Will DRM Finally Beat Piracy? Notorious Cracking Forum Says Yes

[hermes]

This is an arms race. Sooner or later they will fall, as everyone that came before. Then the industry will produce a new gold standard that will keep a handful of games safe until the pirates scenes breaks it down and the cicle continues.

The best games can hope for is to be packed with the newest version of DRM, so that pirates get a couple of months of work before they crack it, at which point the game recoup the sales (minus the ones scared of the evils of the new system) and we are back to the beginning.

 

[Aeshi]

This doesn't really have anything to do with what I'm saying. You do get that I'd rather see people pay, right?

Uh... yes it does? You were talking about how respecting the consumer seems to work out pretty well for people who sell physical product. I pointed out that correlation does not equal causation by pointing out that maybe that's because it's both harder and riskier to steal physical goods than it is to pirate digital ones.

 

[dochmbi]

3DM are renowned for their trolling, especially when you consider that most of the info taken from them is translated.

There's also the fact that out of all games using Denuvo, nearly all have been cracked, including: Lords of The Fallen, Fifa 16, Dragon Age Inquisition and Metal Gear Solid 5(which was cracked in a week).

Fifa 16 remains uncracked.

 

[Nobuoa Schniell]

"While nothing is completely "uncrackable", and I'm sure Just Cause 3 will fall, if Denuvo can manage to keep games uncracked for several months following release, it will probably cause most crackers and pirates to lose interest. After all, those first months are where most sales are made."

This statement confuses me. It implies that the cracker's intention is to cause lost sales for the game. Which I don't believe is the case at all. As for people who pirate the game, they usually have no intention to buy it anyway. Granted, if a game's crack is delayed 2-3 months, that'll likely push people who were tentative about buying it to eventually give in and purchase. But for those who still never intended to, they'll likely be willing to wait those 2-3 months. Ultimately I think that's the best case scenario. 2-3 months is more than enough times to get the initial sales, and maybe even a steam sale to discourage pirates further.

 

[Mortuorum]

"I still believe that [just Cause 3] can be compromised. But according to current trends in the development of encryption technology, in two years time I'm afraid there will be no free games to play in the world."

And that's the problem, right there. There will be plenty of free games to play in two years, in five years and in 20 years. There just won't be as many pirated games. Calling it "free" is bullshit. Call it what it is - "stolen".

 

[Something Amyss]

Isn't Denuvo infamous for hurting performance and is even an alleged cause of hard-drive damage? Oh wait I forgot, fuck the paying consumers! We need to make sure those pirates actually buy the game! Even though their is no proof that a pirated copy is a lost sale...oh wait I forgot, logic be damned, pfft, my mistake

Yeah, Denuvo may make piracy go away, but harming my gameplay and possibly even my computer will also make me go away.

I tolerate DRM when it's unintrusive. When I see Denuvo's involved, I turn back immediately.

 

[OldNewNewOld]

Not gonna happen.
Is this your guys first time seeing DRM work? It will kinda work, fuck up the legitimate customer for a while. Then someone will actually find a real crack for it and every game will be easily cracked until some new "good" DRM comes up. History repeats itself.

That being said, I would love to see what excuse the shitty publisher will use if piracy is gone. Who will they blame next when their next big shit flops. Pirates? Nah, they are gone? Entitled gamer and the patriarchy? The "uncracked" games sold like shit by AAA standards, so who is now to blame?
CoD was pirated by millions of people, yet it sold 10s of millions of copies.
Just Cause 3 wasn't pirated by anyone and sold like half a million if I remember correctly.
It's like some people actually pirated games because no demos are usually available for them to try out the game before investing a rather big $60. Especially for people that don't live in the US or west Europe where games are even more expensive but salaries are 10 times lower.

Also, Denuvo is apparently good for preventing piracy, but seeing how literally every game that uses it has some performance issues, I don't see why any gamer would actually be happy about that.

To boost sales, all they'd have to do was add a splash screen that said "If you enjoyed this game, please consider purchasing it" and people would be more inclined to do so.

You can't possibly believe that to be true... you seriously think pirates will pay for a game as long as developers... ask nicely?!?

Thanks for the hardest laugh I'm likely to have all month.

I might get a warning for this because the rules here are as clear as the fog currently in my city, but here it goes.
I sometimes pirate games to see if they will run on my old PC and if I like them. Then I buy them if I like it or delete it if I don't. I recently pirated Infinifactory to check it out. I finished the game, bought Infinifactory, TIS-100 and SpaceChem will also keeping an eye on Zachtronics and their future games. If I didn't pirate it to try it out, I probably wouldn't have bought any of those games.

As I live in South-East Europe, I know a lot of people that pirate games and sometimes buy them. Those people wouldn't actually buy any games if they didn't try them out. I'm not saying piracy is good, but it's not completely bad either. I've read few studies that suggest that pirates are also people that invest the most money into the industry.

 

[gigastar]

To boost sales, all they'd have to do was add a splash screen that said "If you enjoyed this game, please consider purchasing it" and people would be more inclined to do so.

You can't possibly believe that to be true... you seriously think pirates will pay for a game as long as developers... ask nicely?!?

Thanks for the hardest laugh I'm likely to have all month.

I think that's basically CD Projekt Red's mindset, though. Poland has one of the highest piracy rates in the world, so CDPR just said, "Well, let's just give up on DRM and ask nicely for people not to pirate."

...from what I last heard, they're doing okay for themselves.

While not understating the success of Witcher 3, did it not occur to you that CD Projeckt running GoG might have something to do with thier continued well-being?

 

[dochmbi]

Yeah, they said Assassin's Creed 2's always-online couldn't be cracked either.

.

Yup and it was cracked 6 weeks later, which for the time was really really slow, because games were available on day 1 cracked in those days.
This DRM on AC2 made a paying customer out of me, because AC1 was so good and I love renessaince italy so much. I managed to find a cdkey online for 25? so that softened the blow.

So yeah, DRM can work. I'm curious if there is any way to actually measure the sales impact of unpiratability. Anonymously gathering data maybe? It's tough because people don't want to incriminate themselves.

 

[hermes]

The other scenario is for video game piracy to be similar to movie piracy, in that you have to wait months for a good version (or any version at all).

Wait what?

Hateful Eight came out literally today here. Its only been out two weeks in the US even, and that was a limited run. Its been out 'properly' for about nine days. I was at a friend's house a week ago and they happened to have it on the TV. Presumably acquired online. Months?

It depends on the movie and the quality. For example, Minions and The Martian were rather hard to find in good quality, and many people are willing to wait unless they can find it in 720p (at least) or DVD Rip. Some movies can be found on decent quality, but not everything.

Some movies can be found online but the image and sound quality is horrible (obviously filmed with a webcam hidden in a purse). Some people don't mind that or can tolerate it on movies that don't have high quality requirements...

The flood doors are open once the movie gets to Bluray or steaming services, but most times, it takes about 6 months between the release of a movie and it being available for rent.

 

[grigjd3]

The best argument against DRM would be unbreakable DRM. If you can't find a difference in sales when you have unbreakable DRM, then you're wasting money on it.

 

[RJ 17]

in two years time I'm afraid there will be no free games to play in the world."

Excuse me as I play the world's smallest violin for you. I bet he went on to say "And that means that we'll have to actually...you know...buy our games like the rest of the plebeians."

Look, I really don't care about pirates all that much. I don't believe piracy destroying the industry or anything. But I'm still glad to hear that it might be officially defeated in 2 years time because if I have to spend my hard-earned cash on the games I enjoy, why shouldn't they have to?

 

[Aeshi]

I feel like I have to disentangle your nonsense and then re-explain what I've already written in my original post...
Stealing and downloading are two separate things, with separate consequences and circumstances. You can't make that comparison.

The reason I can make the example I did, is because "pirates" are just as likely to be your consumer/customer as they are to download something - Thieves, in the context of what we're talking about, are not.

I wasn't comparing Piracy to Theft, I was comparing one set of risks to another, less risky set of risks.

I was pointing out that obtaining a physical product without paying for it is far more risky than obtaining a digital product without paying for it is, and that as a consequence of this the people who sell the former are always going to have a higher % of paying customers than the latter, regardless of how either treats the customer.

If that example really irks you that much, imagine this instead: Two games released side-by-side, one of which has a special DRM that's as effective as catching you as a police force (and carries the same punishments.) and the other having a more standard DRM. Who do you think is going to get pirated more?

 

[medv4380]

It's just a new kind of DRM. Making an impossible to mod system is itself impossible. Give anyone physical access and time then they'll be able to crack it. Denuvo sounds hard, but each time they crack it they make the next time easier if Denuvo isn't also changed. And giving something the title of Uncrackable won't make the crackers stop. It'll cause them to swarm in like dung beetles in a cow pasture. Give someone an impossible mountain, and they'll keep coming until they figure out how to climb it.

 

[Adam Jensen_v1legacy]

Do you know why devs and publishers care about piracy?

Because they think it hurts their sales. So for an anti-piracy measure to be successful that needs to be true. And it really isn't. Denuvo apparently costs a lot of money. So why would companies bother with it if they notice that their sales don't justify the price of Denuvo? At that point they'd be losing even more money which would ironically make the anti-piracy measure cost more than actual piracy. Also, it was cracked once and it will be cracked again. Denuvo's method might be different, but it shares the same destiny as SecuROM. I do feel sorry for the people behind this tech though. They are obviously smart and they're trying to protect other people's work. But it just won't last.

 

[Tiamat666]

In the age of Steam sales and indie games, great games to play for little money are so ubiquitous, I'm surprised anybody even takes the risk to pirate games anymore. Seems stupid to me to risk getting malware on your computer when you have so many options these days.

 

[Level 7 Dragon]

In other news, the crossbow has just been invented. That's it people, pack up your stuff and go home. The arms-race is now over, nothing will ever trump it. History ends today.

I know this is a joke, but the invention of the crossbow basically completely changed the way wars were fought. All of a sudden people with very minimal training could be effective in battle against even hardened veterans. Nothing, not even the gun, changed war as much as crossbows did.

Not to derail the conversation, but crossbows had to go a long way to replace archers, as it usually took about a minute to reload a single one, while a skilled huntsman was and still is capable of firing multiple shots in quick sucsession. Just look at archery championships. Crossbows did replace long bows fairly quickly, as the point of such a weapon is distance and power and not fast reloading. Just came back from seeing the Reverant and it seems that early rifles shared the same problem - you had to reload after every shot and it took a while, which is one of the reasons why bows were still quite devastating in close standoffs.

Back on the topic of DRM. When I was 13 I got a copy of Assassin's Creed 2 for cristmas, but since I lived in a rural area at the time, internet kept cutting off, as a result, I wasn't able to play the game due to Unisoft's archaic always-on DRM. Generally, copy protection is a good thing, as long as it does not interfere with us actually playing.

 

[Karadalis]

The only DRM that truly works is sadly "always online", but going there would make absolutely everyone suffer, well everyone who ever cared about games.

Diablo 3 and sim city riiiiiiight? Sorry to say but "allways online" seemed to be piss easy to avoid last it came up.

No DRM is unhackable... no security measure unbeatable. All it takes is time and motivation... something that hacker groups have plenty off ESPECIALY if something is hard to crack.

 

[DoPo]

Isn't Denuvo infamous for hurting performance

There was one developer who claimed that. And it was the guys who did Lords of the Fallen. That game is also pretty infamous for not being that well technically. The devs just tried to shift the blame onto the DRM. So, no, that's not really the case.

and is even an alleged cause of hard-drive damage?

Yeah, that "alleged cause" was a completely random nobody posting completely bullshit data, which should have completely failed to impress anybody. Yet thousands of people decided to not look past the headline and started parroting it incessantly. That's the "alleged cause". Potip: try to read past a headline. I've lost the number of times I've had to explain this same thing to people who seem to not be able to do that.

To boost sales, all they'd have to do was add a splash screen that said "If you enjoyed this game, please consider purchasing it" and people would be more inclined to do so.

You can't possibly believe that to be true... you seriously think pirates will pay for a game as long as developers... ask nicely?!?

Thanks for the hardest laugh I'm likely to have all month.

You...erm, you do know that this exact message is present A LOT of pirate releases, right? Sometimes it's literally word for word, other times it's paraphrased to something like "If you've enjoyed this game, please support the developers".

At any rate, every big name in the scene puts that in their release NFOs. Most others who want to be part of the scene also do. Heck, it's literally harder to find releases which don't encourage people to kick some money in the developers' way. Assuming, that is, that we're talking the original NFO - sometimes on reuploading, that either gets excluded or changed and it may have the message omitted.

To boost sales, all they'd have to do was add a splash screen that said "If you enjoyed this game, please consider purchasing it" and people would be more inclined to do so.

You can't possibly believe that to be true... you seriously think pirates will pay for a game as long as developers... ask nicely?!?

Thanks for the hardest laugh I'm likely to have all month.

I think that's basically CD Projekt Red's mindset, though. Poland has one of the highest piracy rates in the world, so CDPR just said, "Well, let's just give up on DRM and ask nicely for people not to pirate."

...from what I last heard, they're doing okay for themselves.

While not understating the success of Witcher 3, did it not occur to you that CD Projeckt running GoG might have something to do with thier continued well-being?

Yes, the service that from day 1 has always prided and advertised itself as being "DRM free", and it's indeed one of the top slogans they've always had for their history, could also have something to do with helping out CDPR.

 

[Dr. Crawver]

Yeah, they said Assassin's Creed 2's always-online couldn't be cracked either.

Did you know they've built an unsinkable ship? Yep, it's called the Titanic.

Difference is it's not the ship maker claiming it's unsinkable, but rather the iceberg.

To be fair though, they're not saying this is uncrackable. They believe they can and will beat it. Just that they're getting harder and harder to break, to the point where they think it's beyond hope.

Whether this is true or not only time will tell. Maybe some exploit or new way of coming at it will be found, and the race is set back to zero. But it'll be interesting to see what happens.