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According to TorrentFreak, the long-awaiting stealth game Hitman 2 — which comes 'protected' by the latest variant of Denuvo (v5.3) — leaked online. Aside from having its protection circumvented, this happened three days before the title's official launch on November 13.
It appears that a relatively new cracking group called FCKDRM obtained a version of Hitman 2 that was only available to those who pre-ordered the game. While several groups have been chipping away at Denuvo for some time, FCKDRM is a new entrant (at least by branding) to the cracking scene. (Note: The group is not related to the FCKDRM initiative, an anti-DRM site launched by GOG.com, even though it does use the logo.)
It should be noted that the owners of Denuvo released marketing material a few months ago suggesting that even 4 days of protection (actually even hours according to them) is worth the price of their DRM. (However, no mention of -3 days.)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 20 2018, @02:55PM (1 child)
In case of games with physical and unique interaction, this may work. Although as you mentioned, getting a working implementation without discoverable bugs will take more than a few attempts.
For video or audio, there already is a very effective copy method. Get a good camera, pay and play the movie once and record it on some drm-free media, distribute. The quality of house-hold recording is certainly good enough to satisfy most people with this copy. To get around this they need full control of all your devices, I doubt they can afford that.
However there is another elephant in the room. Implementing this is very expensive, it probably also puts some extra hassle on real customers. Multiple studies have already shown that pirating in no way reduces actual profit/sales. Combined this gives a few things:
If they make unbreakable protection,
1. this will cost them part of their profit-margin, without getting any value in return.
2. they will actually lose a profit-line, namely suing copyright infringers.
3. They can no longer beg for handouts because hey piracy! E.g. risk another income-line with the now irrelevant hard-drive tax etc... (They will obviously continue lobbying for copyright extensions etc...)
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Tuesday November 20 2018, @06:56PM
To put it concisely, DRM is a fence. It's there to signal that the inside belongs to someone else, so that people who are worried of getting caught don't break in.
You can make the damn wall or fence as high as you want, someone will try to get through just for kicks. The more bragging rights the better.
The internet made it easy to share the pass-through techniques, and the feeling of impunity means that your imperfect wall is breached by a lot of people. But most of those people still acknowledge that doing so breaches the law, so the companies still make their cash despite some losses (yes, some people would buy if they couldn't pirate).
It's a tradeoff between the cost of the better wall, the cost of getting the cops to come around more often, the ability to whine that your problems are from theft, and the actual amount of the "theft". The current situation seems to be at about the right equilibrium for most parties involved.