Thursday, October 12th 2017
Where Art Thou, Denuvo? Shadow of War DRM Cracked in Two Days
Denuvo has been one of the foremost DRM technologies in recent times. There have been a number of issues around this particular RM technology: unclear terms of service that didn't explain the use of this third party DRM, or reports of inconsistent and even degraded performance on Denuvo-protected games. While some of those points have since been corrected - there's no clear evidence of degraded performance with Denuvo anti-tamper on or off - and games' terms of service have been updated to include references to Denuvo anti-tamper being used, this is one of those technologies that has been more ill-received - kind of like SecuROM, back in the days.
Denuvo, however, has enjoyed some measure of success in the past, in that it has allowed games developers to see their products remain uncracked for longer periods of time that they would with other DRM technologies that are currently employed (like Steam, for instance). Developers and publishers say this allows them to see more fruits from their labor in that at least during that DRM-protected window, would-be pirates will likely make the jump towards a legitimate version of the game, instead of waiting for the DRM protection to be bypassed. Lately, though, its protections are being bypassed almost as fast as Steam's, which has been the case with Middle-Earth: Shadow of War - cracked two days after release. This is a prickly subject that usually neatly divides proponents of either DRM-free games, or those that really don't care, so long as it doesn't tamper with end-user experience. There are success cases for both fields - GOG on the DRM-free side of the fence and Steam on the other, for example - but this is clearly a debate that won't be settled any time soon.
Sources:
Crack Watch, User @ rdri on Reddit
Denuvo, however, has enjoyed some measure of success in the past, in that it has allowed games developers to see their products remain uncracked for longer periods of time that they would with other DRM technologies that are currently employed (like Steam, for instance). Developers and publishers say this allows them to see more fruits from their labor in that at least during that DRM-protected window, would-be pirates will likely make the jump towards a legitimate version of the game, instead of waiting for the DRM protection to be bypassed. Lately, though, its protections are being bypassed almost as fast as Steam's, which has been the case with Middle-Earth: Shadow of War - cracked two days after release. This is a prickly subject that usually neatly divides proponents of either DRM-free games, or those that really don't care, so long as it doesn't tamper with end-user experience. There are success cases for both fields - GOG on the DRM-free side of the fence and Steam on the other, for example - but this is clearly a debate that won't be settled any time soon.
43 Comments on Where Art Thou, Denuvo? Shadow of War DRM Cracked in Two Days
While PUGB did 16million only in Steam.
Denuvo does not guarantee sales. yes if game comes broken and bad.
but Denuvo guarantee higher sales, if game well made and uncrackable.
We have bigger problems like online only games, without single player for same price as The Witcher 3 or loot boxes and P2W that is much worse than software that does nothing to ur PC.
If you are crying about some protection software and how it's breaking ur privacy, you should first disconnect ur self from the Internet and live in the Cave.
But I won't blame companies for trying.
Too bad publishers are unlikely to ever go back to physical when digital offers them more control for less money.
I'm not saying that DRM helps sales. Quite the opposite. Just saying that that IS the way they see it, whether right or wrong. It is true that DRM free AAA titles from companies like CDP can still sell millions without DRM just by making a good product. On the other hand, the whole "If they make good games, they won't get pirated and people will pay for good games" argument is silly... Why would people pirate garbage games and not good games? A pirate is going to pirate software that he wants whether it's good or bad. If anything, bad software gets pirated LESS, because nobody wants it. Best case scenario, piracy has no effect on sales. But it's just naive to say that "If you make a good game, people will pay for it and not pirate." That's basically saying that pirates only pirate crappy games. And that just isn't the case. It doesn't even make sense.Of course it isn't immoral to wait for a sale. You didn't make them drop the price. They agreed to sell it to you at a discounted rate because it's older. You didn't do anything wrong.
And they wouldn't drop the price if they knew they could sell it at full price. Like GTA5 was full price for a long time. There's just less demand for those other games. And demand determines real worth. Not the initial price.
These days developers divert substantial amount of resources to anti-piracy (DRM) yet still can't stop those seasoned pirates. The downsides for doing that are less creative, poorly optimised and bug ridden games. Why can't they understand that if they focused more on the actual games instead of spending hours on implementing some intrusive, performance/experience degrading DRMs, they would get more support from their players?
If piracy were a real problem the industry would've died instead of growing substantially. Real piracy doesn't seem to be much of an issue these days outside the odd incident of fraudulently purchased keys popping up time to time.Absorbing and gutting seasoned developers also doesn't help things either. Publishers don't want to stop chasing easy money or lose their classic scapegoat though.
I used to buy Deluxe editions to games, for half that price, that were at least 100x time better games, that include also collectibles, soundtrack CDs, nice printed manual book, lather maps, etc.
Ex:
Diablo, Diablo II, Curse of Monkey Island, GTA, etc, etc...
Nowadays, "deluxe" or "gold editions" means, some crappy useless DLCs and....that's it?????
I heard that this DRM has been cracked in some cases in less than 12 hours.
As for this game i don't give a flying fck with it's BS loot boxes which you have to do a terrible grind for the true ending or pay for it.
Question is how long does it need to hold up before being cracked, company may have some kind of agreement on how many hours\days which is expected.
Back in the day, Wolfenstein (and probably many others) became a hit months after its release. Because people played it, found it awesome and the word spread. These days, it's the other way around: PR makes a title appear awesome and dupe people into buying before they know what they get.
Too bad the game itself sucked.