Friday, November 3rd 2017
"Scene Groups Have Figured Out Denuvo", Piracy Group Declares
Denuvo's fall from grace - and current thread of obsolescence waters - has been a long time coming for scene crackers and pirates. One of the only anti-tamper mechanisms to actually deter pirates in their cracking efforts as of late, Denuvo ushered in an era of unmitigated success upon the first months after its launch, by any measure. Marketed as a "best in class" solution, Denuvo's makers were smart enough to know that any kind of protection they made would be eventually surpassed by pirates' efforts - which is why they simply said that Denuvo's mission was to " (...) provide the longest crack-free release window compared to competitors." Looking to guarantee developers and publishers the arguably most important time-frame for new game releases and sales, Denuvo's sales and marketing director Thomas Goebl said that their aim was "to help publishers to secure the initial sales windows of their games, hence delaying piracy."
However, after massively successful initial anti-tamper efforts, which saw Denuvo-protected games going uncracked for months after release, the death knell seems to be sounding for the company's protection mechanism. As users have been noting, and as scene groups have been touting, "(...) Denuvo protected games will continue to get cracked faster and faster." The new methods no longer involve reverse-engineering a game's executable to strip a game of its DRM software; now "[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."
Perhaps the most dangerous indicator for Denuvo has been the inclusion of a second layer of DRM protection on the latest Assassin's Creed Origins, which makes use of VMProtect on top of Denuvo's Anti-Tamper. That a publisher has decided to invest twice in DRM, not fully trusting Denuvo's solution to handle the assault from pirates, is likely the clearest sign of a company that has seen its products fall out of favor. It likely signals an industry-wide eye-opener that Denuvo isn't fitting the bill anymore, which will certainly make it harder for the company to keep selling its services. After all, a couple of days of piracy protection likely isn't the kind of "early sales window" publishers are looking for when they pay for Denuvo's royalties, now is it?
Source:
PC Games N
Perhaps the most dangerous indicator for Denuvo has been the inclusion of a second layer of DRM protection on the latest Assassin's Creed Origins, which makes use of VMProtect on top of Denuvo's Anti-Tamper. That a publisher has decided to invest twice in DRM, not fully trusting Denuvo's solution to handle the assault from pirates, is likely the clearest sign of a company that has seen its products fall out of favor. It likely signals an industry-wide eye-opener that Denuvo isn't fitting the bill anymore, which will certainly make it harder for the company to keep selling its services. After all, a couple of days of piracy protection likely isn't the kind of "early sales window" publishers are looking for when they pay for Denuvo's royalties, now is it?
17 Comments on "Scene Groups Have Figured Out Denuvo", Piracy Group Declares
The problem is, the next big step against piracy, is the same that was taken 7 years ago: Some companies simply stop releasing their games on PC. Just wait and see. Any game is cracked in 1 day now. I´m on a private FTP that has all the game releases instantly, some even before the steam release. Reminds me of the 1990s and 2000s.
The commercial drive within gaming is sonething we have only seen as being counterproductive to qualiry and progress until now. Real innovation in gaming concepts and mechanics suffers from the presence of big publishers. Its the same way with modding as well, make it xommercial and the passion to make sonwthing special will be destroyed by the need for safe investing and profit margins.
Also it doesn´t make sense to have less companies releasing games on PC. The more companies, the better. More options, less exclusives. No platform should have exclusives.
Btw, now that you mentioned it, Call of Duty WW2 is a good game.
And I know Activision is the publisher, just like it is the publisher for call of duty wich is made by Treyarch, SledgeHammer and Infinity Ward. That doesn´t change anything. Call of Duty, Destiny, Warcraft, Heartstone, Diablo, etc, they all belong to activision. Your comment made no sense sorry. Activision is not a developer on any game. You said "market doesn´t need activision", wich is laughable considering the amount of PC players on Overwatch and World of Warcraft.
They're nothing but DLC infested, loot box cash grabs now and I'm not playing along anymore.
Fuck these money grabbing publishers.
The only good thing to come out of it is that it has removed my desire/need to upgrade to expensive new CPU's & GPU's in order to play them.
My current rig is going to last me a long,long,long while yet.
The fact is that big publishers really are no longer relevant by todays standards at all, with the emergence of crowd funding and the low requirements to actually publish a project. They serve no purpose except as a stakeholder. The only relevance they have are as license holders and for paying out dividends. Old boys networks 'managing' our gaming experiences and getting in the way of creativity and game content/longevity most of the time. Activision isn't the worst of the bunch, but it still represents dead weight.
Games nowdays, most of them comes to release with many many problems and bugs... something that wasn't tolerated a few years ago.
Publishers like EA, Activision are simply money grabbers, studios struggle to get the game done in time... and then the price of those games are just not real. 60€ from a brand new version of a game ? something that a week after get a free pirate version of it ? No wonder people just play the pirate one just to see if the game is good enough to buy it.
With this comes another matter about gaming. Some games, (I remember No Man's Sky) overhyped game failed to hook the players, and many titles comes in the same way. So why i should even bother buy a game, if it really doesnt delivery user experience ? I've tested NMS pirated...and I felt that was the right judgement for me not to buy game.
I do buy games, only..and only if they are fairly priced games and can deliver user experience. Diablo 3, FFXIV Realm Reborn, ArcheAge (EA), BlackDesert Online... are some examples, even if they arent the best of best....
If the game is good enough they really dont need so many DRM actions, people buy it and play it. So when a game is behing a DRM...maybe its because is not good enough.. or the publisher is a money grabber.
Edit: I took China as an example, but there are also a lot of other countries where people earn less.