The wasting of time is because you are using an unsupported operating system. It sounds like if you switched to one you wouldn't have to waste time since the OS would support everything the game needs.
There is quite a bit of anecdotal evidence that many Denuvo-protected games run worse on the recommended hardware and O/S until the Denuvo protection is removed. The end result is a worse day-one experience for the people who pay the most than for either the pirates (if any) or the people who wait for the game to fall out of the early hype phase.
It feels optimistic to think that the DRM works perfectly on every possible configuration running a supported OS though, does it not?
Just in case that's helpful, there is a Steam curator that marks games protected with Denuvo, to make that fact more visible before you buy them. https://store.steampowered.com/curator/26095454-Denuvo-Watch...
>some people have to suffer because other people don't behave nicely
It's self fulfilling though. Some people won't behave nicely if a game comes with Denuvo.
What part of the experience suffers from Denuvo? I've had games with Denuvo and then had Denuvo removed and at least in my limited personal experience there has been no discernible difference.
I can understand the argument against DRM in general and owning things you buy, but that seems like a different problem.
Interesting. For how effective Denuvo is the impact is negligible. Less than 1% average framerate and seconds of loading time.
The disk space usage is weird, but 100mb to 300mb executables is irrelevant in the age of terabyte drives and 50gb game installs.
Nice to confirm that there was no way I was ever going to notice its impact.
The clever thing here is that Denuvo is only used to protect certain functions, not the entire game. The functions it protects should be functions that run infrequently, but contain enough critical game logic that they can’t just be replaced wholesale by a cracker. I believe the game developer themselves chooses what functions to protect. If they protect too much (or protect the wrong functions) performance can suffer, whereas if they don’t protect enough, the crackers’ job is too easy.
I wonder if Denuvo the company charges more or less depending on how much function protection the developer chooses or if it is a flat rate.
From the "analysis" I gather it works by encrypting the .exe and the key's are server-side. The hardware info is used to further encrypt it.
I think the goal should be to fool the checks rather than remove the encryption which would be a nightmare. CPUID can output whatever you want, it just reads MSR's. I'm sure there are possibilities to use kernel drivers to make windows functions also read out whatever you want.
You need (1) a valid license file and (2) a list of all the checks that are made and (3) some way to override the output of each check. Furthermore, you want to ideally do this in a way that makes your cracked software actually deployable on random computers, so you don’t want to do any heavy kernel-mode hooking because people won’t be able to use your crack.
Oh and if you actually do distribute a crack that uses a stolen license file, they’ll ban the heck out of the hardware identified in the license (and probably any user/account/Steam IDs they manage to hoover up), which will no doubt be an annoyance to a cracker.
> Less than 1% average framerate
Where did you see this? I quickly skipped through both videos and saw 5-20% difference in average framerates, 20%+ difference in 1% lows which is what makes a game feel choppy/laggy, and 5-10+ seconds difference in loading times.
And going by the techniques explained in the OP those numbers make complete sense, that's the cost I would expect for the advanced obfuscation/protection Denuvo uses.