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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
(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.