Denuvo-Protected Games Rendered Unplayable After Domain Expires | Hacker News Reader

Denuvo-Protected Games Rendered Unplayable After Domain Expires

torrentfreak.com

158 pointsforlorn85 comments

Has anyone ever done an a analysis on whether Denuvo (or DRM in general) is actually a wise investment of capital? I imagine it probably does have some impact on early sales in that it will prevent early customers from pirating to try it rather than buying it. But at the same time, you have things like Steam's return policy, the general dislike of DRM, and the publicity/image cost when something happens preventing everyone from playing the game. Not to mention that it seems inevitable these days that it either gets cracked or removed by the publisher anyway.

I always wonder if the resources spent on Denuvo would be better spent on the game itself, or marketing the game, allowing the so-inclined to pirate it more easily at launch, but offsetting that with better sales overall driven by better reception, more word of mouth, etc.

If it wasn't a vise investment, publishers and developers of AAA titles wouldn't invest in it. But they do.

This assumes that companies do not make unwise investments, when counterexamples are legion.

As phrased, that's a weak argument. Whoever is calling the shots will have some bias and weigh different conceivable outcomes in a subjective manner that an outside observer may consider unsound. I mean, "publishers and developers of AAA titles" also somehow brought us the disastrous releases of No Man's Sky or Cyberpunk 2077. Or any of the PR disasters of $random_AAA_game.

I agree that it's overwhelmingly likely that someone ran the numbers about using DRM at these companies. But it's not unlikely that they over- or under-estimated certain factors. They will have more information than we do, but certainly not perfect information (see also above).

> I agree that it's overwhelmingly likely that someone ran the numbers about using DRM at these companies.

I wouldn't even go that far. It's very rare for anybody to run the numbers. Humans are too lazy. At most they'll eyeball it. Unless somebody requires hard numbers and they start digging up your process so that it's easier to actually do it than to fake it, no "running the numbers" will happen.

I'd go one further (in the other direction). If someone "ran the numbers", I'm quite sure they would have made them public. Because no consumer wants DRM (some are ambivalent, some hate it, but no one is like "oh, thank goodness, DRM"), and the inclusion of DRM by other companies does not threaten your market share, a company has nothing to lose, and only to gain (good will) if they were to release those figures and explain to their customers with cold hard data why DRM is included.

None have done so. Ergo, I am quite sure no one has "run the numbers"; they have, as mentioned, eyeballed them and used them to justify their own biases, as humans are wont to do. And either do not have enough of an analysis to release, or realize it is so easy to poke holes in that they shouldn't.

It’s not that simple because there’s no objective way to get a number for the most important question: how many people would have bought if they couldn’t pirate it? The publishers have quoted estimates which basically assume 100% conversion and I’d be quite surprised if there weren’t senior managers who wholeheartedly believed that because if your job amounts to “sell more” that’s a very tempting way to say that not hitting your targets wasn’t your fault. This is especially what you tell politicians when saying you need police investigations into pirating and various legal protections, too.

These numbers are, of course, wildly optimistic but it’s harder to say exactly how far off they are.

I never said it was simple. Your example is exactly the sort of thing I was referencing when I said "or realize it is so easy to poke holes in that they shouldn't". Because, obviously, assuming every IP on a torrent swarm (or whatever) is a lost sale is fallacious.

That doesn't really follow. Companies are run by people, and people have a bit of a history of doing unwise things, often repeatedly.

I would suspect that it probably offers some reduction in casual piracy around release time (as compared to a game with no DRM that you can install anywhere you want as many times as you want with no need to work around anything), though that's probably hard to measure since there's no control group for AAA titles - most of them have some sort of DRM.

The downside is it probably causes significant damage to customer goodwill and willingness to buy future titles, but from the companies' perspective, that's both really hard to measure and it applies to financial results for future quarters, not this quarter, so it might as well not exist.

I love this assumption that those actors are rational

Do you want to risk your job by saying DRM isn't worth it? If you report to the board, do you think the shareholders think it's meaningless? If you report up, do you think your bosses want to stick their necks out?

Fundamentally, they're spending other people's money as insurance to avoid losing their job following a flop that can be spun as due to piracy.

There are plenty of market failures out there. Why would this be necessarily any different?

The "general dislike of DRM" is a non issue because it's only shared by a minuscule portion of game players. And most of those who have a dislike for DRM still won't let that get in the way of them playing a game they really want to play at release time.

Denuvo seems to be extremely effective at delaying piracy for a few months, during which the publishers of the game make most of their sales.

It's really only to protect the launch window. Most games will be discounted later on to the point where they're more or less affordable to everyone. But if someone pirates on release they'll never be inclined to buy at that lower price later on.

This is the reason why I've mostly heard. TBH it would probably be a good ideas for vendors to remove DRM after a game has been out for a few years and has stopped getting patches for a year+.

I think a lot of them do. It's not uncommon to hear of devs removing DRM after a certain number of months. Especially nowadays where after a certain point they just want people to play the game ready for when the sequel comes out.

> But if someone pirates on release they'll never be inclined to buy at that lower price later on.

Just a personal anecdote. I have pirated a shitton amount of video games when I was young and didn't have money. You know what was one of the first thing I did after getting my salary ? I bought burnout paradise. I now own almost 1/2 of all the video games which I played as a pirate on steam and epic.

And also people who generally take the pirate route to play video games, never ever generally pay for it. So expecting a pirate would give in to buy a video game which he thinks will definitely get cracked in the near future is not really a good idea.

Not only this but for some games, the launch window is all they’ll have because the game is terrible. This works as insurance to make sure they make some money.

Also DRM vendors (like Denuvo) have moved to a more aaS licensing model and homegrown DRM solutions fall so quickly they're out of fashion, so there's financial incentive to stop paying licensing costs for games in their long tail phase for sales.

Well used, Denuvo is not that bad. It is misuse that cause games to become slow or unplayable. And generally, it only serves to protect the first few months of sales, it is not uncommon to strip out DRM after that.

Indie games often don't need it (and don't do it). AAA games are a different story. Including DRM is a significant expense in a low budget game, these games are usually cheaper, and people are often more sympathetic to small studios. Also, indie games need exposure first, and they get at least that from pirate copies, AAA games rely on advertising for that and run close to market saturation so pirate copies are more of an opportunity cost.

> Well used, Denuvo is not that bad.

Ubisoft admitting that Denuvo ( idk why they used the term third party lol ) causes PC stuttering.

https://gamerant.com/ubisoft-third-party-software-pc-stutter...

Resident evil 8 runs better when it is stripped off its denuvo protection. As confirmed by Digital foundry's video.

https://youtu.be/UXZGCwAJpbM

https://www.pcgamer.com/resident-evil-village-drm-denuvo-stu...

You will now see a huge influx of video games being stripped of denuvo because it literally shits itself in 12th gen Intel chips and games become unplayable with denuvo.

> And generally, it only serves to protect the first few months of sales, it is not uncommon to strip out DRM after that.

Nope, disagree. The only time they strip Denuvo out is when the game is cracked by warez scenes or if the cost of paying denuvo gets bigger than the people actually paying for it.

Some video games which are out for well over an year but just got denuvo removed in the last 2-3 months out of the blue. It is because of denuvos incompatibility with win11.

1.Shadow of Tomb Raider (3 years)

2.Rise of tomb raider (6 years )

3.Injustice 2 (4years)

4.Jedi fallen order (2years )

5.Nier replicant.

6. Tekken 7 (6years).

> AAA games rely on advertising for that and run close to market saturation so pirate copies are more of an opportunity cost.

Trust me when I say people who pirate are usually the ones who never ever buy video games. Pirates can never be considered an opportunity cost. Not trying to glorify pirates, but people waited patiently for over an year to play RDR2 till it got cracked, so that they don't have to pay outta their pockets.

> Trust me when I say people who pirate are usually the ones who never ever buy video games.

It is not like black and white. There are a lot of people in between pirate and pre-order player.

I mean, "never ever" is extreme. But the point is "does leaving a game easy to pirate, vs making it hard to pirate, actually decrease sales".

And unfortunately it's kind of impossible to test that.

> It is not like black and white. There are a lot of people in between pirate and pre-order player.

I can tell with confidence its not the case with my country. People who are well off, who are desperate enough to play it do pre-order vidya. And the other half don't spend money on video games because they think its a waste of money, why ? because its gonna get cracked anyway why pay for it now ? People are willing to wait for a few months for it to get cracked if it means that they can save that money. I know it sounds strange but when it comes to piracy its quite black and white over here.

Ubisoft is notorious for misuse of DRM. I believe you have to disable virtualization from the BIOS to even be able to play some of their games. They also reverted back to needing an always on connection for some of their games. What confuses me is that their use of DRM seems really inconsistent, and they keep it on even for old games.

Stay away from Ubisoft on PC.

Denuvo, like most game DRM engines have libraries that can be called from anywhere inside the game code and perform a variety of checks. If the developers are overzealous and make frequent, complex checks, it will result in stuttering. If I remember well, RE8 has a check when a zombie spawns, resulting in mid-gameplay slowdown. They could have put checks only in naturally slow events, like loading a map, and no one would have noticed.

And I kind of agree about pirates never buying games, I don't remember buying a single game during all my student days. And I have now mostly stopped piracy, DRM or not, mostly because I earn enough money, play less, and platforms like Steam are really convenient.

> Trust me when I say people who pirate are usually the ones who never ever buy video games

Why would we trust you? This is just you speaking for yourself.

I used to pirate and when I couldn't, I bought the games. I'm probably not the only one.

The fact that publishers routinely spend millions of dollars on DRM is evidence that DRM works at protecting their sales. They wouldn't throw this kind of money with hundreds of experts crunching the numbers if it wasn't valuable for them.

Money speaks, while you are just making claims without any evidence.

I did not do the analysis myself but I saw some numbers and they make it a very good investment. Unfortunately I cannot share.

This is just one point, but I started pirating games during college because of DRM, after whatever they used in Spore destroyed Windows so badly I had to do a full reinstall and lost a bunch of stuff. Before that I reliably bought all my games.

I don't pirate games anymore, but that's only because I stopped playing computer games entirely and stick to consoles, to avoid DRM screwing with my stuff.

I’m not trying to be rude here but going from PC gaming to consoles because you dislike DRM is like buying a sports car because you think trucks pollute too much.

I don't think he's saying to avoid DRM, rather to avoid DRM on his computer, which playing via console would do.

It depends on whether you object to the concept on principle or to the negative impact on your computer. In the latter case, his actions make total sense.

Consoles are all about DRM aren't they?

Yes, but they would not ruin his PC again.

Afaik both Sony and MS (yes, even MS) do some internal QA before allowing a game to be published on their consoles.

Plus they don't allow (single player?) games to require registering with the publisher. So on the rare occasions I'm interested in a game from the top user hostile AAA publishers, I get it for console.

Consoles are DRM.

Sure, but more importantly: consoles aren't the computer I do everything with.

Yes.

"The European Commission paid €360,000 (about $428,000) for a study on how piracy impacts the sales of copyrighted music, books, video games, and movies. But the EU never shared the report—possibly because it determined that there is no evidence that piracy is a major problem."

TLDR: https://gizmodo.com/the-eu-suppressed-a-300-page-study-that-...

Study: https://cdn.netzpolitik.org/wp-upload/2017/09/displacement_s...

You left out the money quote from the Gizmodo article:

> The report found that illegal downloads and streams can actually boost legal sales of games, according to the report. The only negative link the report found was with major blockbuster films:“The results show a displacement rate of 40 percent which means that for every ten recent top films watched illegally, four fewer films are consumed legally.”

(Emphasis added.)

So, if anything, game companies should literally be putting their stuff up on torrent sites themselves!

I suspect that a lot of that 40% are people who pirate it to try it out before purchasing. What ever happens to demo disks and the like? I miss that

Yup, the only two companies I can trust with game quality are Sega and Valve, all the rest either have toxic communities or had major fuckups with quality, performance or plots, and I don't trust them with $4.99 at all.

I like the rockstar approach. Have a local player game that has a story and a lot of fun mechanics, and then have an online version with fun side quests and adventures with your friends. Totally worth the $50 cost of entry.

welp, it didnt age well

But then it s not piracy anymore. I often transform a pirated game I like into a buy on Steam later that I never touch, but almost never pay again for a game I got for free legally - what matters to me (but that s just me) is the convenience and comfort of the legal offer, not the support to companies I assume have planned for my consumption behaviour. If I learn they put on torrents willingly, I ll probably swallow the lack of convenience and assume I m doing the right thing.

The only thing I feel annoyed by is that I could be buying a game I pirated at a sales price, displacing cost for something I shouldn't have been able to, but again if prices were more aligned with perceived value and risk of mismatch between marketing and realized quality, I d hesitate less sending money their way.

>But the EU never shared the report

I remember the day it was published, it hit some news, I made a backup of that PDF from EC domain (still have it!), 2 or 3 hours later the PDF was 404.

What did it say?

The same pdf is now hosted on netzpolitik, link above, but no longer available on EC website

Wisdom of the crowd. Thank you for your service!

DRM doesn't work in games, go to a torrent site to see all the failed attempts.

    1. It costs money
    2. It makes the product worse(slower, less portable,etc...) for your _ paying _ customers.
    3. It doesn't work if the game is good.

Just add a copyright note on the corner and make sure to have good distribution.

As others have mentioned it’s probably only helpful on release date or the first weeks.

Ideally it should just automatically expired after x amount of time.

Denuvo has been very successful at protecting games in the launch window the past couple years. Last I heard there was only one person willing and/or able to crack it and their throughput wasn't high.

It works to boost preorders and the crucial first week to get into sales charts.

If I understand correctly: If I had been fast enough to buy this domain, I would be able to break Denuvo for a long time?

At least until the registrar intervened per their abuse policy

Most registrars have a grace period of 30-40 days, where the original owner can still reclaim it IIRC.

> Following the failure to renew, the domain then went into a grace period but when that expired too, it appears to have been removed from DNS records.

Oh wow, didn't see that. How did nobody notice...

Well there should still be a redemption and "pending delete" period [0]. I believe the original owner can still reclaim during those.

[0] https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/dns/glossary/expired-dom...

That's right. After grace period it goes into a period called redemption where they can still get it back but it cost like $120.

Source: Used to work at registrar.

So if I buy the domain, and give it the original DNS records for 45 days, then I could take control?

Reclaim as in renew their claim. Not reclaim as in claw back

No, you could not have purchased the domain

No, it never fully dropped.

> Updated Date: 2021-11-08T14:45:58Z

> Creation Date: 2014-09-24T14:45:19Z

> Registry Expiry Date: 2022-09-24T14:45:19Z

This should immediately make it legal to apply a crack in my opinion. I hope this is the case.

You don't own the game, you own a license to play it for however long the publisher wants. Whether or not it is legal really shouldn't matter, it should just be done as a matter of course for such games.

Wouldn't that depend on local laws? My assumption is that it would be covered by the recent EU court ruling that allows reverse engineering to fix bugs[0].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28809559

It definitely would not be because that ruling does not overrule other bits of legislation, such as the prohibition against distribution or importation of tools to circumvent technical protection measure that all EU countries have.

it does if the software is not working(like in this case). "the legitimate purchaser of a program is entitled to decompile that program in order to correct errors affecting its operation"

https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=f5b1193c-f423...

The main point here is to figure out if it no longer working is actually considered an error or whether it might be a planned feature.

No, this is misinformation.

That ruling just states that it is not a copyright breach to decompile a program to correct errors.

It does not grant a carte blanche against other laws. DRM circumvention laws are separate offenses and are not overridden.

(Not a lawyer) You could probably sue in some jurisdictions, since a main aspect of the contract was not clearly advertised.

If it has a buy button for game xyz you should assume you’re buying the game, not a license, even if the fine print says otherwise. For multiplayer games it would probably be ok to not perpetually run the servers, for single player the server isn’t an aspect that is crucial to the functioning. There may be an issue with how long ago the purchase was though.

These kinds of arguments don't make any sense to me. You can't buy copyrighted works[1], only licenses to them. So Steam changes the button to "Buy License" and literally nothing changes. Are you happy now? Of course not. Because that's not the issue. The thing you have issue with is the terms of the license, not the license itself.

[1] Okay fine you can but nobody who buys Skyrim thinks they are buying the rights to the whole Skyrim media property. But hey, I hope I'm wrong and you all owe me lots of royalties.

You buy a copy of the game that is expected to run with the hardware defined - no end date.

If they’d change the button and add an explanation that the license can be revoked at any time without notice or reason, then my argument would be invalid, but users might not be willing to pay as much any more.

Edit: because they now openly know the significant terms and know they’re potentially being screwed. It’s already bad enough to pay full price without the ability to resell or pass on (not sure how games are right now, but that’s why I don’t use a kindle, along with it being tied to my other Amazon account and everything that goes with it)

In the United States, the 2021 DMCA anti-circumvention exemptions do include this case[0]:

> (17)(i) Video games in the form of computer programs embodied in physical or downloaded formats that have been lawfully acquired as complete games, when the copyright owner or its authorized representative has ceased to provide access to an external computer server necessary to facilitate an authentication process to enable gameplay, solely for the purpose of: (A) Permitting access to the video game to allow copying and modification of the computer program to restore access to the game for personal, local gameplay on a personal computer or video game console;

However, these rules are currently renewed every three years, instead of being permanent, so it could not be the case in the future.

[0] https://public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2021-23311.pdf

Furthermore, the DMCA 1201 exemption process only applies to the act of applying a crack to a game, not the act of distributing it. So if a game's DRM fails the only legal way to make use of the exemption is to figure out how to break the DRM yourself - you can't distribute the resulting cracking tool to anyone without violating DMCA 1201, even if it has a lawful use.

> However, these rules are currently renewed every three years, instead of being permanent, so it could not be the case in the future.

That's a lovely meta-commentary on this situation. Not just the DRM domains expire, so do the laws that allow their circumvention when they do!

Is it anyways illegal to "crack" a game you have purchased?

When games required CDs to run - I had to apply No-CDs. Because CDs were fragile and expensive. When games started to require online DRM - I had to apply No-Steam patches. Because I am rarely online and value my privacy. Even though I legally bought those games, DRM causes so much inconvenience, so I'd actually donate to pirates for making my life easier. News like this prove me right.

> After sending a set of questions to two of our usual contacts at the company, we received a pair of automated emails stating that our correspondence was “undeliverable”, that the messages had been “bounced by administrator” and as a result had permanently failed.

Wtf? What ever happened to journalistic principles like protecting your sources?!

These are likely PR people, not anonymous sources.

The emails were forwarded to "support@codefusion.technology"

In what way is saying emails bounced endangering their sources?

"we tried to contact the company and couldn't for technical reasons" isn't revealing any big secrets.

"We sent this amount of messages and they bounced with these specific error messages" would give a mail admin enough information to find the sources

All of my original iPad games also don’t work because Apple refuses to let iOS devices downgrade to run software it was only just using.

Did anyone buy it and replace with a server that just returns “you’re all good!”?

Commoditize your complements strikes back

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