17 ms·

Red Dead Redemption 2 DRM still has not been cracked (316 days)

158 points by tetris11 6y ago

tetris11 6y ago
Quote from a piracy thread: "Red Dead Redemption uses some obfuscation written by the same folks that sold previous obfuscation as 'Arxan'. The HWID-bound license probably plugs into the DRM such that it enables continued execution of the game code. This has become a feature of complex DRM." "It also has a lot of custom checks that Rockstar wrote." "That's it. There's no grand mystery, it's a classically challenging problem using new ways of writing frustrating-to-reverse bullshit." src: https://www.reddit.com/r/Piracy/comments/h0j17y/red_dead_redemption_2_drm/ftnthhy?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/Piracy/comments/h0j17y/red_dead_red...
- jnwatson 6y ago
  I interviewed with Arxan. I've been generally impressed with their stuff.
  - invalidusernam3 6y ago
    Was it an interesting interview? Sounds like it would be an interesting place to work.
    - jnwatson 6y ago
      It was a typical startup: somewhat disorganized, but with some interesting technical questions. I didn't know nearly as much about reversing back when I interviewed as I did now. Most of the questions were on the order of "come up with better ideas than we have", which IMHO is probably not the best way to interview.
  - NoOneNew 6y ago
    I'm also interested in what was impressive with them. STORY TIME! Tell us a story!
- drmcometru 6y ago
  I work on anti-DRM techniques for a living. The experience has shifted my views of DRM. Originally, I saw DRM as highly anti-consumer, and a waste of time and clock cycles. Arguably I do still believe that - but now I have great respect for the technical side of good DRM implementations, and I acknowledge that they provide a time buffer to protect against the first wave of piracy. I've stripped Arxran's protections from software in the past, and I might just have a look at breaking RDR2 now it's been brought to my attention...
  - renewiltord 6y ago
    Wait, how do you make a living from that? Like publishers need you to break their stuff out so they can resell it long after the developer is gone or something?
    - ineedasername 6y ago
      Yes, I'm curious about what kind of (legal) paying job needs that sort of skill set.
    - drmcometru 6y ago
      Organizations that apply 3rd party DRM to their products often want independent verification that the DRM functions as intended (there's a lot of snake-oil), and a quantification of how much time/effort it takes to break the DRM.
      - barbs 6y ago
        Wow. Kind of like red-team hackers testing the security of their website or whatever. Sounds like a dream job for the right person...a "drmcometru" if you will ;)
      - renewiltord 6y ago
        Very cool, very cool. Thank you!
        6y ago
- rasz 6y ago
  This type of DRM can eat something crazy like >50% CPU when playing. Dense dynamic recompilation, running inside obfuscated VM, etc. https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/282924-denuvo-really-does-cripple-pc-gaming-performance https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/282924-denuvo-really-does...
- theincredulousk 6y ago
  Worked with Arxan's technology for a bit. Not surprised it is getting to the point where cracker's don't have the time to break it. Embracing the point that everything can be broken eventually, the focus becomes just making it take a long time, such that it is not economical, or simply too time consuming "for fun". Arxan's toolkit includes peppering custom checks everywhere in the code, including mechanisms so these checks don't have the same signature and can't be searched for easily once one is found. Further, there are "silent ones", which most of the time don't do anything, but at some point will activate. This makes it so you can think you've broken the protection, and then e.g. one hour into playing the game it randomly seg-faults (crashes with an error indistinguishable from a normal bug, through deliberate memory corruption), or flags your hardware as using a cracked version and blacklists it. Imagine trying to figure out if memory corruption was on purpose or a normal bug when the corruption happened 1,000,000,000 instructions ago by a section of code that is completely innocuous and just had an off-by-1 error introduced via some index calculation. Now imagine there are 500,000 of these little silent/time-delay traps sprinkled all over the code. In that way it can be nearly impossible to know if you've fully cracked the game. I mean you can really take the long-con with these things, and let it run for weeks, or even just never notify the user and hit them with a blacklist. Imagine playing a game for 100 hours and then out of nowhere having your progress wiped - pretty harsh lesson if you were invested in it. Then there is the binary + in-memory encryption, and customization of protection for every install. This was one of the holy grails as I understood it - you could make the software such that the protection system is completely custom for every install of the software, which makes binary patching useless. This would be difficult when distributing the software on discs, but, and this is a key point, trivial these days where games are downloaded. It is easy to custom generate binaries for everyone. This can do things like use a custom key based on your HWID that is literally necessary to decrypt portions of the game code. There is no way around having the correct key for your hardware to literally decrypt and run the code, which through other techniques can be made custom and further checked for authenticity, making it impossible to simply get the decrypted code and patch it in to other installs. Related techniques can be used to determine if you're running a binary that was decrypted on a different machine, and that is before getting into code that is custom-encrypted and decrypted in-memory at runtime based on your current HWID. You're probably thinking you can reason your way around this, but trust me, it has all been thought of before. The closest you could probably come is forcing cracked clients to all run in some kind of identical virtual machine, which is going to be shit for playing a AAA game even if it worked and no protections were able to figure out they were running in a virtual machine, which they can. The list goes on for this tech, and while no single tech is super effective, when they are all put together, it adds up to a knot that very few people will have the motivation or monetary incentive to sort out, or even ability to in a relevant amount of time after the games release. By the time they figure it the next update could be released, and all that is left is to look back in misery at the time of their life they wasted cracking an old version of a game.
shmerl 6y ago
DRM obsessed developers: we need to spend time on this junk and punish our paying customers. All other developers: we spend time on making better games and release them on GOG on day one.
- recursive 6y ago
  I think Rockstar is big enough to work on two things at the same time.
  - andrewxdiamond 6y ago
    They are referring to the quality tradeoffs that must be made when adding DRM to a game. It adds overhead at the very least, and many games, Triple As included, have had game breaking faults due to shoddy DRM implementations.
    - asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
      Seems to have balanced out ok in RDR2.
      - redisman 6y ago
        RDR2 is fairly poorly optimized but I'm not really taking these anecdotal "DRM makes games slow" comments too seriously until there's some proof. Games are almost never CPU bound so I just don't see how obfuscation is supposedly killing performance.
        andrewxdiamond 6y ago
        Here, I did the quick google search you could have done and found some data on DRM performance implications in real world games. https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/282924-denuvo-really-does-cripple-pc-gaming-performance https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/282924-denuvo-really-does...
dylan604 6y ago
Is DRM so totally useless that this is a worthy thing of note?
- recursive 6y ago
  RDR2 is one of the biggest of triple-As. It probably has more cracking effort applied to it than most. I don't think that's evidence that DRM is useless.
  - dylan604 6y ago
    If no other DRM has withstood for 300+ days before being cracked, then it seems pretty useless. Yay, it worked for one title. I think we can all agree CSS was pretty useless. This stat makes it sound like AAA game DRM is about as easy to crack. At least it's not as bad as the master key leaking for Blu-ray.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - NoOneNew 6y ago
      You do realize whoever wrote the spec for this DRM now has free advertising to be hired for more projects and make bank. If Rockstar did it in house, I'm pretty sure they're going to make a spinoff DRM company. Useless, stupid, whatever you want to call it, they're going to print fun-coupons now.
      - dylan604 6y ago
        DRM is and always will be a cat&mouse game. The hacker that breaks this DRM will also get level up bonus for their resume. At that point, this theoretical business model you propose will no longer be such a valuable thing. Those fun-coupons will be as valuable as the Chuck E Cheese tickets recently discussed
        NoOneNew 6y ago
chromedev 6y ago
The game wouldn't even run for like the first 5 days because they required BIOS updates from manufacturers for the game to even work.
- nitrogen 6y ago
  Does that mean the game is using the TPM or similar for its DRM?
- zamadatix 6y ago
  I wouldn't associate the mess that was motherboard firmware around launch with anything but AMD. The firmware didn't even boost the CPU right either.
  - chromedev 6y ago
    It was due to needing a specific version of AGESA, which also has to do with security and was likely related to DRM, hence why the game wouldn't boot.
  - exciteabletom 6y ago
    I have an Intel SKU and I couldn't launch the game for 2 months after release.
    - zamadatix 6y ago
      Because of BIOS issues?
      - exciteabletom 6y ago
        I updated the BIOS and nothing changed. After a few months they fixed it.
- kevinventullo 6y ago
  The game regularly crashed for me 4 months after release, to the point where I stopped playing it.
google234123 6y ago
Good for them!
jupp0r 6y ago
Maybe it's just me not being a college student with a very constrained budget anymore, but is using cracked games still a thing nowadays? My impression was that it was very widespread until the mid/late 2000s because it was the most convenient way to get a game (ie without going into a physical store or mail ordering games). This should be alleviated by steam/stadia/etc nowadays, right?
- ineedasername 6y ago
  I'm ambivalent on the issue of piracy through lack of money. I mean, it's not really a lost sale, and it could generate a repeat paying customer later. Especially as you get out of your teens/early 20's and tend to have more disposable income, and price is the easier barrier to leap than sketchy torrents and cracks.
- renewiltord 6y ago
  Still a big scene. Maybe bigger (absolute terms, not percentage) because gaming is such a huge market now. For the big games like RDR2 or the newer Assassin's Creeds, the DRM probably paid back way more than it cost.
- vmception 6y ago
  I'm generally curious about this too. Cracking got harder and licensed distribution in the 2010s became as convenient and consumer friendly as it unlicensed distribution was for pirates in the early 2000s. Region locked games started disappearing, coinciding with less physical media needs to begin with. Flagship titles started being released cross region simultaneously. Downloads and streaming was available and fast. The marketplaces and discovery gradually got better too, still limited here but not better than what the marketplaces distributing unlicensed content have. There is also the part about the budget, but I'm not sure. Expense was a factor, but I'm not sure how big of a factor. The things people do on Steam and other marketplaces is similar to what pirates were doing: downloading a ton of games for free because they could, but only playing the flagship games and never touching the other ones. So the pirates-turned-consumers are still only buying a handful of games, and now also have access to the promotions and plethora of free stuff as the always-consumers.
lacker 6y ago
The frustrating thing about this DRM is that RDR2 requires an internet connection in order to play the single-player game. At one point my internet was down and I couldn't play it. Obviously not the biggest problem in the world, but still an annoyance.
- drmcometru 6y ago
  The biggest concern for me is, what happens when you want to play the game again in 10 years time, when the DRM servers are offline? When you buy DRM'ed media, you are merely renting it for an unspecified duration.
  - joshschreuder 6y ago
    A lot of companies are at least removing the more aggressive DRMs (eg. Denuvo) some time after the prime sales window has passed, at which point they would either have minimal DRM like Steam, or be fully cracked.
  - dudus 6y ago
    In 10 years you're better off just playing the 8K remaster on PS6 or maybe just playing red dead redemption 3 which is pretty much the same game but with better graphics and combat.
    - progman32 6y ago
      Perhaps in 20 years I'll be able to play HL3 instead of HL2 :)
    - arc-in-space 6y ago
      Yes, the remaster, on a locked-down hardware platform, both of which I will have to pay for again. Hopefully by then I will also be too old to remember what 'anti-consumer' means.
    - selfhoster11 6y ago
      * If you get a remaster at all * If the current IP owner didn't make a mess of the remastering process (in an aesthetic or technical sense) * If the remaster is free of defects that make the game unplayable for seasoned users of that game * If you have the target platfrom of choice that the remaster targets. In other words, you would have to be very lucky.
Benjamin_Dobell 6y ago
It's worth keeping in mind that cracking DRM is pretty much universally criminally illegal these days. In the past (admittedly a long time ago now) you would have just been butting up against the game's terms of service / shrink-wrap license. Since the WIPO Copyright Treaty has been ratified in local law almost world-wide, no-one with even a semblance of professionalism would even attempt to crack DRM. So it's not like the world's best security consultants have been working on this non-stop for the last year. EDIT: Just to clarify, security firms may of course be hired/green-lit by the DRM's implementer to try break the software. However, DRM is not open season for white-hat security engineers like a lot of other areas are.
- pfundstein 6y ago
  Are you telling me it's illegal to reverse engineer [DRM] software that I paid for and installed on my PC? That's like making it illegal to open the bonnet of my car and take the engine apart. Or are you saying it's illegal to build a crack using my private computer? Or are you just saying it's illegal to publish that crack?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - ev1 6y ago
    From a legal risk POV, yes, assuming US-based. It is not fair use at all, either. CFAA and DMCA are quite nasty in this regard. It gets significantly worse if, in the course of your inspection/EULA violation/whatever, you have to interact with any third party DRM [online] services for authn/authz. Then you bring even more crime into scope. Ianal, but I'm fairly certain the answer is 'yes' to every single question, even individually (the act of cracking and the act of publishing it might even be two separate crimes) EFF: > The anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA, 17 U.S.C. 1201, prohibit circumvention of “technological protection measures” that effectively control access to copyrighted works. The law also prohibits trafficking in tools that are primarily designed for circumvention, have only limited commercially significant purpose other than circumvention or are marketed for circumvention. While section 1201 can arguably apply to any security researcher, those studying digital rights management (DRM) of music, movies or other creative content are most likely to face section 1201 claims, since Congress intended to protect these copyrighted works when it passed the statute. Researchers looking for vulnerabilities in authentication handshakes, code signing, code obfuscation, and protocol encryption also have to worry about section 1201 because vendors have argued that these also qualify as “technical protection measures” covered by the DMCA.
Medox 6y ago
In the meantime the PS4 jailbreak went from version 5.05 (where it stagnated for a long time) to 6.72 in July, which was also old by that time, being released in mid July 2019, but which now can run RDR2 up to the patch 1.13 (last on 6.72). Or to put it differently... If you can't crack the game, crack the os. At least in the console world, this gives you the advantage that anything works up a certain fw version afterwards. If I remember correctly, the jump from 5.05 to 6.72, added more than 1000 playable games for those who kept the PS4 on 5.05 (myself included). Sadly, there is not much talk around HN about console hacking. E.g. Here is the bounty submission of Andy Nguyen (theflow0) for 6.72: https://hackerone.com/reports/826026 https://hackerone.com/reports/826026 Sony might have shot itself in the foot by accepting the disclosure at the end... But, then again, they had to and there's not much harm done when the jailbroken fw is a year old.
- tetris11 6y ago
  what's the advantage of a jail broken ps4? Other than running 3rd party Linux binaries, and maybe adding ad-blockers, is there a gaming benefit?
  - tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago
    Piracy, I assume?
  - p1necone 6y ago
    Running homebrew, although I don't know if there's much of a homebrew scene for the ps4. Also you can get a second hand ps4 pretty cheap nowadays relative to it's hardware and power consumption - could make a decent home server if you chucked some variety of linux on there (is there much support for the hardware?)
    - dogma1138 6y ago
      PS4 is basically a PC at this point one of the main reasons for why no homebrew scene.
  - TAForObvReasons 6y ago
bsder 6y ago
Presumably this is simply a function of not cracking it within the 30,60,90-day critical window? Sure, cracking it now would give you "street cred", but you probably gain more by cracking something newer and more popular.
- p1necone 6y ago
  I'm pretty sure the only reason people crack games is for street cred, or at least for the technical challenge. Seems like "I cracked the game that noone else could for nearly a year" is a great reason to try to me.
rabbitonrails 6y ago
Maybe just a sign you can’t even give RDR2 away for free ;)
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Johnny999 6y ago
Well yeah, it's not going to be cracked.
dahi1203 6y ago
yes waiting for that but here i had got hotstar mod apk with cracked interface to enjoy vip/ premium for lifetime https://modlelo.com/hotstar-mod-apk/ https://modlelo.com/hotstar-mod-apk/
ChildOfChaos 6y ago
This is normal now. Most of the cracking groups have given up, because of Denuvo, they just crack small releases, the few people that were actually cracking Denuvo were not even the big scene groups, most likely individuals with certain skills, but at lot of them just disappeared as it became too hard/took too long to make it worth the time.

158 points by tetris11 6y ago

Quote from a piracy thread: "Red Dead Redemption uses some obfuscation written by the same folks that sold previous obfuscation as 'Arxan'. The HWID-bound license probably plugs into the DRM such that it enables continued execution of the game code. This has become a feature of complex DRM." "It also has a lot of custom checks that Rockstar wrote." "That's it. There's no grand mystery, it's a classically challenging problem using new ways of writing frustrating-to-reverse bullshit." src: https://www.reddit.com/r/Piracy/comments/h0j17y/red_dead_redemption_2_drm/ftnthhy?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/Piracy/comments/h0j17y/red_dead_red...

jnwatson 6y ago
I interviewed with Arxan. I've been generally impressed with their stuff.
- invalidusernam3 6y ago
  Was it an interesting interview? Sounds like it would be an interesting place to work.
  - jnwatson 6y ago
    It was a typical startup: somewhat disorganized, but with some interesting technical questions. I didn't know nearly as much about reversing back when I interviewed as I did now. Most of the questions were on the order of "come up with better ideas than we have", which IMHO is probably not the best way to interview.
- NoOneNew 6y ago
  I'm also interested in what was impressive with them. STORY TIME! Tell us a story!
drmcometru 6y ago
I work on anti-DRM techniques for a living. The experience has shifted my views of DRM. Originally, I saw DRM as highly anti-consumer, and a waste of time and clock cycles. Arguably I do still believe that - but now I have great respect for the technical side of good DRM implementations, and I acknowledge that they provide a time buffer to protect against the first wave of piracy. I've stripped Arxran's protections from software in the past, and I might just have a look at breaking RDR2 now it's been brought to my attention...
- renewiltord 6y ago
  Wait, how do you make a living from that? Like publishers need you to break their stuff out so they can resell it long after the developer is gone or something?
  - ineedasername 6y ago
    Yes, I'm curious about what kind of (legal) paying job needs that sort of skill set.
  - drmcometru 6y ago
    Organizations that apply 3rd party DRM to their products often want independent verification that the DRM functions as intended (there's a lot of snake-oil), and a quantification of how much time/effort it takes to break the DRM.
    - barbs 6y ago
      Wow. Kind of like red-team hackers testing the security of their website or whatever. Sounds like a dream job for the right person...a "drmcometru" if you will ;)
    - renewiltord 6y ago
      Very cool, very cool. Thank you!
      - 6y ago
rasz 6y ago
This type of DRM can eat something crazy like >50% CPU when playing. Dense dynamic recompilation, running inside obfuscated VM, etc. https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/282924-denuvo-really-does-cripple-pc-gaming-performance https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/282924-denuvo-really-does...
theincredulousk 6y ago
Worked with Arxan's technology for a bit. Not surprised it is getting to the point where cracker's don't have the time to break it. Embracing the point that everything can be broken eventually, the focus becomes just making it take a long time, such that it is not economical, or simply too time consuming "for fun". Arxan's toolkit includes peppering custom checks everywhere in the code, including mechanisms so these checks don't have the same signature and can't be searched for easily once one is found. Further, there are "silent ones", which most of the time don't do anything, but at some point will activate. This makes it so you can think you've broken the protection, and then e.g. one hour into playing the game it randomly seg-faults (crashes with an error indistinguishable from a normal bug, through deliberate memory corruption), or flags your hardware as using a cracked version and blacklists it. Imagine trying to figure out if memory corruption was on purpose or a normal bug when the corruption happened 1,000,000,000 instructions ago by a section of code that is completely innocuous and just had an off-by-1 error introduced via some index calculation. Now imagine there are 500,000 of these little silent/time-delay traps sprinkled all over the code. In that way it can be nearly impossible to know if you've fully cracked the game. I mean you can really take the long-con with these things, and let it run for weeks, or even just never notify the user and hit them with a blacklist. Imagine playing a game for 100 hours and then out of nowhere having your progress wiped - pretty harsh lesson if you were invested in it. Then there is the binary + in-memory encryption, and customization of protection for every install. This was one of the holy grails as I understood it - you could make the software such that the protection system is completely custom for every install of the software, which makes binary patching useless. This would be difficult when distributing the software on discs, but, and this is a key point, trivial these days where games are downloaded. It is easy to custom generate binaries for everyone. This can do things like use a custom key based on your HWID that is literally necessary to decrypt portions of the game code. There is no way around having the correct key for your hardware to literally decrypt and run the code, which through other techniques can be made custom and further checked for authenticity, making it impossible to simply get the decrypted code and patch it in to other installs. Related techniques can be used to determine if you're running a binary that was decrypted on a different machine, and that is before getting into code that is custom-encrypted and decrypted in-memory at runtime based on your current HWID. You're probably thinking you can reason your way around this, but trust me, it has all been thought of before. The closest you could probably come is forcing cracked clients to all run in some kind of identical virtual machine, which is going to be shit for playing a AAA game even if it worked and no protections were able to figure out they were running in a virtual machine, which they can. The list goes on for this tech, and while no single tech is super effective, when they are all put together, it adds up to a knot that very few people will have the motivation or monetary incentive to sort out, or even ability to in a relevant amount of time after the games release. By the time they figure it the next update could be released, and all that is left is to look back in misery at the time of their life they wasted cracking an old version of a game.

shmerl 6y ago

DRM obsessed developers: we need to spend time on this junk and punish our paying customers. All other developers: we spend time on making better games and release them on GOG on day one.

recursive 6y ago
I think Rockstar is big enough to work on two things at the same time.
- andrewxdiamond 6y ago
  They are referring to the quality tradeoffs that must be made when adding DRM to a game. It adds overhead at the very least, and many games, Triple As included, have had game breaking faults due to shoddy DRM implementations.
  - asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
    Seems to have balanced out ok in RDR2.
    - redisman 6y ago
      RDR2 is fairly poorly optimized but I'm not really taking these anecdotal "DRM makes games slow" comments too seriously until there's some proof. Games are almost never CPU bound so I just don't see how obfuscation is supposedly killing performance.
      - andrewxdiamond 6y ago
        Here, I did the quick google search you could have done and found some data on DRM performance implications in real world games. https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/282924-denuvo-really-does-cripple-pc-gaming-performance https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/282924-denuvo-really-does...

dylan604 6y ago

Is DRM so totally useless that this is a worthy thing of note?

recursive 6y ago
RDR2 is one of the biggest of triple-As. It probably has more cracking effort applied to it than most. I don't think that's evidence that DRM is useless.
- dylan604 6y ago
  If no other DRM has withstood for 300+ days before being cracked, then it seems pretty useless. Yay, it worked for one title. I think we can all agree CSS was pretty useless. This stat makes it sound like AAA game DRM is about as easy to crack. At least it's not as bad as the master key leaking for Blu-ray.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - NoOneNew 6y ago
    You do realize whoever wrote the spec for this DRM now has free advertising to be hired for more projects and make bank. If Rockstar did it in house, I'm pretty sure they're going to make a spinoff DRM company. Useless, stupid, whatever you want to call it, they're going to print fun-coupons now.
    - dylan604 6y ago
      DRM is and always will be a cat&mouse game. The hacker that breaks this DRM will also get level up bonus for their resume. At that point, this theoretical business model you propose will no longer be such a valuable thing. Those fun-coupons will be as valuable as the Chuck E Cheese tickets recently discussed
      - NoOneNew 6y ago

chromedev 6y ago

The game wouldn't even run for like the first 5 days because they required BIOS updates from manufacturers for the game to even work.

nitrogen 6y ago
Does that mean the game is using the TPM or similar for its DRM?
zamadatix 6y ago
I wouldn't associate the mess that was motherboard firmware around launch with anything but AMD. The firmware didn't even boost the CPU right either.
- chromedev 6y ago
  It was due to needing a specific version of AGESA, which also has to do with security and was likely related to DRM, hence why the game wouldn't boot.
- exciteabletom 6y ago
  I have an Intel SKU and I couldn't launch the game for 2 months after release.
  - zamadatix 6y ago
    Because of BIOS issues?
    - exciteabletom 6y ago
      I updated the BIOS and nothing changed. After a few months they fixed it.
kevinventullo 6y ago
The game regularly crashed for me 4 months after release, to the point where I stopped playing it.

google234123 6y ago

Good for them!

jupp0r 6y ago

Maybe it's just me not being a college student with a very constrained budget anymore, but is using cracked games still a thing nowadays? My impression was that it was very widespread until the mid/late 2000s because it was the most convenient way to get a game (ie without going into a physical store or mail ordering games). This should be alleviated by steam/stadia/etc nowadays, right?

ineedasername 6y ago
I'm ambivalent on the issue of piracy through lack of money. I mean, it's not really a lost sale, and it could generate a repeat paying customer later. Especially as you get out of your teens/early 20's and tend to have more disposable income, and price is the easier barrier to leap than sketchy torrents and cracks.
renewiltord 6y ago
Still a big scene. Maybe bigger (absolute terms, not percentage) because gaming is such a huge market now. For the big games like RDR2 or the newer Assassin's Creeds, the DRM probably paid back way more than it cost.
vmception 6y ago
I'm generally curious about this too. Cracking got harder and licensed distribution in the 2010s became as convenient and consumer friendly as it unlicensed distribution was for pirates in the early 2000s. Region locked games started disappearing, coinciding with less physical media needs to begin with. Flagship titles started being released cross region simultaneously. Downloads and streaming was available and fast. The marketplaces and discovery gradually got better too, still limited here but not better than what the marketplaces distributing unlicensed content have. There is also the part about the budget, but I'm not sure. Expense was a factor, but I'm not sure how big of a factor. The things people do on Steam and other marketplaces is similar to what pirates were doing: downloading a ton of games for free because they could, but only playing the flagship games and never touching the other ones. So the pirates-turned-consumers are still only buying a handful of games, and now also have access to the promotions and plethora of free stuff as the always-consumers.

lacker 6y ago

The frustrating thing about this DRM is that RDR2 requires an internet connection in order to play the single-player game. At one point my internet was down and I couldn't play it. Obviously not the biggest problem in the world, but still an annoyance.

drmcometru 6y ago
The biggest concern for me is, what happens when you want to play the game again in 10 years time, when the DRM servers are offline? When you buy DRM'ed media, you are merely renting it for an unspecified duration.
- joshschreuder 6y ago
  A lot of companies are at least removing the more aggressive DRMs (eg. Denuvo) some time after the prime sales window has passed, at which point they would either have minimal DRM like Steam, or be fully cracked.
- dudus 6y ago
  In 10 years you're better off just playing the 8K remaster on PS6 or maybe just playing red dead redemption 3 which is pretty much the same game but with better graphics and combat.
  - progman32 6y ago
    Perhaps in 20 years I'll be able to play HL3 instead of HL2 :)
  - arc-in-space 6y ago
    Yes, the remaster, on a locked-down hardware platform, both of which I will have to pay for again. Hopefully by then I will also be too old to remember what 'anti-consumer' means.
  - selfhoster11 6y ago
    * If you get a remaster at all * If the current IP owner didn't make a mess of the remastering process (in an aesthetic or technical sense) * If the remaster is free of defects that make the game unplayable for seasoned users of that game * If you have the target platfrom of choice that the remaster targets. In other words, you would have to be very lucky.

Benjamin_Dobell 6y ago

It's worth keeping in mind that cracking DRM is pretty much universally criminally illegal these days. In the past (admittedly a long time ago now) you would have just been butting up against the game's terms of service / shrink-wrap license. Since the WIPO Copyright Treaty has been ratified in local law almost world-wide, no-one with even a semblance of professionalism would even attempt to crack DRM. So it's not like the world's best security consultants have been working on this non-stop for the last year. EDIT: Just to clarify, security firms may of course be hired/green-lit by the DRM's implementer to try break the software. However, DRM is not open season for white-hat security engineers like a lot of other areas are.

pfundstein 6y ago
Are you telling me it's illegal to reverse engineer [DRM] software that I paid for and installed on my PC? That's like making it illegal to open the bonnet of my car and take the engine apart. Or are you saying it's illegal to build a crack using my private computer? Or are you just saying it's illegal to publish that crack?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- ev1 6y ago
  From a legal risk POV, yes, assuming US-based. It is not fair use at all, either. CFAA and DMCA are quite nasty in this regard. It gets significantly worse if, in the course of your inspection/EULA violation/whatever, you have to interact with any third party DRM [online] services for authn/authz. Then you bring even more crime into scope. Ianal, but I'm fairly certain the answer is 'yes' to every single question, even individually (the act of cracking and the act of publishing it might even be two separate crimes) EFF: > The anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA, 17 U.S.C. 1201, prohibit circumvention of “technological protection measures” that effectively control access to copyrighted works. The law also prohibits trafficking in tools that are primarily designed for circumvention, have only limited commercially significant purpose other than circumvention or are marketed for circumvention. While section 1201 can arguably apply to any security researcher, those studying digital rights management (DRM) of music, movies or other creative content are most likely to face section 1201 claims, since Congress intended to protect these copyrighted works when it passed the statute. Researchers looking for vulnerabilities in authentication handshakes, code signing, code obfuscation, and protocol encryption also have to worry about section 1201 because vendors have argued that these also qualify as “technical protection measures” covered by the DMCA.

Medox 6y ago

In the meantime the PS4 jailbreak went from version 5.05 (where it stagnated for a long time) to 6.72 in July, which was also old by that time, being released in mid July 2019, but which now can run RDR2 up to the patch 1.13 (last on 6.72). Or to put it differently... If you can't crack the game, crack the os. At least in the console world, this gives you the advantage that anything works up a certain fw version afterwards. If I remember correctly, the jump from 5.05 to 6.72, added more than 1000 playable games for those who kept the PS4 on 5.05 (myself included). Sadly, there is not much talk around HN about console hacking. E.g. Here is the bounty submission of Andy Nguyen (theflow0) for 6.72: https://hackerone.com/reports/826026 https://hackerone.com/reports/826026 Sony might have shot itself in the foot by accepting the disclosure at the end... But, then again, they had to and there's not much harm done when the jailbroken fw is a year old.

tetris11 6y ago
what's the advantage of a jail broken ps4? Other than running 3rd party Linux binaries, and maybe adding ad-blockers, is there a gaming benefit?
- tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago
  Piracy, I assume?
- p1necone 6y ago
  Running homebrew, although I don't know if there's much of a homebrew scene for the ps4. Also you can get a second hand ps4 pretty cheap nowadays relative to it's hardware and power consumption - could make a decent home server if you chucked some variety of linux on there (is there much support for the hardware?)
  - dogma1138 6y ago
    PS4 is basically a PC at this point one of the main reasons for why no homebrew scene.
- TAForObvReasons 6y ago

bsder 6y ago

Presumably this is simply a function of not cracking it within the 30,60,90-day critical window? Sure, cracking it now would give you "street cred", but you probably gain more by cracking something newer and more popular.

p1necone 6y ago
I'm pretty sure the only reason people crack games is for street cred, or at least for the technical challenge. Seems like "I cracked the game that noone else could for nearly a year" is a great reason to try to me.

rabbitonrails 6y ago

Maybe just a sign you can’t even give RDR2 away for free ;)

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

Johnny999 6y ago

Well yeah, it's not going to be cracked.

dahi1203 6y ago

yes waiting for that but here i had got hotstar mod apk with cracked interface to enjoy vip/ premium for lifetime https://modlelo.com/hotstar-mod-apk/ https://modlelo.com/hotstar-mod-apk/

ChildOfChaos 6y ago

This is normal now. Most of the cracking groups have given up, because of Denuvo, they just crack small releases, the few people that were actually cracking Denuvo were not even the big scene groups, most likely individuals with certain skills, but at lot of them just disappeared as it became too hard/took too long to make it worth the time.