Assassin's Creed Origins is crippling gamers' CPUs due to anti-piracy DRM | Hacker News Reader

Assassin's Creed Origins is crippling gamers' CPUs due to anti-piracy DRM

theinquirer.net

98 pointsbluesilver0776 comments

Oh, so the cracked version that inevitably comes out will actually have decent performance? Adorable. Can't wait.

It's often been the case that pirated versions are objectively superior to the crippled originals, but I don't think I've ever seen a case as blatant as this.

It's mostly the paying customer who ends up with the burden. I would really like to know the train of thought behind it because for me that is just plain weird.

It's the same when you buy a movie or a television show on DVD/BR. You first get the traditional FBI warnings (that as a non US citizen doesn't apply to me) and if you are lucky you get a 3 minute unskippable scenes about how piracy is the equivalent of murdering a thousand puppies.

Somebody who pirates never see these things and have a better viewing experience.

Love how you just summed up (in my mind) the reasons for Netflix's success.

Really glad that the market really played its role by providing customers with a near-perfect (Netflix's library is inconsistent to say the least) viewing experience.

This is exactly why I pirate what I bought when I want to rewatch it. Torrents are superior in every way so those box sets usually sit on the shelves gathering dust.

I don't know why media companies insist on punishing paying customers.

Investing in new infrastructure and a changing market is more expensive than talking to a few Senators and buying off the shelf DRM solutions

> "You first get the traditional FBI warnings (that as a non US citizen doesn't apply to me)"

Many have acted upon that belief and lived to regret it. The US has a surprisingly long reach when it comes to punishing what it considers illegal trafficking.

On my legit DVD copy of 'Mulholland Dr.' by David Lynch the entire main film is one continuous video and you cannot skip, fast forward or jump to a particular scene, so you have to watch the whole thing end to end. The directors notes that come with the DVD say this is because he wanted to limit the way people experience the film.

First thing I did was rip it and remove the restriction. Imagine if you bought a film and it refused to play on any screen less than 32" wide...

You sure? I believe he intentionally did not put in scene breaks but regular old fast-forward still worked.

If you're right, it's an interesting example of "artistic" DRM that is not related to copyright enforcement. Can anyone think of any others?

If this is true, then there will also be a measurable environmental impact to playing the game.

reminded of the unexpected (or at least, in the early days, under-reported) energy costs associated with cryptocurrencies...

As far as I know, the "crack" for Denuvo, simply emulates the correct server responses, so the game can run normally. So unless the dev remove the DRM themselves, everyone loses...

No, what you describe is a bypass and it's not considered a crack by the scene. Denuvo has been completely removed from some games, but I don't keep up with the news so I can't say which.

Well there's a scene group called steampunks, who "crack" denuvo games by generating a correct key for the offline version of denuvo (normally if you play a denuvo game offline it'll send you to a website with a key to enter in a game prompt).

Their releases are scene releases, even with denuvo remaining as is.

The bypass "crack" Sephiroth87 is referring to is from (I believe) a non-scene person called baldman.

Right? I havent seen anyone try to take the hit for it either, no pull date or anything. Pathetic.

Operation Flashpoint/FADE DRM

The fun fact time.

Denuvo DRM happens to be... a repackaged VMProtect. Moreover VMP devs were suing Denuvo for illegally repackaging and selling a _single copy_ of VMP that Denuvo bought from them and then actively trying to evade paying licesning fees. Apparently prior to that Denuvo was talking to VMP about doing some custom development work, but they weren't able to agree on terms. [1]

VMProtect itself is a well-established virtualization-based DRM solution and it does dramatically increase the complexity of cracking of binaries. It's been around for a while now and it's popular in shareware circles as a successor to Armadillo protector, which too was a form of a code virtualizer. From what I've seen said about VMP, it is stable and reasonably light, so Assassin's Creed maxing out CPUs is more likely the Creed's own problem rather that of the VMP.

[1] https://rsdn.org/forum/shareware/6733344 (in Russian)

According to VMProtect, that's not true [0]

[0] http://vmpsoft.com/20170606/vmprotect-and-denuvo-gmbh/

They settled.

The post I linked to is from March, when this circus was just getting started, and the post is by none other than the VMPSoft founder himself.

"Ubisoft has also implemented VMProtect, a piece of software that protects code by executing it on a virtual machine with non-standard architecture [...] tanking the game's performance by 30-40 per cent"

This feels so extreme.

Here is the post by the cracker

https://image.prntscr.com/image/_6qmeqq0RBCMIAtGK8VnRw.png

https://np.reddit.com/r/CrackWatch/comments/79pd62/update_on...

That's circumstantial.

People are blaming the DRM because the DRM simply exists; all the breakpoint proves is that VMProtect does what it says it does (decode sections of the game in the VM). It doesn't however prove that the DRM causes the stutter or performance issues, for all we know that could be a bug in the game's engine itself.

Hopefully time and more data will tell us for sure either way. We aren't there yet, although no lack of proof will stop the tech media from reporting on it.

There is more reasonable technical theory but it's all speculation now

>Anvil Next engine has been rewritten with a bindless model for shaders but their DX12 renderer that goes hand in hand with this tech is only ready on Xbox One. On PC this cannot be handled so they use an extra binding wrapper to communicate between D3D11 and their renderer, this was co developed by Intel and Ubisoft. This goes against what AMD and Nvidia recommends to developers, uses a lot of extra CPU power and render their cards' power useless in certain situations (e.g. city areas in Origins).

http://developer2.download.nvidia.com/assets/gameworks/downl...

https://np.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/79qxxt/assassins_cree...

Talk by CD Projekt's CEO about not using DRM, and dealing with piracy: https://kotaku.com/some-real-talk-on-piracy-from-a-witcher-3...

Their approach always made so much more sense to me.

I assume, since most revenue of major established game franchises is actually made in the first month, that it's probably worth it to add the DRM.

If you can delay your game getting cracked for a few weeks by using some obscure complex DRM, you've already recouped most of your investment and are in the clear.

Single player (blockbuster) games are probably one of the few industries where I would say piracy does matter. A pirate is not always a buyer, but gamers are notorious for not paying if they can. But they often will if they can't.

Not that I approve of DRM, but I understand why companies are massively worried about it -- they literally have billions of dollars riding on that one launch weekend.

That said, they should probably consider removing the DRM after a few months, or replacing it with something less complex (and resource intensive).

>A pirate is not always a buyer, but gamers are notorious for not paying if they can. But they often will if they can't.

[Citation needed]

"Investigating Factors Influencing Game Piracy in the eSports Settings of South Korea"[0] shows that behavioural intention was the result of social norms and attitude; for example if people who had friends or spouses who viewed piracy favorably they too were more likely to pirate themselves.

[0] http://digitalrepository.unm.edu/educ_hess_etds/9/

This so much. Especially since we know from iTunes that people DO pay for content if the can. The burden of proof lies with the proponents of DRM!

People don't pay for content, they pay for convenience. When streaming was still non-existent, and if you weren't a college or high school kid, buying an album on iTunes was less hassle than torrenting it (especially for the non-technically inclined). Now that there's Spotify et al, iTunes sales have massively slumped.

The same goes for games: Steam killed a big chunk of piracy, as having to crack the game and crack again after each update (not to mention no achievements and no official multiplayer) is less of an user experience than just using Steam. However, if as in this case using the Steam version comes with a 40% performance cost... then yeah, piracy gets attractive again.

> The burden of proof lies with the proponents of DRM!

That seems like a just world fallacy. The decision is made based on the perceived risk/reward by the publisher before you the consumer ever have a role to play. If they have internally decided this is "worth it", then it is _to them_.

If you want to correct their internal model of a customer, the one where it is worthwhile to use DRM, then the burden lies on you. Not that I am suggesting you can but, theirs is the incumbent position, yours is the challenger.

If you really don't like the DRM policy, don't pirate the game either. Pirating solves your problem (the DRM) but it doesn't correct their model of you. Lots of active pirates are still seen as fans of the game and potentially customers. They still see an "opportunity to convert" if they can just get stronger DRM out the door for the next title.

Saying "people do pay for content if they can" is seeing it from your perspective. To change their minds you have to see it from their perspective. Even if you feel it is objectively untrue, their perspective is that piracy is lost revenue and DRM reduces that loss.

That was not my point, and proponents of DRM are not necessarily only the people selling products.

I pirated the Witcher 3 originally, but it was so good I ended up buying it just to support the company. Step one in stopping piracy is to make something actually worth paying for.

The thing is that what you believe is worth paying for is proportional to the ease to find pirated content.

In argentina, people pay netflix and share accounts between friends, and some play hbo go for GoT, but thats it. In the U.S., its very rate to see pirated TV.

A sandwich might be worth 5 dollars to you, but if there are free sandwiches next to it, you will think "I would pay it if it were worth it"

I don't think it's that simple. In Poland in early 90s everybody pirated everything. I'm not overstating it. Only businesses bought legal software, everybody else pirated. Piracy was only a crime since 1992 IIRC.

And it wasn't easy - you had to copy dozens of floppy disks, often people copied each disk 2 times, because out of 20 floppies one is bound to have read errors, if not more. It took ages.

But the prices were crazy - a game costed 60-120 PLN and people earned like 700 PLN per month.

Then piracy got much easier thanks to CD recorders and internet - but it changed nothing, because you can't go over 100% :)

Since that time piracy only got easier thanks to broadband, dvd-writers, usb pendrives, ssds, yet legal computer market in Poland increased many times and piracy is in decline. Mostly because of increasing salaries, and extras included with legal copies.

Again, talking about piracy and fairness should be a moot argument. Something being expensive doesnt give you the right to consume something without the permission of the one who made it.

Think of this in terms of source code. If you wanted the source code for facebook, facebook might sell it to you (for billions ofc), but you cant pay for it. That doesnt give you the right to steal it.

Its just too easy to do. Its a basic microeconomics argument. But piracy has not only risks, but costs, and hence it does allow the product to be sold at a higher price. It constricts supply.

> Something being expensive doesnt give you the right to consume something without the permission of the one who made it.

Of course it doesn't (except in some special cases, but that's another debate, and doesn't concern games - see life saving drugs for example).

But the discussion was about DRM and whether they work - IMHO they don't, because the main reason behind piracy isn't accessibility, but too high (price/perceived value). So - limiting accessibility of piracy isn't going to stop it.

Also it would have worked by now if it worked at all.

Also also :) EU did a study in 2013 which found that piracy doesn't really hurt sales, because most people who pirated X and haven't bought it later - wouldn't have bought it anyway. https://cdn.netzpolitik.org/wp-upload/2017/09/displacement_s...

Im damn sure it works because if piracy were not punished, popcorn time would swallow the entire consumer market, much like it has in countries like Argentina and the netherlands. The barrier of installing a VPN adds an expense higher than paying for netflix, making it unappealing.

> EU did a study in 2013 which found that piracy doesn't really hurt sales, because most people who pirated X and haven't bought it later - wouldn't have bought it anyway.

I haven't read that paper, but from an economic standpoint, this is still not enough to prove what people would have bought if they had access to piracy. Again, look at popcornTime. If people were fined in Argentina like they are in the US, I assure you netflix would surge in subscriptions.

I have no idea what popcorn time is, and there are next to no fines for piracy in my country. Well, in theory there are, but in practice there aren't.

In Australia, certain content is banned, so pirating or acquiring it via other means is nececery.

I also want to point out another problem in a lot of countries is bandwidth. Limits of 20GB is not unheard-off. But GTA5, 65GB. So easier to copy a couple of rar files on usb and sneakernet it around.

I wouldn't call watching TV a necessity, but sure, no doubt that restricted access causes piracy.

Its fundamentally a problem of business model. You can't charge differential pricing based on what the customer is willing or able to do, so one way or another you compromise revenue, or content, or something else.

Naturally as this has progressed with time, the shows themselves started adding ads within the show to prevent things like this.

They seem to be nice now, but during Witcher 2 release they had heavy DRM issues and threatened to go after pirates (while many of pirates were just people who wanted to play the game they bought).

Huh? I bought The Witcher 2 on release day from GOG with no DRM.

Physical copies in some countries had DRM because of publisher. There were problems, and they reacted to that poorly (threathening players who pirated). They apologised later.

While I wouldn't trust the source in this case, the very unusual CPU scaling and the very high CPU usage in general for this game could be explained by this.

The game even benefits from Threadripper, scaling beyond 8 cores, which is very unusual for games. And as it also runs on consoles with much, much less CPU power, I would suspect it is doing something very inefficient on PCs.

> And as it also runs on consoles with much, much less CPU power, I would suspect it is doing something very inefficient on PCs.

Copy protection. PS4 and Xbox One are both AMD x64 so you can reuse loads of code, which means that TF is indeed correct in blaming DRM.

This is why I don't buy games with DRM other than steams default DRM (although I mostly play games on PS4 nowadays anyway) and why I generally tend to avoid Ubisoft games (amongst others). I might buy a second hand copy at some point, or if its very heavily discounted, but I'm certainly not pushed to get this game, especially with this news.

> This is why I don't buy games with DRM other than steams

Valve did an amazing job at building their reputation (by doing things the right way.) Very few can do DRM without pissing off people.

Maybe you were not around but they did piss off a lot of people.

The switch from WON to Steam basically destoryed a huge part of the Counter Strike community (for example you couldn't play older versions anymore like 1.5)

Also Valve was one of the first company that required an online activation for a single player offline game (HL2). It was unheard back then.

Its terrible, DRM is one of the low points of steam. I got windows games I paid for I can't play anymore because of it.

Its garbage that reduces the value of games. It just increases Steam's profits.

They pissed me off by locking me out of my entire library for several weeks when their password changing mechanism was silently truncating passwords. Since then I haven't spent a single penny on Steam, or anything else with DRM.

I wait until big games like the Witcher series hit GoG.com. That means I miss out on a ton of AAA games, but I'm not a hardcore gamer so it's no big deal. Most of my time gaming right now is split between catching up on late 2000s titles like the Crysis and Saint's Row series, and on open world games like Rust.

I love GoG! But as seer said, The Witcher is a special case, since GoG is owned by the same people. Still some fantastic games there though, just not the latest-and-greatest.

(I also have a lot of Humble Bundle games)

The witcher is an exception though, as CDProject red are the creaters of both gog and the series, thus it was available from day 1 :)

Wow, I wasn't aware of that.

What cemented GoG for me was two events: One, they got the entire classic Thief series (my all time favorite game series which won't install on modern Windows from my game discs) and two, when a few games on Steam that I thought I owned were pulled or otherwise tampered with; something I paid for was suddenly gone or altered with no recourse. I still have my Steam account and I do play games on it, but going forward all of my game budget goes to GoG and thrift store finds.

I'll wait for the cracked version, thanks.

It may works as a stopgap as this extreme move is not usualy found in games where performance is key to the experience.

Hackers will develop better tooling for VM introspection or something in the near future dropping again the time between release and initial anti-drm patch.

As a concerned consumer who buys game on pc or ps4, knowing this I will pass on the PC version and buy a second hand PS4 version.

No way I'm upgrading my 3570k for the sake of a pointless virtualization overhead.

I've stopped gaming on PC and I only use Xbox One now.

First, I can buy all my games digitally through a single store. I don't have to install Steam, Origin, Blizzard, etc.

Second, I don't have to worry about installing DRM software that runs on my computer 24/7 even when I'm not gaming.

Third, I can play in my living room instead of hunkered down in a dark room while my wife complains that I'm hiding from the family.

The next version of Assassins Creed will probably only be available via on demand streams for the first month ;-)

Ubisoft has a long history of using questionable DRM. I remember having problems uninstalling their Starforce crap after playing Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones.

If it's an Ubisoft game, it's worth paying attention when people complain about the DRM. It might not just be the pirates complaining.

LOL the cracked version removes this glitch. The irony that paid game is worse than free pirated.

The point is that there isn't a cracked version (yet).

But when it comes out, those who don't pay will get a markedly better experience than those who do. And yet any high piracy numbers will be used to further justify invasive DRM like this, harming people like me who just want to pay for a game and not be punished for doing so.

It's the most backwards assed system I can think of. Why do we as an industry still pretend DRM is worth a damn?

This has commonly been the case with DRM'd games.

Yup. I've been steadfastly anti-DRM since I had a game that just crashed after a few minutes because it thought my SCSI CD-ROM drive was a virtual drive and the DRM kicked in.

I ended up having to pirate it in addition to buying it in order to play it the first few weeks. They eventually released a patch, but by then I had been playing the game for weeks without another problem and there was no way I was risking their countermeasures.

At the time, I was pissed that I spent my good money and they screwed me like that, and even denied the problem for weeks before fixing it.

I also remember having a terrible experience with games for windows live back in the day... it wouldn't let me play my legally purchased game without creating an account first. Problem was, there were problems creating the account! When I finally got it working somehow, it decided that games for windows live needed a 3 hour update first. I was never more furious at a game/drm before or since. Man I hated games for windows live, glad that shit is dead.

I wonder if they hijacked GPU a bit instead and used that for mining cryptocurrencies - whether Ubisoft would be better off (and deliver better experience to end user), instead of crippling CPU?

Publishers don't seem to have learned much since StarForce

odd, watching a few streamers with this and there were no indications as such from watching them play. now I do not know if they were given the game copies or merely codes so perhaps the DRM is not active for them.

would be another can of worms if so

I have a four year old gaming rig with minimal upgrades, i5-2600K, 24gb of RAM, GTX 760 iirc. I bet it will run like dogshite on my setup. YouTube streamers need to have decent machines in order to stream and play, so they may just have machines that are a lot more capable than the game itself can overcome

Lot of streamers use dual PC setup to lower the CPU stress.

I watched a streamer with a single PC setup (playing + gaming on the same PC) and he had insane frame drops on a quite decent PC (i7-4790K + GTX 1080)

I don't touch anything by ubisoft on pc due to being burned too many times, i don't want uplay.

I remember when I bought Assassin's Creed 2 years ago (legitimate, legal copy from Steam) and the game would never connect to the authentication servers, no matter what I tried.

I ended up having to download a cracked version of my legally owned game just to play it.

According to reliable source, The Inquirer, citing reliable source TorrentFreak.

who is the customer if so extreme anti-end-user measures are taken, because it surely isn't the end user?

I don't think I've read the inquirer articles before, but is this a standard?

> EARLY ADOPTERS ... have been quick to moan that ...

> ... gamers have taken to the Steam forums to whine about ...

> DRM all too often seems to make users lives' a misery

They're just talking about a broken game, right? (That will likely get patched in a few days/weeks)

It's more the batshit crazy idea behind it. If you want to play the game you have two choices:

1. Pay for the game to support the creation of more games. This path will include invasive DRM that either causes performance problems, damages your hardware, or disallows you from playing the game you paid for, for instance when you're not connected to the internet.

2. Pirate the game, play it how you want.

That they punish the users who do the right thing and reward those who do not is crazy to me. That it has continued for so long without a collective wakeup call that you should not punish the people who give you money and play by the rules is mindboggling.

There exists a third option. Pay for the game, then pirate the superior cracked version.

Which is still illegal regardless of whether it's moral.

I'm trying to find a way to work in a bound for the floor reference but none of them fit.

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