Will DRM Finally Beat Piracy? Notorious Cracking Forum Says Yes

[Vigormortis]

Yes, the distinction is crucian. Piracy is copyright infringement, which is NOT theft, because you do NOT steal anything. It is not theft neither legally nor morally.

Depends on the method with which you acquire the data.

 

[FalloutJack]

Sounds like a feint to lull people into a false sense of security...

 

[Strazdas]

Funny thing, playing a game at friends house that you didnt pay for is technically illegal under DMCA.

Really? That sounds ridiculous even for such an anti-consumer piece of filth law, but it wouldn't be surprising if the puppets politicians who wrote it accidentally or purposely worded it to take away another basic consumer practice.

It is ridiculous, which is why noone tried to enforce this yet. hopefully, noone ever will.

Yes, the distinction is crucian. Piracy is copyright infringement, which is NOT theft, because you do NOT steal anything. It is not theft neither legally nor morally.

Depends on the method with which you acquire the data.

Copyright infringement requires you to copy the data. Hence the name copyright. Since you copy the data, the original is not being removed. because original is not being removing, it is not theft. Now dont get me wrong, it is still very much illegal to infringe copyrights, its just that the action being done is different than that of theft. Also note: Theft is a criminal charge while copyright infringement is a civil charge, a distinction worth mentioning for US people (TPP actually want to make it a criminal charge btw)

 

[immortalfrieza]

You know, call me nostalgic, but whatever happened to the days where not being able to afford a piece of entertainment just meant you didn't buy it and got on with your life?

Those days never existed. bootleg copies were always around. even before we had printed word there were people illegally making copies of books manually. piracy is as old as media.

And for most of human history the ONLY way most people could get most products in any practical manner were to make bootleg versions. Especially outside major population centers for millennia people had to make everything from books to spoons to entire buildings by hand just to be able to have them at all, and professional work was far too expensive and impractical for the average joe up until mass production started to become practical.

There was also a time when most people made things simply because they wanted to help people, for the love of the craft, or simply out of necessity, rather than because they wanted to make money. Whatever happened to the days where everything wasn't jacked up to unreasonably massive prices and seeking a profit wasn't the reason anyone ever made and sold anything?

In the end, piracy is just the inevitable result of progress and as always happens the old guard try to do everything they can to squash the fruits of that progress so they can stick to what they've always been doing. Just like when cassette and VHS tapes, CDs, cars, whatever were invented and made other products worthless companies are simply refusing to get with the times and work with rather than against a new technology that is rapidly rendering their business model obsolete and instead are fighting to stick with that model even as it slowly sinks under them. We now have the power to make a literally infinite amount of anything digitally downloadable for no cost, and that scares these companies into drastic actions like DRM because they know that eventually they aren't going to be able to make money hand over fist controlling many of their products anymore now that there are many that are digitally downloadable, that now consumers have another option besides taking it in the rear ends from these companies if they want something that is digitally downloadable. I'll bet anything that far in the future the day the human race invents a genuine Star Trek style Replicator and thus can make an all but infinite amount of anything for next to nothing we'll still be dealing with this same artificial scarcity crap as we are now, simply because those that are rich and powerful would rather do everything they can to stop human progress if it kept them rich and powerful.

 

[Buckets]

With the advent of steam, I have not bothered downloading a dodgy title in years. The steam sales generally make a game more accessible to me by price so I wait.
With console games I usually watch a few reviews before I commit, except for some 'must buy' titles, but normally I'd wait for a pre-owned title.

 

[Aeshi]

There was also a time when most people made things simply because they wanted to help people, for the love of the craft, or simply out of necessity, rather than because they wanted to make money. Whatever happened to the days where everything wasn't jacked up to unreasonably massive prices and seeking a profit wasn't the reason anyone ever made and sold anything?

Er, Money happened? We stopped relying on Bartering and started using Currency. There may not have been any monetary transactions when some medieval craftsman was going "I'll help those farmers build a shed to help them out, they'll give me some food to help me out." but it was hardly done purely out of the saintly goodness of their hearts.

Anyone who spouts that "You should do it for the art/joy of helping/whatever" stuff should try doing their own job for no payment for a year or two and see how well that works out.

(That's not even touching on the pro-Piracy crowd - A group whose core tenet is: We deserve every game ever for free. - complaining about how greedy people are these days.)

 

[mrdude2010]

That's a fucking awful idea. Way too few people have the bandwidth, let alone the ping, to properly play a game like that. With modern MMOs, you still have pretty much the entire game on your hard drive. It's only your interactions with it that are being sent back and forth between the server.

Well, I didn't say that it'll be done right tomorrow - in 5-10 years this model will be the future - the most perfect way to combat piracy.
And if you don't have a bandwidth for that - well, you won't play any games then, not my problem.

It will be the video game manufacturer's problem, because they'll need to spend a lot of money on server maintenance, not to mention the lost sales from people without regular internet access. With how slowly internet infrastructure is improving, I can't see it being remotely worth it.

 

[Magmarock]

Fuck DRM. I have a really strong passion about this. I hope I can talk about pricy in this thread without getting into trouble. Piracy is of course something you want to avoice and you want people to buy your games. However I feel that DRM is one of the worst thing and I refuse to deal with it. I purchase almost all my games exsluvily from GOG.com However there are some games I see on Steam that I must have. In such a cases I will buy it, but only on the condition that there is a way to circumvent the DRM.

As fair as I am aware if you own the game legally you are allowed to have a backup and there are no set rules or guidelines for optioning that backup. In theory you should be able to download a warez version of a game that you've bought for the sake of a DRM free backup. I'm not sure on the legitimacy of this though and it varies from country to country. This could all be soled however if devs just stoped using DRM. Witcher 3 didn't use and it hasn't seemed to have hurt them at all.

 

[Magmarock]

I find this idea... vaguely possible. The idea of making copy protections so frustratingly hard to crack that pirates stop bothering with it certainly has a non-zero chance of existing. 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).

The question here is if GoG will keep its no-DRM policy in place if this really takes off.

I believe that a lot of people turn to warez to get away from DRM if there's any positive from this it might mean better busyness for GOG

 

[barbzilla]

It is just another version of Denuvo, which has been cracked before and will be cracked this time as well. Denuvo is notoriously hard to crack because they feed bits of code into other parts of the game, so the pirate would have to spend a large amount of time hunting them down and figuring out how to remove them without damaging the game play any more than Denuvo has already done.

Another thing is, I can't stand Denuvo. Even with a fairly high end system, I can only play on medium on Just Cause 3 because of this horrid DRM, and even then it lags out occasionally. I have a feeling that the developers will eventually get tired of having to fix their code and implement extra optimization code just to counterbalance the crap that the DRM is doing in the first place. Dragon Age Inquisition was the same way, but shortly after Denuvo was cracked for the pirates, EA was suddenly able to release a patch that optimized the resources.

 

[boag]

That's BS. Every one knows that the only true way to stop piracy is videogame streaming.

For those that don't know: Imagine yourself, that all game data of your bought game is on a centralised server. The server takes 90% of the hard work on itself and the player is just getting a pretty picture on his screen - much like Steam Link, actually, but works like modern MMO's

While this type of DRM is also not invincible, it's simply too hard to crack - you as a pirate literally will have to catch every single byte of server information and/or reverse engineer them by yourselves which is too long and costly. There's a reason why MMO's are notoriously "pirate proof".
Oh, and also - you can't play the game without being always online, but tough shit poor people - it's the inevitable future.

Yeah thats gonna be fun when the internet goes back to the AOL business plan of pay per internet usage, now that the TPP has been passed.

 

[MrCatchTwenty2]

I would hope that non-existent piracy would mean a better experience for the paying customers. If that was the case then I would be happy to see unbeatable anti-piracy measures, as long as it doesn't mean my game stops working if the company doesn't want to pay for it anymore.

Then again, I do have a rather black and white opinion of piracy. Basically: if you didn't pay for the game, then you shouldn't get to play(except borrowing or free games). And like I do with anything that I have a radical or non-nuanced opinion on, I'm gonna stay out of it. The world has enough radical opinions out there trying to get unreasonable things to happen without my help.

Nothing's unbeatable anyway.

 

[Strazdas]

What kind of a mentally challenged person do you have to be to stream uncompressed video feed? Of course compressed one is going to be expensive but it vastly reduces the size. Next, 600mbs connection already exists - my provider gives 1GB connection and I live in a fucking third world country, compared to USA or EU.
Of course - if the the whole game is on a server and the player receives only video feed - than yea - the server will have a hard time.

The next issue: PING IS NOT FASTER THAT THE SPEED OF LIGHT!!111 Well good for him - it never stopped me from playing MMO's you know. Australia is fucked because no one gives a damn about them, but European/USA server is not that bad. Played Wow on US server - 200 ping - A OK.

tl,dr: We code the video and place servers closer to us and no problem. Although I have to agree - it's not gonna be cheap. However, if the hardware will grow exponentially in power, the modern coding algorithms of video coding will work a lot faster.

One that does not accept video quality loss as compromise for game streaming.

Yes, 1GB connections exist, but only for a very small public. and thats only assuming minimum resolution and framerate here. for people gaming on 1440 or even 4k resolutions or those with 144hz monitors that 1gb isnt even going to be enough.

Ping does not have a speed. its a measure of response time. in order for it to be so low in order to not affect the gameplay you will have to transfer the data at the speed of light or have a streaming server very close to your house. I dont think you understand how close it has to be. EU cant have a single server. if the server is anywhere but inside your city you wont have a good experience. 200 ping is OK when all the calculations are done locally on your client. this is not going to be anywhere close to ok for streaming. 20 ping is going to be way too big, let alone 200.

No, we dont code the video. if we code the video it defeats the entire purpose of having servers stronger than local machines. and we dont have servers close enough and having them close enough is completely unreasonable solution since you will have to have literally millions of servers in every town city and village.

This is just amusing to read. Yes - servers are a problem for implementing videogame streaming today. The internet-problem however is BS - unless you live in some kind of Zimbabwe you will have a decent bandwidth (and if you DO live in Zimbabwe - you probably have better things to do that sitting here anyway).

the problem is you not understanding the requirements for this to work and assuming that its the same as movie streaming. its nowhere even close.

 

[Nielas]

Copyright infringement requires you to copy the data. Hence the name copyright. Since you copy the data, the original is not being removed. because original is not being removing, it is not theft. Now dont get me wrong, it is still very much illegal to infringe copyrights, its just that the action being done is different than that of theft. Also note: Theft is a criminal charge while copyright infringement is a civil charge, a distinction worth mentioning for US people (TPP actually want to make it a criminal charge btw)

Copyright infringement is essentially failure to pay for work done which is generally a civil matter in most jurisdiction unless fraud can be proven.

On the other hand if your boss refused to pay you for work you have done, then most people would consider that a form of theft.

 

[mrdude2010]

What kind of a mentally challenged person do you have to be to stream uncompressed video feed? Of course compressed one is going to be expensive but it vastly reduces the size. Next, 600mbs connection already exists - my provider gives 1GB connection and I live in a fucking third world country, compared to USA or EU.
Of course - if the the whole game is on a server and the player receives only video feed - than yea - the server will have a hard time.

The next issue: PING IS NOT FASTER THAT THE SPEED OF LIGHT!!111 Well good for him - it never stopped me from playing MMO's you know. Australia is fucked because no one gives a damn about them, but European/USA server is not that bad. Played Wow on US server - 200 ping - A OK.

tl,dr: We code the video and place servers closer to us and no problem. Although I have to agree - it's not gonna be cheap. However, if the hardware will grow exponentially in power, the modern coding algorithms of video coding will work a lot faster.

Well, for one thing, it takes time to compress and uncompress that much video, so you're adding a delay on top of the rest of the delays. Very few people have that kind of bandwidth. Anyway, while 200 ping doesn't matter in a MMORPG, it definitely matters for an FPS, or an RTS, or a MOBA, or really any game type where split-second mouse/keyboard management makes a big difference.
Also, servers are expensive to build and maintain. This is why most companies either build one giant server in a relatively central location covering a large area, or try to get the players to host games themselves. This is without running tens of thousands of unique instances of the game on top of their existing loads. It would take a huge breakthrough in CPU and GPU manufacture, and even though they're not too far off, that sort of power is not cheap. The cost will not be worth the lost sales to piracy any time soon.

This is just amusing to read. Yes - servers are a problem for implementing videogame streaming today. The internet-problem however is BS - unless you live in some kind of Zimbabwe you will have a decent bandwidth (and if you DO live in Zimbabwe - you probably have better things to do that sitting here anyway).

Ping is not a problem (see above), Servers - yea but that will change in 5-10 years
And that you can't play the game without a stable internet connection - yea, that's a bummer, yet that's your and only your problem - 3G internet is only beginning to rise in my country, while USA, UK and others are introducing 5G already. Get a better internet.

That's just straight up ignorant. The places I used to live, the options were either dial up or satellite/cell internet, both of which have narrow bandwidths and low data caps. I live in a pretty large city near some of the largest cities in the country, and the fastest possible package I can get is 50mbps, or about 6.25Mbps. The U.S. does not have good internet, and the infrastructure isn't going to drastically change any time soon. "Just get better internet" is a dumb thing to say, because it's not available for a large group of people. this map [https://www.fcc.gov/reports-research/maps/section-706-fixed-broadband-deployment-map] gives a good indication of the state of internet for people away from cities. This isn't too much of a problem if the game only has to connect to a server to receive occasional updates, or if the game is run on a home computer with only the relevant data being communicated by the computer, but it becomes much more of a problem when the entire game has to pass back and forth. While things are better in other places, the U.S. makes up a significant portion of their customer base. They're not going to deliberately cut off that many sales.

 

[Strazdas]

20 ping per city, lolwhat? You should change your provider - that is a shitty internet! 20 - is a ping for a neighbouring country! Although I don't remember in details, but I had 200 ping from my country to USA. Europe servers had 50 max or no ping at all (unless the server was very poorly made)

And yes:
The whole point of this is that your PC will turn into essentially a terminal, and won't have to make millions of calculations like now. Yes, I agree that you will have to have servers in all major cities. That is a necessity and there's gonna be a lot of them - also fact. But because there's so many servers, there is no point in concentrating them in one place - you will just have to spread them in required quantities across the country.
I can't be sure about what ping is OK for streaming purposes - maybe you're right about that, but the fact is - big ping speaks only about the line quality. With a quality line across the whole country ping will bee tiny, if will be at all.

Oh and yes, the funniest thing about the post - SERVERS WILL BE STRONGER THAN PC!!!
That's the fucking point! Fuck expensive hardware - a monitor, a mouse and you play whatever you want.

So to conclude - right now, the problem is in unholy beating the servers will take. Not in ping.

P.S Oh, yes I forgot about the NO LOSING VIDEO QUALITY!!111
Have you forgotten, that with right parameters, the loss will be so insignificant, no human eye will be able to see the difference compared to the video size? Not to mention that there are algorithms, that do stuff without losing video quality? Yes, they compress not as good, but still - not a raw video

20 ms ping requires you to send a signal and get a response in 20 ms. Lets assume it takes you 1 ms to send a signal and 1ms for the server to send a signal (in reality, its more). this leaves 18 ms for a round-trip. this means that one-side trip is 9 ms. Now, lets assume that the signal is directly wired to the signal (nothing in between it that could slow it down) and it moves at the speed of light (fiber optics). This means that the signal can move a maximum of 0,009*300000=2700 KM. This is the radius where in absolutely ideal situation you could have 20 ms ping. Now real life is quite different. in real world most of that 20 ms will be taken by server response time and the Internet provider hops in between, so real life radius is closer to 270 KM.

It is literally not possible to have no ping at all. this is physical impossibility. no data can travel instantaneously.

Your computer will still have to handle all the streaming and decompressing though, so the terminal cannot be some weak chromebook anyway. Also having servers for everyone in every city entirely defeats the purpose of having streaming to begin with. it is also entirely economically unfeasible.

No, servers will not be stronger than PC. Even the 3k GPU render servers still barely outperform well built PCs in terms of power per dollar. yes, they are beneficial to render companies due to massive power in a single cluster, but if you are splitting it up you may as well have many machines. the only benefit will be that not everyone will be using them at the same time so only peak use counts will be needed. Like i said before, no, a monitor and a mouse will not do. you will still need to have a powerful GPU to decode it.

Even in RAW the quality problems of GPU generated image is obviuos. ANY loss of quality is spotted by everyone that isnt as blind as a bat. And yes, there are apgorythms that can compress it to a point without loss of quality, but the amount of power it will take to encode and decode them in real-time (and all of that has to happen in less than 20 ms minus the time the data is being sent to you from the server) will mean we will need even more powerful computers. see, the benefit of RAW is that once its generated you can just send it, no extra processing needed. with encoding, you will need at least 4-5 times the processing power to encode it quickly enough. once again making it economically unfeasible.