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Comment by bri3d | Hacker News Reader

The most important thing about Denuvo is that it's on a subscription license to the game publishers, so it's almost always removed after some length of time. This is critical in understanding why it isn't cracked as often, because they've shifted the economics to "spend 3 months tediously removing obfuscation methods or wait 1 year and the game is unprotected anyway."

> anything covered by Denuvo is unavailable even years later

I don't think this is true in the general case.

> Either nobody is willing to crack it (unlikely)

That's exactly what's going on - it's a matter of time-benefit, not "possible." What's groundbreaking with Denuvo isn't that the overall technique is incomprehensible but rather that it's insanely tedious to remove and very difficult to automate. They haven't made some groundbreaking theoretical technique, they've applied so many "standard" ways to obfuscate a binary that it becomes more annoying than it's worth to remove.

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Is this, uh… actually a good outcome? If games make most of their money in the first couple months anyway (I’m not sure about this claim but it seems intuitively possible, at least for AAA), then getting anti-piracy for that timeframe seems like a high priority.

Then, the subscription can be allowed to lapse… and the game can be preserved, at least to the extent to which it can run without servers. If we have any belief in the “games as art” idea, this seems like a good result for preserving art.

It works out pretty well as long as publishers follow that step yeah. it would be nicest to open source the game after it's life span maybe

It would be nicest not to use unethical software (Denuvo or any other DRM) and distribute the game source with the binaries since the initial release. I can't believe that this needs to be repeated and that our understanding of open source has been perverted to 'is it on Github, and do the devs/community work for free so we can take advantage from them?' and that it's ok for games to be proprietary software...

As someone who regularly used to visit the ship and heavy rain websites for video games, I actually feel the modern usage of Denuvo—protect sales for the first bit, and then remove it for the long tail—is a decent middle ground between EA-style DRM that locks down a game and its servers for ever, versus having a game completely blown open the first day, and a new-ish studio losing a considerable amount of genuinely-deserved revenue the first few days after release because they had no DRM on.

Nobody needs video games. It’s ok if you can’t play video games.

By that logic nobody needs game developers and it's OK if we remove any laws (e.g. copyright) that protect them.

I don’t see how you arrived at that conclusion. People pirate games as if they’re entitled to play them without paying. If someone can’t afford the game they want, too bad. There were plenty of games I could not afford as a kid, so I did other things.

I'm not seeing the connection here. By the same logic, nobody needs software, it's ok if you can't use software, thus proprietary software is not unethical?

I mean, I'm pretty happy with the arrangement. People who buy day-1 bugfests for full price have to deal with awful DRM. But if you wait a year or two, then the most egregious bugs get fixed, it goes on sale, and the intrusive DRM is gone.

Of course, this means that casuals like me get a much better experience than their core, dedicated, day-1 customers ... but really, that sort of contempt for your core audience is a foundational principle of AAA these days.

It's a pretty good outcome, yeah. Kind of makes one wonder why copyright needs to be 70 years + life, when the overwhelming majority of sales are in the first year...

You make a good point, but there's a lot of money in sequels and IP.

Trademark, not Copyright.

No, the IP is protected by copyright, not by trademark.

The stories are copyrighted, but the characters inside are also trademarked. You can go distribute Steamboat Willie without consequences, but Mickey is still Disney IP.

And what stops you from making new content with Mickey Mouse in it is the set of copyrights Disney holds on Mickey Mouse. The trademark does nothing.

Established law says that every publication of a work involving a copyrighted character creates a new version of that character whose copyright extends for the full period starting from the publication of that work. This came up when someone wrote a story about Sherlock Holmes, who was out of copyright, and they were sued, successfully, on the theory that they had used aspects of Sherlock Holmes' personality that were developed in stories still under copyright.

Sam Logan had some fun with the concept here: https://www.samandfuzzy.com/3429

> After nearly 100 years of acting, what's your favorite of your roles?

> Steamboat Willie.

> Really? Not any of your other--

> We don't talk about my other roles. They're a burden. A liability, used to control me. I have left them behind, so that I may be free.

> The most important thing about Denuvo is that it's on a subscription license to the game publishers, so it's almost always removed after some length of time.

No, the most important thing about Denuvo is that PC gamers are forced to upgrade their hardware because Denuvo is such a performance hog. All you have to do is wait until Denuvo is stripped and the game will run much faster.

Frankly, it wouldn't surprise me if there's a conspiracy between Denuvo and Intel/AMD/NVIDIA where Denuvo goes out of their way to hurt performance on a really popular title, thus forcing people to upgrade.

Idiot writers at gaming websites claim a new patch to a game that's been out for a while has "optimizations" and lauds the developers for slaving away to make an already-finished game faster. The reality is that they just stripped out Denuvo.

I agree that I've seen anecdotal evidence that Denovu slows down some games considerably. That said, a conspiracy between every major hardware manufacturer and Denovu is certainly a bridge too far. It's far more reasonable, especially after reading this article, that there's a significant cost to all this encryption and wrapping and redirection if it's not applied carefully and enters a hot path.

I am more likely to believe someone who bypassed Denuvo.

> One can see that Denuvo does indeed intervene from time to time, but what one can clearly see: It doesn’t do that very often, definitely not every frame.

> It’s only once every few seconds. Even less, sometimes it doesn’t do anything.

> To me personally, it tells that Denuvo executes checks so infrequently, that the likelyhood of it causing major performance issues seems rather low.

https://momo5502.com/posts/2024-03-31-bypassing-denuvo-in-ho...

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