5 ms·
The normalization of Denuvo, as well as "anti-cheat" protection that involves constant monitoring of your environment, is a fucking travesty for privacy and gam
by alexb_ 4y ago
The normalization of Denuvo, as well as "anti-cheat" protection that involves constant monitoring of your environment, is a fucking travesty for privacy and games. The worst part about Denuvo is that cracking it is game-specific, and there's ~1 person who is willing and able to do it (and currently isn't touching denuvo due to not being donated enough money)
- thot_experiment 4y agoIt really makes me sad that people are even willing to create these systems. It would haunt me forever if I took part in writing something like this.
- ryandrake 4y agoOne sad lesson I learned early on in my software career is, for every ethical stand you are willing to take as a developer, there's always some other developer who is willing set aside ethics or has a different set of ethics. Software needs some kind of baseline ethical standard, like a Hippocratic Oath. A line that we "shall not cross." I remember my first job out of college, I was asked to write code that caused our software to cheat at a certain industry benchmark. I was very junior, but still realized it was wrong. I finally worked up the courage to tell my boss that I had an ethical problem with doing this and wouldn't do it, and to my surprise, he said "Oh, that's fine! We treat software developers well here. I'll just give you a different bug ticket to work on!" Jim, a few cubicles down from me had no problem writing the benchmark-cheating code. It's kind of futile.
- elipsey 4y ago>> https://www.acm.org/code-of-ethics https://www.acm.org/code-of-ethics It is worthwhile for us to read and reflect on the ACM Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct.* * https://www.acm.org/code-of-ethics https://www.acm.org/code-of-ethics
- tomjen3 4y agoThat one requires a lot of free work. I believe that requiring others to work for free is morally wrong.
- arlcode 4y agoWell, someone develops software for nukes, citizen surveillance systems, fraud schemes and technologies for scamming people out of their retirement savings. If you consider mechanical and chemical engineering there are also people who develop nerve gas agents (usually deployed against civilians), butterfly mines, cluster munitions and incendiary artillery rounds ready to burn your enemies cities to the ground. Some anti cheating / piracy software that "arguably works" is pretty tame compared to that.
- Shorel 4y agoAs an iRacing customer, I am glad the anti-cheat they use, exists. Otherwise, I would be subjected to shitty racers who would ruin every race in the first lap, and cheaters who compete on hacks instead of talent. I am also sure there are equivalent bad apples in every single gaming platform.
- thot_experiment 4y agoAnti-cheat and DRM are not the same thing, and having community servers with admins greatly reduces the need for anti-cheat. So does not having rewards for winning other than winning.
- prvit 4y agoSome crazy rose tinted glasses here. Back in the CS 1.6 and CS:S days community admins would only catch straight up rage hacks, most aimbots and triggerbots would fly under the radar unless caught by clientside anti-cheat. But sure, we can pretend that cheaters don’t matter as long as it’s not blatantly obvious to all other players.
- egypturnash 4y agoThat "worst part" sounds like the best part from the perspective of someone who has put a lot of time, money, and effort into their game and would like to make some kind of profit.
- alexb_ 4y agoIt's the best part for execs who think piracy cuts into legitimate game sales (it doesn't). And for those who want every single copy to come with a giant amount of bloat and spyware so that a fraction of a % of people who weren't going to give them money anyways don't get to play.
- prvit 4y ago> It's the best part for execs who think piracy cuts into legitimate game sales (it doesn't). I’ve bought games because there were no cracks available, I don’t think I’ve ever bought a game after pirating it. There’s no way I’m alone in this.
- tristor 4y agoMeanwhile, back when I had time to game heavily I would, as a matter of course, pirate every single game on PC because the experience was pretty much always superior, but I would also pre-order/buy on release the same games. I didn't pirate because I didn't want to pay for it, I pirated because I didn't want to deal with a single-player games requiring an always-on Internet connection and running kernel modules in Windows to do piracy/cheat detection, degrading system/game performance, and violating my privacy and the security of my system. I own literally thousands of games on Steam, and thousands more outside of Steam. I also relentlessly pirated every game I wanted to play for decades. The way to "fix" piracy is by companies providing a superior user experience, not by beating their paying customers with sticks.
- prvit 4y agoSure, but you can’t seriously argue that there is a significant audience of people who’d refrain from buying games if they couldn’t pirate them.
- prvit 4y agoStuff like Denuvo was normal back when games where sold on floppies… What is this “normalization” you’re talking about?
- autoexec 4y agoThere was nothing close to Denuvo when games were sold on floppies. I'd happily go back to a time when we had to worry about code wheels or finding the first word on a certain page of the manual instead of having your entire system infected with malware giving access to your personal data/files and having your machine's performance crippled.
- prvit 4y agoThat’s not what Denuvo does. The only meaningful difference between Denuvo and floppy-DRM is that Denuvo employs a bit more sophisticated obfuscation scheme.
- autoexec 4y ago> The only meaningful difference between Denuvo and floppy-DRM is that Denuvo employs a bit more sophisticated obfuscation scheme. Funny, I don't remember any code wheel having kernel level access to my system... They also never caused performance issues https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/282924-denuvo-really-does-cripple-pc-gaming-performance https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/282924-denuvo-really-does...
- prvit 4y agoAh, you’re talking about Denuvo anti-cheat which is a separate product from the same company. Not the “core” Denuvo product.
- everyone 4y agoWell Empress does seem to be a total lunatic, but they have been cracking denuvo games recently. eg. dying light 2 and deathloop
- haunter 4y ago>as well as "anti-cheat" protection How do you solve cheating problem though? When I sit down playing a multiplayer game I don't want to see anyone cheating, botting etc. It's not fun. Yes it's a cat and mouse game between the cheat makers and the devs and anti cheat solutions are not perfect but without some anti cheat system most online games would be totally unplayable.
- yvdriess 4y agoA good netcode that does not trust the client already gets you most of the way. Games developed for consoles first trust the client to a large extent, so the PC ports are easy to write cheats for.
- Shorel 4y agoiRacing installs an anti-cheating service which is not Denuvo. It works fine as far as I know.
- badocr 4y agoReminder that Denuvo is not an anti-cheat, it's DRM.
- Shorel 4y agoReminder not needed. Many of these solutions, both DRM and anti-cheat, work using the principle of checking if the user is using the original unmodified files, and checking if the user is not also modifying the memory of the running program with some tool.
- LoganDark 4y agoDRM has the additional goal of restricting who can use even those unmodified, genuine files, whereas anticheat does not.
- mcwhy 4y agoRemove gold farming and competitive sweatlord ladders from your game. Majority of cheats exist to make money, remove their income and they will leave.
- dartharva 4y ago"Normalization" is a stretch, most games that have Denuvo are generally horrible by themselves which is why publishers who know it lock it out so that less people realize they have paid for garbage before buying it. The stalwarts of today's PC gaming industry like Valve, CDPR, Devolver, FromSoft etc. have yet to feel the need to rely on such cheap tricks.