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It doesn't matter at all how out of reach it is for most people. As long as one kid in Russia can do it, the torrent is available for everyone in the world just

It doesn't matter at all how out of reach it is for most people. As long as one kid in Russia can do it, the torrent is available for everyone in the world just as soon. This has already been shown with videogame DRM like Denuvo. It's so hard to crack that only a handful of people know how, and yet they end up racing eachother so eagerly every time a new game comes out that it's usually done in under 24 hours. Unless you can beat "so secure that only a handful of people in the world can crack it" the situation will always be the same.

jsheard 2y ago
Denuvo has pulled back into the lead lately, it's taking a very long time for cracks to appear, if they ever do. For example Dragons Dogma 2 came out in March and still hasn't been cracked. Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora hasn't been cracked for a full year.
- AnthonyMouse 2y ago
  Active player counts: Minecraft: ~185,000,000 World of Warcraft: ~7,250,000 Dragons Dogma 2: ~4000 This seems more along the lines of nobody bothers to crack games nobody wants to play.
  - jsheard 2y ago
    DD2 is a single player game, those generally don't maintain their active player counts forever. It peaked at 228,285 concurrent (not total) Steam players which are pretty good numbers.
    - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
      The peak was the release, after which it promptly cratered. It was below half that within a month and below 14k the next month.
      - pxoe 2y ago
        This obsession with concurrent player counts, especially for single player games, is just obtuse. It's not actually telling what you want to believe.
        jsheard 2y ago
        Even if we do go by concurrent players, Black Myth Wukong had one of the biggest launches in Steams history with a peak concurrent of 2.4 million players, and that hasn't been cracked either after five months.
  - dvngnt_ 2y ago
    there's only one person releasing cracks for modern denuvo and their last release was a year ago, and they're crazy
    - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
      Apparently the people doing this kind of work have been disproportionately in Eastern Europe and what's going on in Ukraine has so disrupted that part of the world that they currently have bigger problems. So then you're waiting for either that region to stabilize or demand for cracks to cause people somewhere else to get into the game, and in the interim you effectively have a temporary supply chain issue. But it's hard to give credit for the ravages of war to the DRM pushers and it's not at all obvious that they've secured any kind of permanent advantage.
      - mardifoufs 2y ago
        Who was cracking denuvo on a regular basis back in say, 2021, before the war started? Basically no one. So I'm not sure that's true.
        AnthonyMouse 2y ago
        There is an ocean of difference between "basically no one" and "actually no one" when you only need one person in the world to do it.
theshackleford 2y ago
> This has already been shown with videogame DRM like Denuvo. No it hasn’t. > Everytime a new game comes out that it’s usable done in under 24 hours This is not even remotely true and is not based in any kind of reality.
- Neonlicht 2y ago
  Back in the day when piracy was quite literally just copy and paste it was a very active scene. But cracking Denuvo takes real skill- and there's no financial reward in it. Back in the 90s bootleg DVDs and CD-ROMs had organised crime making money from it.
  - rescbr 2y ago
    Exactly. Cracking Denuvo as a hobby is not something a sane person would do, and the downsides if caught are higher when one is fully employed. At least to me, a decade has passed since I left college and had spare time and energy to tackle such projects just for cred.
    - winocm 2y ago
      I took a cursory look at breaking it and it seems rather trivial in retrospect, just annoying at best since you have to rebuild the executable’s imports, relocations and section headers, along with removing the giant bloat sections that they add (seriously, when the main .text section of a game is 4MB, and then their extra obfuscation sections end up being over 250MB, something is ridiculously wrong.)
tasn 2y ago
Not quite. The problem is that when you involve hardware, things are exponentially harder. When you tie it with content streaming, it's essentially a losing battle. Hardware: makes cracking much much harder and out of reach for a lot of people. Even the people that can do it are going to be drastically slowed down due to this. Streaming: means you can block specific device keys once you know they are compromised (the hacker managed to mod the TV to be able to record from it).
loeg 2y ago
Denuvo is winning, for better or worse. You can see some of the lead times for cracking these games[1][2]. It's, you know, often months+. [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/CrackWatch/comments/1hqd4p3/crack_watch_games_that_no_longer_have_denuvo/ https://www.reddit.com/r/CrackWatch/comments/1hqd4p3/crack_w... [2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/CrackWatch/comments/ieo7u4/crack_watch_games/ https://www.reddit.com/r/CrackWatch/comments/ieo7u4/crack_wa...

jsheard 2y ago

Denuvo has pulled back into the lead lately, it's taking a very long time for cracks to appear, if they ever do. For example Dragons Dogma 2 came out in March and still hasn't been cracked. Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora hasn't been cracked for a full year.

AnthonyMouse 2y ago
Active player counts: Minecraft: ~185,000,000 World of Warcraft: ~7,250,000 Dragons Dogma 2: ~4000 This seems more along the lines of nobody bothers to crack games nobody wants to play.
- jsheard 2y ago
  DD2 is a single player game, those generally don't maintain their active player counts forever. It peaked at 228,285 concurrent (not total) Steam players which are pretty good numbers.
  - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
    The peak was the release, after which it promptly cratered. It was below half that within a month and below 14k the next month.
    - pxoe 2y ago
      This obsession with concurrent player counts, especially for single player games, is just obtuse. It's not actually telling what you want to believe.
      - jsheard 2y ago
        Even if we do go by concurrent players, Black Myth Wukong had one of the biggest launches in Steams history with a peak concurrent of 2.4 million players, and that hasn't been cracked either after five months.
- dvngnt_ 2y ago
  there's only one person releasing cracks for modern denuvo and their last release was a year ago, and they're crazy
  - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
    Apparently the people doing this kind of work have been disproportionately in Eastern Europe and what's going on in Ukraine has so disrupted that part of the world that they currently have bigger problems. So then you're waiting for either that region to stabilize or demand for cracks to cause people somewhere else to get into the game, and in the interim you effectively have a temporary supply chain issue. But it's hard to give credit for the ravages of war to the DRM pushers and it's not at all obvious that they've secured any kind of permanent advantage.
    - mardifoufs 2y ago
      Who was cracking denuvo on a regular basis back in say, 2021, before the war started? Basically no one. So I'm not sure that's true.
      - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
        There is an ocean of difference between "basically no one" and "actually no one" when you only need one person in the world to do it.

theshackleford 2y ago

> This has already been shown with videogame DRM like Denuvo. No it hasn’t. > Everytime a new game comes out that it’s usable done in under 24 hours This is not even remotely true and is not based in any kind of reality.

Neonlicht 2y ago
Back in the day when piracy was quite literally just copy and paste it was a very active scene. But cracking Denuvo takes real skill- and there's no financial reward in it. Back in the 90s bootleg DVDs and CD-ROMs had organised crime making money from it.
- rescbr 2y ago
  Exactly. Cracking Denuvo as a hobby is not something a sane person would do, and the downsides if caught are higher when one is fully employed. At least to me, a decade has passed since I left college and had spare time and energy to tackle such projects just for cred.
  - winocm 2y ago
    I took a cursory look at breaking it and it seems rather trivial in retrospect, just annoying at best since you have to rebuild the executable’s imports, relocations and section headers, along with removing the giant bloat sections that they add (seriously, when the main .text section of a game is 4MB, and then their extra obfuscation sections end up being over 250MB, something is ridiculously wrong.)

tasn 2y ago

Not quite. The problem is that when you involve hardware, things are exponentially harder. When you tie it with content streaming, it's essentially a losing battle. Hardware: makes cracking much much harder and out of reach for a lot of people. Even the people that can do it are going to be drastically slowed down due to this. Streaming: means you can block specific device keys once you know they are compromised (the hacker managed to mod the TV to be able to record from it).

loeg 2y ago

Denuvo is winning, for better or worse. You can see some of the lead times for cracking these games[1][2]. It's, you know, often months+. [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/CrackWatch/comments/1hqd4p3/crack_watch_games_that_no_longer_have_denuvo/ https://www.reddit.com/r/CrackWatch/comments/1hqd4p3/crack_w... [2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/CrackWatch/comments/ieo7u4/crack_watch_games/ https://www.reddit.com/r/CrackWatch/comments/ieo7u4/crack_wa...