Game studios that use digital rights management (DRM) tools tend to defend it to the death, even after it's been cracked. It prevents 'casual' piracy and cheating, they sometimes argue. However, Rime developer Tequila Works is taking a decidedly different approach. It claims that it'll remove Denuvo, the anti-tampering/DRM system on the Windows version of Rime, if someone cracks its island puzzle title. This is an odd promise to make, especially since it amounts to an inadvertent dare -- find a way to break in and the developers will eliminate the need for that crack.
This wouldn't be so unusual a statement if there weren't a history of Denuvo cracks. While it's harder to defeat this code than earlier schemes, it's definitely not impossible. Recent games like Resident Evil 7 and Prey had their Denuvo implementations broken within days of release, while developers have patched it out on titles like Doom and Inside. Tequila Works is aware that cracking is likely more a question of "when" than "if," but it appears to be optimistic about the challenge involved.
Source: ArsTechnica
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Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard
Over the past few years, the name Voksi has become synonymous with game cracking, in particular when it comes to anti-Denuvo activities. This week the talented Bulgarian released a 90-minute video in which he reveals how he cracked V4 of the infamous anti-tamper technology. TorrentFreak caught up with him for the lowdown.
Source: https://torrentfreak.com/voksi-releases-detailed-denuvo-cracking-video-tutorial-180210/
Denuvo "is an anti-tamper technology and digital rights management (DRM) scheme developed by the Austrian company Denuvo Software Solutions GmbH".
Related: Denuvo Forgets to Secure Server, Leaks Years of Messages From Game Makers
More Powerful Denuvo DRM Cracked 10 Days After Release of PREY
'Rime' Creators Will Remove Anti-Tampering Code If It's Cracked
New "Out of Control" Denuvo Piracy Protection Cracked
Denuvo Accused of Using Unlicensed Software to Protect its Anti-Piracy Tool
Denuvo License Generator is Latest Circumvention Method
Denuvo-Free Devil May Cry 5 Reportedly Improves the Game's Performance by Up to 20FPS
It appears that Denuvo's anti-tamper tech has significant impact on Devil May Cry 5's performance, and a Denuvo-free .exe game file has now surfaced online.
The Devil May Cry 5 .exe file was actually released by Capcom following the game's release earlier today, but has now been pulled. However, the file can still be downloaded through the Steam console. Several users are reporting FPS improvements by up to 20FPS while using the Denuvo-free exe file.
Sound familiar? Devil May Cry 5 is the game AMD demoed running on a Radeon VII GPU at its CES 2019 keynote. I wonder if they were running it with DRM.
Average frame rates are only part of the story when it comes to a game's performance. Minimum frame rates, percentiles, etc. can measure frame stuttering. A significant boost in a game's performance can also increase minimum frame rates.
Related:
Denuvo Forgets to Secure Server, Leaks Years of Messages From Game Makers
More Powerful Denuvo DRM Cracked 10 Days After Release of PREY
'Rime' Creators Will Remove Anti-Tampering Code If It's Cracked
New "Out of Control" Denuvo Piracy Protection Cracked
Denuvo License Generator is Latest Circumvention Method
Voksi Releases Detailed Denuvo-Cracking Video Tutorial
DRM Software Company Takes Legal Action Against Cracker
Hitman 2's Denuvo Protection Cracked Three Days Before Launch
New 'Valeroa' Anti-Piracy System Cracked "In 20 Minutes"
Evidence Continues to Mount About How Bad Denuvo is for PC Gaming Performance
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 29 2017, @10:47PM (4 children)
The game studios used to be cool. Id released engine source code. Epic quietly released patches that removed DRM.
These days? Fuck them all to death.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 29 2017, @10:53PM (3 children)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kubNNTLGW4 [youtube.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 29 2017, @11:14PM (2 children)
Good luck ever getting the source to id tech 5.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 30 2017, @12:38AM (1 child)
Some hacker got ahold of it and released it online, then after outcry when iD tried to stifle it, they released it under some restrictive non-commercial license, then finally after quake had been out a few years or something they released doom, first under the restrictive license, then re-released it licensed under the GPLv2 (although only the last version of Doom, meaning a number of cool features had been stripped out, like the triple-head singleplayer mode utilizing 3 systems over a lan for the front/left/right viewscreens.)
Furthermore as was brought up, iD had defrauded their employers at SoftDisk by developing their software on company time and trying to end run around them to publish it elsewhere. That is how that 7th Commander Keen game came around (Keen Dreams?) as a settlement of that. Combined with Carmack doing similiar over the whole Oculus thing (which I will note he joined onto late anyway.) there really isn't a lot of respect to be had anymore. Having said that, he, the Williams (of Sierra fame, and all their country bumpkin programmers!), and a variety of others should be lauded for giving us a period of moderately independent gaming developers in an era that helped show the little guy could be innovative and make a huge splash. But claiming any of them were 'good guys' is glossing over lots of nastiness in the industry that isn't just the big players (although they are the most egregious.)
P.S. Don't forget the Roberts, currenting bilking upwards of 250 million for their 'Star Citizen' game, which is then going to bilk even more millions in downloadable content even though that is enough money to make all developers 'millionaires' overnight, as if the Roberts at least didn't already have millions they could've been funding with...
(Score: 3, Funny) by boltronics on Tuesday May 30 2017, @03:33AM
I remember being horrified as a kid, learning the working conditions of programmers made to suffer Ken Williams' wrath.
You can see him here [sierrachest.com] (scroll down a bit) whipping the workers in their cubicles.
It's GNU/Linux dammit!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 29 2017, @11:17PM (6 children)
I suspect that what's going on here is that the game devs may be calling the bluff of the DRM merchants, and saying, basically: "If it isn't preventing copying, we're yanking this customer-hostile shit. And not paying you again."
It makes a lot more sense than just daring the community to do what you know damn well they'll do anyway.
(Score: 2) by zocalo on Monday May 29 2017, @11:46PM (3 children)
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 4, Interesting) by sjames on Monday May 29 2017, @11:55PM (1 child)
It does make good advertising either way.
It could also be a counter to the argument that once something is cracked, the 'pirates' are offering a product superior to the original. This way they use the DRM to gain a few more days exclusivity and then once the crack is out there remove the DRM (that is no longer helpful) to avoid offering an inferior product.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Tuesday May 30 2017, @07:38PM
This.
The first couple weeks are critical for sales (says the guy playing TF2 and other older games), and then you might as well offer the product without the encumberance.
Maybe they pay Denuvo per install, which makes no sense after the DRM gets cracked.
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Tuesday May 30 2017, @08:17AM
But the Denuvo team know their product can be defeated. They can hardly be oblivious to the fact that all its previous incarnations have been defeated. They'd never offer a refund-if-broken.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by c0lo on Tuesday May 30 2017, @01:54AM
It's also:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 30 2017, @08:55AM
No, they just wanted to slow down the pirates a bit.
Unfortunately for them, there are people like me who won't touch a game if it's got shit like that on the game. I see a game has external drm on top of steam, and I'll just flag it as "not interested" which will remind me to never buy the game in the future, even if the drm is removed.
However they did the dumb thing of not being up front about the drm being on the steam version at first - they updated the store page later in the day or the following day to properly flag it. Essentially after someone warned people in the discussions that denuvo was on the game. (they had to find that out for themselves however.)
So since I can't trust them to be honest and up front about the DRM they hide in their games, I've written down the publisher and developer in my little book that I check before buying a game. Names in that book mean I ignore them regardless of what they put out, on any platform. I've got enough games bought over the years that still sit unplayed to keep me occupied.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 30 2017, @05:34AM
It's a shitty game that isn't worth the price of free.
(Score: 2) by KritonK on Tuesday May 30 2017, @06:48AM (6 children)
Doesn't protection code boil down to
if [some_test succeeds] then
allow program to run
else
fail
endif
in one or more places?
Someone proficient in using a disassembler and a binary editor can always change all occurrences of such code to
if true then
allow program to run
else
fail
endif
and bypass the protection, no matter how complicated the test is. This is one of the reasons why our company doesn't bother adding protection to our software, preferring to rely on offering software that our customers want, at a price that they are willing to pay.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 30 2017, @08:03AM
Essentially yes, but it's not quite that simple. The tests and codepaths tend to be quite subtle and well hidden. It's almost like saying that particle accelerators are just smashing atoms together.
Of course, if the software is good enough, it will eventually get cracked, and cracked version is usually the better one. DRM, by definition, only affects legal users after all, and strength of copy-protection schemes pretty well correlates with their invasiveness and amount of problems they create. I used to download no-CD cracks for all of my legally obtained games.
I applaud your no-DRM policy. If only more software developers thought like that, who knows how many clock cycles and customer support hours could be saved...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 30 2017, @08:11AM
In theory, yes. However, it will be very obfuscated.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 30 2017, @08:18AM
More like
if [get_some_key_from_somewhere] then
decrypt_essential_code_for_running the game
else
fail
endif
in a *lot* of places.
Of course the key in question needs to be distributed somehow with the game, so mathematically it's *always* crackable. Can be a lot of work though.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Wootery on Tuesday May 30 2017, @08:37AM
They'll likely use other tricks too. Skype, for instance, tries to detect the presence of a debugger and will refuse to play ball if it thinks it's being analysed. It also tries to break the way debugger breakpoints work, encrypts the interesting parts of its native code, tries to detect changes being made to its native code, and fills its native code space with 'junk' to bury the needle in a haystack. Source. [oklabs.net]
It's also possible to make use of a bytecode interpreter to make analysis more difficult. Somewhat related: the original Xbox made use of an interpreter in its boot process. The idea was that Microsoft knew that 'attackers' wouldn't easily be able to change the small amount of data held in the Xbox's relatively-secure (but very small) ROM, but would be able to change everything else, so their strategy was to write a small interpreter for a p-code which couldn't be used to do anything naughty, then write their boot code in the insecurely-stored p-code. Source. [mborgerson.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by TheRaven on Tuesday May 30 2017, @10:08AM
sudo mod me up
(Score: 1) by terrab0t on Tuesday May 30 2017, @10:48PM
The biggest trick is making it very time consuming to verify if a crack is working. Don’t shut the program down immediately if a DRM check fails. Set a flag that slowly degrades parts of its functionality. The software will still be useless without the DRM, but it could take hours for a cracker to check each possible DRM switch.
TheRaven gave a good example with Red Alert. For productive software, you can make important features fail after varying lengths of time and in convoluted chain reactions. Have it silently corrupt files on save, have editing options suddenly stop working, etc.
The crackers will track down one or two of these, but they will give up trying to find and debug them all.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 31 2017, @02:10AM
WTF are you ppl talking about, this game already has a P2P release that works on Day 1...this is nothing but a PR stunt. DRM is dead and has been since the day copy machines were invented (and no I don't care about your transparent red plastic strips!)...where's the GOG release? Time to pay the piper. *mic drop
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 31 2017, @03:08PM
Is this a play to catch perpetrators of past crackings by controlling the situation?