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Comment by NickNameNick | Hacker News Reader

If the DRM code was cleanly separated from the normal flow of the game code, it would be trivial for crackers to patch it out.

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Evidently it's still trivial for crackers to patch it out

I wouldn't say it's trivial. EMPRESS is one of the most talented crackers on the scene at the moment and it took ~2 months for this release.

Arguably, without EMPRESS, the crack would have taken a lot longer.

I think publishers should be happy with that. Every day a crack doesn’t come out is one more teenager who is hyped about latest game who will buy it.

Yeah, a lot of publishers voluntarily remove DRM from their games after a few months because most of the profit is made right at launch. Once the first round of discounts start to hit DRM serves no purpose anymore.

It's even better! You sign a contract with denuvo for how many days protection. The less days the less you pay. When the contract is up they remove it

I have never heard of this. Do you have any examples?

Search for "Denuvo removed" on Google. Lots of recent examples.

Doom Eternal & Metro Exodus – https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2020-05-29-denuvo-sec...

Monster Hunter World – https://www.vg247.com/2021/06/03/monster-hunter-world-denuvo...

Mass Effect Legendary Edition – https://www.nme.com/news/gaming-news/mass-effect-legendary-e...

Nier Automata – https://www.nme.com/news/gaming-news/nier-automata-update-re...

Capcom themselves did it with the rerelease of RE2 and RE3

Steam wish list. Pick it up for $15 and get a better experience with the DRM removed. Thanks Capcom!

> Every day a crack doesn’t come out is one more teenager who is hyped about latest game who will buy it.

Taken literally, that's all of ~60 additional copies sold!

Publishers put this DRM in place only as a short-term measure, removing it within a year in almost all cases after the majority of their sales are well gone. They do this in the hope to convincing people who might pirate the game to ultimately purchase it, which I'm assuming must work to some extent or they wouldn't pay the rather high costs of Denuvo, etc. (and I'm willing to bet their sales data probably supported this theory).

1. People who want to play the game online or are hyped and preorder it

2. People who want to play the game immediately and can’t wait, but will download it for free if they can

3. People who want to play it but are happy to wait for a sale

4. People who will never buy the game, but will play a cracked version

Group 2 is pretty huge, and includes age groups who care a lot about cosmetic items online (teenagers-20s)

I'm under the impression that the group of people who if they can pirate something, will do so and never buy it, but if they can't, will just buy it, is quite small indeed.

Every time it comes out that a pirate version fixes things broken in the mainline version, esp if drm is what broke it, I slide more firmly into always pirate category.

meaningful online service is the only thing that drives me to buy AAA games now and days, and most don't even have that.

Do people in the "always pirate category" buy games that they can't pirate, though? Or do they just skip those games and play different ones instead?

That describes me. I pirated lots of games when I was still into gaming. I bought Tribes 2, for example, because of course you can't pirate it if you want to play online (and it's a multiplayer-only shooter). Same for e.g. PUBG and one or two others.

Steam is a great thing for anti-piracy; 99% of the time it works without any friction and is faster/safer than piracy.

On the other hand I've only played the original Call of Duty and BF1942, and have neither paid for nor pirated any of the sequels of either. Frankly most AAA games actually really suck.

I generally won't buy single player games I can't pirate. The reason for this is they either have some online only bullshit, which is unacceptable in a single player game, or some DRM performance degrading virus.

The only game I pirated in the last 10 or so years was Metro Exodus because it was removed from the Steam store just before launch.

> The only game I pirated in the last 10 or so years was Metro Exodus because it was removed from the Steam store just before launch.

I waited until I could buy it for ridiculously dirt cheap on sale (literally a tiny fraction of full asking price) because their actions at launch destroyed my willingness to pay full price. Had they done things differently, they easily could have had me as a happy full price purchaser.

Interesting, does this mean DRM functions are forced inline when compiled?

Not just that. I'm not an expert, but from what I read, some DRMs will encrypt assets and critical game logic and let them be decrypted in real time on a virtual machine so that they aren't directly extractable from memory.

Once is in memory, encrypted or not, it can be extracted, inspected and replaced (which is what a launcher crack style does).

Yes, but figuring this out can still take a long time. Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory survived for over 400 days before being cracked.

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