5 ms·

Emerging? Haven't highly skilled folks been targeting games and game DRM for decades?

• makapuf 3y ago
  From the article: While the game-cracking scene has been thriving for roughly four decades, the game companies describe the “warez scene” or “Scene release groups” as an “emerging” threat.
  • coffeebeqn 3y ago
    They must not have been conscious in the 80s or 90s or 00s. If anything it seems like piracy is way down given the better digital stores and fairer prices (during sales events at least ) - and many games being always online where part of the logic lives on a server you can’t replicate locally
    • Arrath 3y ago
      Aren't there only, what, 2 genius level hackers around these days that can whip up cracks for denuvo's latest and greatest?
      • phone8675309 3y ago
        Only two currently, but that market will grow with time so long as Denuvo keeps going.
        • BoorishBears 3y ago
          The opposite seems to be happening, even the literal two people cracking Denuvo feel it's getting more and more impossible. Overall the narrative is silly though: Denuvo (and by extension the last few years) represent pretty much the first time games aren't defacto cracked on release. Denuvo is from the SecuRom team, and despite being even more evasive I don't think the former was ever as successful.
          • hooverd 3y ago
            Don't worry, I'm sure they'll stop at just games.
            • BoorishBears 3y ago
              Why the sarcasm? I'm perfectly fine if they go further: Denuvo has been a net positive for PC gaming as far as I'm concerned. Studies on cherry picked cases have convinced people that piracy is a good thing for games, but the reality is games with 100 million dollars marketing budgets don't need piracy: they need sales. Sony and co have started treating PC as an actual platform since they can at least eek out a month or two of unaffected sales.
              • phone8675309 3y ago
                It has been a net positive for the _sales_ of PC gaming, but it has been awful for the actual end user, as any DRM scheme is. DRM schemes effectively destroy the first sale doctrine by their very nature, which is a straight up infringement on consumer rights. There have been plenty of documented cases where Denuvo checks actually make the framerates of games unstable on hardware that just meets the recommended requirements. Denuvo prevents game modding, an accepting practice that goes back nearly a quarter century. Denuvo prevents consumers from backing up their games should the storefront they're shopping at go down. Accepting Denuvo represent ceding some control of your machine to the company that develops Denuvo. There is a part of me that hopes someone finds a 0day in Denuvo and starts destroying people's computers in online lobbies so people rethink the whole thing.
                • BoorishBears 3y ago
                  I'm an adult, so I understand that being good for sales is good for a primarily sales driven industry. That is, assuming I don't want PC to become a 3rd class citizen that consistently gets releases a year later because of utterly tepid publisher interest... which is where PCs were headed pre-Denuvo. Denuvo isn't perfect, but it's been a very good model especially compared to its predecessors. The DRM itself doesn't use ring 0 (their anti-cheat addon does but again, cheating is a bad enough PC problem to justify it) and it's been removed after being cracked in the past. Overall I'll take PC Gaming with DRM over the alternative.
      • eutropia 3y ago
        Any writeup about these two? Seems like an interesting story.
    • oldbbsnickname 3y ago
      The author must've been born in the 00's because nothing before their time exists.
• deleted 3y ago
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