During the time of the Soviet Union, it was an urban legend that during supply shortages, Soviet factories would have no real work, but workers needed to keep up the appearance of working, so they would have one line of workers continuously assembling devices, feeding into another line that would continuously disassemble them, all in a loop where nothing gets produced.
In many ways, it feels like we are seeing this today in the digital world. As a specific example, GTA 5 (singleplayer) is a game that has been pirated for about 10 years now, and has received zero content updates in that time, yet somewhat recently (maybe a few years ago?) they updated the game on Steam to have new DRM that constantly conflicts with the Steam Deck sleep mode and kicks you out of the game at random after waking up, or just won't even let you launch if you're without internet and haven't launched it within a few days. Nothing worthwhile was produced by this endeavor, that's for sure.
I would hope publishers would take note and remove it, having hundreds of megabytes of junk in the executable is just wasteful to put it mildly
Denuvo is there to prevent piracy within the first 90 days of release. Something like 60 to 80% of a game’s revenue is during that period. They don’t care that it’s eventually cracked, and they absolutely do not care about performance.
The bigger problem with Denuvo is that it appears to significantly impact game performance as well
It can, but that seems to be more related to poor implementations by the game devs, and not inherent to it. There are plenty of examples of games with Denuvo that still run fine (give or take your opinion on whether the presence of DRM is inherently "impacted performance").
If many of your users misuse your tool, that's a design problem not user error
Yeah, goddamn hammers needs to be way softer, do you know how many thumbs worldwide have been hurt by them? Clearly the fault of the hammer.
Why would they care for a few hundred MBs when the games are in the 10s of GBs?
CPU cache space for code is much smaller than GPU memory for models (and the former is more important for performance since many CPU operations like pipeline parallelism are latency bound, not compute bound).
This. Why spend extra on x3d cpu when you can have a reasonable game size (not that it has large enough cache anyway)
>This. Why spend extra on x3d cpu when you can have a reasonable game size (not that it has large enough cache anyway)
Because game(SW) devs/publishers don't care about spending money to optimize for reasonable size, and the enthusiast gamers want to play the game either way and will gladly fork out the cash for the HW to play it, if anything for the bragging rights.
Remember "will it run Crysis?" vintage 2007? Yeah, enthusiasts will be enthusiasts.
I'm a fan of the free market here. Badly optimized games will hurt their sales and force the studios to change or go bust, if the market decides so.
Do the cracks still need you to disable Hyper-V (which leads to disabling WSL and whatever else)?
In addition, I’m not sure why they’re enabling test signing instead of using kdmapper or the like. Sure, anticheats will get way more mad at you having a manual mapped driver, but one imagines rebooting once (after playing your cracked video game) beats rebooting twice (to enable test signing, then after playing the game).
The funny thing is I remember reading about using hypervisor crap to bypass Denuvo in ~2020 (actually the post is from 2019, https://www.unknowncheats.me/forum/2410412-post14.html)
Support GOG, support no DRM.
What games that are on GOG without DRM have DRM on, say, Steam? (Many Steam games have no DRM.)
It's impossible to know which Steam games are DRM-free since Steam games without DRM are not marked in the store. They have to all be assumed to have DRM.
Steam flags kernel-level DRM in a game's store page. Denuvo is identifiable (and named!) this way.
Recent example: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3357650/PRAGMATA/
Well, all Steam games have Steam DRM? The Steam store will tell you if there is additional DRM on top of Steam, at least it has in the past.
To the parents question, it is better to use GOG if you care about DRM.
Sometimes the Steam version is qualitatively better because the publisher/dev has supported the Steam version with more updates. Often the updates do turn up on GOG, but it's possible there is a delay.
Don't forget that the guy behing Denuvo is the same person behind SafeDisc, SecuROM and similar bullshit siblings from the past PC gaming world.
Why are they bullshit when piracy is a huge problem on the PC? There is a reason why AAA titles that are not multiplayer and subscription based lost developer mindshare.
Surely, this has nothing to do with the fact that live service and subscription games generate more revenue, whether or not piracy is involved.
For a long time now I've found it weird that people who like single player games on PC (and to a lesser extent older consoles which had piracy enabling mods) didn't acknowledge the long game consequences of their actions, or at least were willfully ignorant to them because everyone loves getting something for free. It seems to be a variation on Goodhart's law - you get what you reward - if the reward for a company (big or small) in spending lots of time and money isn't as good as other options, those other options will get more investment in the future and the ones you do like will get less.
The other option I can see for the large companies is that any project involving tens or hundreds of millions of dollars is likely to be insured, and a condition of that insurance is they take all reasonable options available to get the most success out of it that they can. If they don't they need to reduce the risk which probably means less resources allocated which again may not be interesting to the companies capable of making grand experiences versus other options.
> For a long time now I've found it weird that people who like single player games on PC (and to a lesser extent older consoles which had piracy enabling mods) didn't acknowledge the long game consequences of their actions
Isn't historically piracy positive for sales [1]?
That said, I'm pretty sure the real issue is that single / local coop games are just not appealing and so they get weaker sales. Like wtf was with Pikmen 2 not letting player 2 control louie? And then when local games start to sell poorly they get divestment but I'm pretty sure it was just lousey games and not piracy.
[1]: https://www.engadget.com/2017-09-22-eu-suppressed-study-pira...
>Isn't historically piracy positive for sales [1]?
if it was for the companies who use Denuvo and it added negative value then Denuvo wouldn't exist as a business and game publishers would happily post their games to pirate sites themselves.
The level of copium involved in piracy debates is always a sight to behold. I'm no saint, I've pirated stuff too but I did so because I was cheap, not because I'm doing the company a favor. That's a level of rationalization you expect from a drug addict
The use of Denuvo has nothing to do with whether piracy hurts sales, only whether executives think piracy hurts sales. As we just saw, actual research on this topic has been suppressed because the results were wrongthink.
How are the game companies supposed to determine that it adds negative value? Speak to the alternative universe where the same game wasn't bundled with it?
It’s hard to see from a US/Euro salary perspective, where not spending $60 is a moral decision, but you can start seeing how someone in a 300/mo salary country doesn’t think “I’ll save a bit and buy it” and instead thinks “I’ll never be able to afford this and this studio made millions anyway” and just pirate it. I’m not that articulate with my words but I hope you get what I’m trying to say.
I think you're saying that piracy is often a no money issue, and you're not wrong.
Somehow I managed to build up a library of Steam games, $1-5 at a time. At that price I am willing to take my risks with possible inconveniences due to DRM and instead consider the convenience of being able to log into Steam anywhere and access my game library.
And though I am loath to admit it, I think "free to play" has shown that it can compete with piracy, though often by including dark patterns and slot machine mechanics to drive monetization.
It's also worth considering how much time you actually play the game. Mario Kart 8 delivered (for me at least) hundreds of hours of fun (often local multiplayer) gaming. If there's a game in that category, it can be worth saving up for (but the console itself can also be expensive.)
> For a long time now I've found it weird that people who like single player games on PC (and to a lesser extent older consoles which had piracy enabling mods) didn't acknowledge the long game consequences of their actions, or at least were willfully ignorant to them because everyone loves getting something for free
Why are you equating people who like single player games to pirates? Are you suggesting devs who made single player games were caving under some kind of market pressure that was ultimately unhealthy for them?
The difference in global, high-speed internet access between Quake and Fortnite is huge. I think that explains why live service games are a recent thing more than piracy. That, and Valve set the blueprint for gambling and loot boxes with TF2.
Regardless, I think the jury is out on Live Service games being "safer" to make. There's certainly a lot of people chasing what Fortnite has, but there's a lot of graves and layoffs. It seems like the single player studios are shutting down less because they were unprofitable, and more because building a sustainable business on selling good products doesn't sound good to investors trying to make an exit.
This single issue convinced me most people have zero moral convictions and will lie to themselves to preserve their self-image.
This looks weird in the context, because the grandparent comment's argument was purely interest-based? You probably mean there's a propensity for tragedy of the commons.
Regardless I'd argue gaming may be the one media category left (after the recent decade's value decline) where piracy remains to seem like more hassle than buying a copy^W license. I would also guess it is more concentrated on a few popular titles compared to music or films. Nowadays I hear more of people collecting games on Steam, to never play them, than of legitimate pirates.
He's a racist [1] with an agenda, don't try to read too much into that kind of comment.
> Brown hands typed these words.
Really? This single issue, and nothing else, convinced you that most people have zero moral convictions? Doesn't take much for you to draw a wrong, blanket conclusion now does it?
Then again I see in your comment below [1] (for the reference "Brown hands typed these words." in response to someone discussing a situation in India) what kind of "moral" convictions you have.
A lot of recessive genes will sadly do that to you buddy. You can't argue your way out of a wet paper bag but at least you can stay in there and argue about its color.
To give you an idea of the scale of the problem:
Greenheart Games famously released a "cracked" version of their own game (Game Dev Tycoon) onto torrent sites on launch day. In this version, the player's in-game studio eventually goes bankrupt because "pirates" steal their games.
The Data: Within 24 hours, 93.6% of players were playing the pirated version.
The Consequence: The developer's blog post highlighted the irony of pirates posting on forums complaining that the "in-game piracy" was unfair and "ruining" their fun. The experiment proved that even at a low price point ($8), a massive majority of the PC audience will choose "free" regardless of the developer's size or struggle.
https://web.archive.org/web/20161118042043/http://arstechnic...
https://web.archive.org/web/20131214165241/http://aussie-gam...
P.S.: It bears repeating that the game cost only 8 dollars.
The number of pirated copies doesn't translate to missed sales.
Someone playing/watching/listening to something for free doesn't mean they would still do it if they had to pay for it.
It’s certainly not a 1:1 loss, but it’s also not zero
Sure it can be zero. It can even be negative. As larger player numbers, including piracy, are a natural form of marketing. That means it's not hard to see this additional marketing could lead to larger sales figures compared to if piracy was not possible.
One reason anti piracy companies make a living is because companies that buy it see concrete increases in revenue as a result. It may not be every pirate who converts to a customer but DRM solutions are priced to be below the expected additional revenue. And it's not always cheap.
Do you have any data to support that? I'd actually be really interested to see. There are a lot of weird ass games with Denuvo (like Handball 17, Bus Simulator 18) I think at least sometimes paying a big DRM subscriptions is part of a money laundering scheme.
There's data against it. The EU conducted a study then suppressed it until an MP eventually made a FOIA request to get the results, because the results weren't what they wanted it to say. https://www.engadget.com/2017-09-22-eu-suppressed-study-pira...
> The experiment proved that even at a low price point ($8), a massive majority of the PC audience will choose "free" regardless of the developer's size or struggle.
Several points:
* A pirate can pirate infinity +1 games for free, that will skew any statistic compared to legitimiate buyers that have to manage a finite budget. It also means that you aren't looking at 93% lost sales.
* It wasn't a new indy game, but a port of an existing mobile game, so I wouldn't be surprised if legitimate buyers weren't in a rush to get their hands on it on day one. The steam statistics from the first month mention a peak concurrent player count of over 7000 so it certainly didn't stay at 200 copies.
Unhinged take I checked that was 2013 and the game cost almost as much as you you would pay in a month's rent in India in small towns.
Most pirates aren't people who could pay for this stuff. This is utterly meaningless.
So much in fact I don't even want to link counter examples to it.
No/very few paying user pirates even single player games these days if they can afford it as a luxury please understand that.
I would likemy regular updates bug fixes patches and new feaures ASAP. And on sale at 8$ for a game is less than 0.01% of my income so sure.
But if it costs 800 USD I will get it for free because I am literally too poor for it.
Anyone who thinks otherwise is beyond deluded.
Instead of denuvo you can use simple steam drm, non trivial to pirate for small games cracks will take days or weeks to appear and updates won't be available instantly.
It's safe simple and easy. And doesn't hurt any one.
Denuvo is just invasive bullcrap that deluded people think helps anyone.
"simple steam drm, non trivial to pirate"
Steam DRM is trivial to the point where you may as well not use it and just release on GOG. Until the one actual cracker in combination with the hypervisor guys showed up a few months ago Denuvo had been unassailable for years.
Thats playing with statistics and you know it. Why such game?
If they would release only the paid game, there wouldn't be 93% + 7% of the gamers playing, far from it.
Cost is almost irrelevant to pirates, either its free or its not, like it or not. There is mix of folks who do it for the lulz, some do it to have higher performance gaming without denuvo taking resources and computing power, and some are outright poor. Even 8-usd-is-too-much poor.
I've lived like that. Don't judge too easily. Don't do stupid mistakes and count those as otherwise-paying-gamers. Thats PR for denuvo and similar, not a fair discussion.
Do we have a reasonable metric of pirate -> customer conversion rate of Denuvo?
SecuROM back in the day caused plenty of legitimately purchased copies to not work. You'd have a physical disc with the game on it from the store, and SecuROM decided it won't work on your computer for unknown, undebugable reasons. .
Piracy may be a problem, but that's a problem to customer who were willing to give a company money. We stopped buying anything with SecuROM on it after 1-2 of those situations.
It's fairly well demonstrated that piracy is a service problem. For example, many people will pay hundreds of dollars for a game on Steam rather than play it for free on Epic (Rocket League). So clearly the free price point is not the problem
To some extent. But in the first month where the game is $100 and the pirate version is free, there are plenty of people willing to pirate even if it’s inconvenient.
IMO drm is understandable at the games release, but it should be removed after the initial period.
I've had to take a moral stance and move to just playing games on Gog that I can buy and own the files for. No I can't play the latest and greatest but it's not the end of the world as I've so many classics to still play and enjoy. I can't support lockdown and DRM anymore. If I buy I want to own, otherwise I've not bought. It is true, if buying isn't owning, then piracy isn't stealing.
Right where I've landed as well. I just won't buy titles with Denuvo DRM, ever, no matter how much I want the game.
Was pleasantly surprised to find Doom Eternal is now on GOG a couple of days ago. If you're willing to wait, some AAA titles show up that previously had draconian DRM.
I'm willing to buy on Steam, however not with intrusive DRM. Nor with 3rd party store requirements (like EA games on Steam).
E.G. I'd like to own a copy of the modern Persona games. I'm in no particular rush. If the studios want my money when they're on sale for like 50% off launch price, gain some profit per sale and additional sales by axing the useless DRM.
Likewise, I will not even consider paying for games (or music) that don't have an unencumbered download option. If the game is open source I will usually buy it without even thinking very hard about whether I'll play it.
Generally any game you can buy on GoG is also DRM free on Steam. I mention since many people have the incorrect notion that all Steam games have DRM
There's still a difference — GOG provides you with downloadable installers you can archive, Steam doesn't.
You can archive the installed files from Steam though. An example is the pixel art program Aseprite. The devs said just to copy the binary out of the Steam folder and place it elsewhere if you wish.
Wonder what will be the consequences of this. I dislike Denuvo for the performance and stability penalties it gives games, but I do wonder if the "security" it gave publishers wasn't a big part of the reason why we've been getting more and more big name games on PC.
This isn't about being right or wrong but about what the publishers will do when they see their games are again getting cracked day one, and if it'll be a catalyst to again return to getting either less PC releases or at least delayed releases compared to consoles.
I will hope that does not happen.
Denuvo’s market is ‘first 90 days’ revenue protection, not lifelong revenue protection. Lots of games using their crap remove it after a few months to shut down the flood of support issues the DRM causes. If only Microsoft hadn’t fucked up so badly with Windows 11 requiring an account, they’d have a way to stop using it altogether.
>Lots of games using their crap remove it after a few months to shut down the flood of support issues the DRM causes.
No, the overwhelming majority of denuvo games released after ~2020 (when they changed there licensing model to SaaS) have it removed after 2-4 years not because of user complaints but because of licensing costs, contracts and compliance.
If anything with many games it is very clear that the developer/publisher do not care for the user, since even when the DRM gets broken and has lost its purposes, many still refuse to remove it and give paying customers the same better non DRM experience as pirates.
>If only Microsoft hadn’t fucked up so badly with Windows 11 requiring an account
I don't understand how that is related at all.
This is not true at all as evidenced by the fact that most games do not get Denuvo removed once they are cracked. And the companies that DO remove denuvo only do so after several years because of licensing costs as denuvo transitioned to a SaaS model.
I feel like the "first 90 days" is just because games no longer include a demo, so they force players to commit to a purchase before a wide consensus forms. A lot of people pirate simply to try the game out. Most people who can afford the game would then purchase the game if it were good.
I have not read a study on this but I suspect the percentage of people who would buy a genuine copy of a game they already have pirated would be something like 3-5%
Untrue, where are all the after-90-days-hacked AAA games? Nowhere, denuvo lives on as long as publisher is willing to pay continuous licence, which is usually years.
And users complaining because denuvo messes up their Windows, sometimes games don't run and so on? Just cost of doing business, as long as enough people buy it who cares.
I honestly doubt it will make much of a difference.
A good percentage of people who would download the cracked games would not have bought those anyway. And with Steam being so convenient it's hard to decide to go for a cracked copy of dubious origin that might install god knows what into your machine.
We're not in the early 00s anymore.
i think your underwstimating the anticheat value that still exists. many of the online games are trash when theres not strict cheat control.
Run anti-cheat server-side. Give us private servers again. There's no reason we should have to put up with client-side rootkits written by non-kernel-devs to play a game.
Community servers don't want server-side anti-cheat either. Hell they invented client-side anti-cheats back in the day. Even current day community servers like Face-IT have additional anti-cheats, not less. Same with modded GTAV FiveM (even before the main game added anti-cheats)
Cheating is a social issue, not a technical one. Communities are the solution.
Private servers are a nice way to do this and do still exist in places. My favorite online game uses them along with server side anti-cheat and while cheating occasionally happens, it has never been an ongoing issue. I've maybe seen a cheater once or twice in all my many hours playing the game over 10 years (elite dangerous, in case you were curious).
>written by non-kernel-devs
What exactly separates a kernel dev from a non-kernel dev?
It's not possible, technically, to run effective anti-cheat server-side. Clients need precise enemy location data for things like sound effects. The server can't tell if the client is using the data for unfair purposes or not.
Too bad. It's not possible for rootkits to be a good idea for a video game.
Once the data is sent to the client, in an untrusted setting, all bets are off. Not your hardware, no control over it.
This. There are a lot of online games I loved playing but the cheating got so bad it made it impossible to play. MW1, MW2, Battlefield, CS, etc... you could see the wallhacks and aimbots taking over every lobby. I eventually stopped playing. I tried using Consoles for online gaming after that but never really got into using joysticks.... still prefer mouse and keyboard. Now I play limited games where the cheating isn't quite that rampant.
Im not a big gamer, but playing GTA Online, and getting taken out as soon as you spawn. Or items just spawning in front of you, like ramps. REALLY ruins the experience
Or everyone in the lobby getting nuked over and over.
Or trying to do heists and having a cheater in every session.
I'd like to play the game again but it's just not fun.
There are still some servers online for games like the first CoD or United Offensive. No hackers as far I can tell anymore. They have all moved on
"Protected" is the wrong word. "Restricted" is much more honest regarding what Denovo does.
Good riddance.
Do any of the legit scene groups sign their binaries? How do you know a release isn’t tainted?
It's not a scene release. You know a release isn't tainted when you grab it from the source...
That's the whole problem. There's no way to verify the authenticity of a release aside from "getting it from a trusted source" or whatever, whereas digital signatures would easily solve this issue.
I find it ironic people mad at Denuvo and yet play games like Battlefield which enforces kernel level spyware nonetheless haha
The main difference that Denuvo does nothing to improve the experience of the end user.
I don't like Anti-Cheat solutions with elevated privileges but they have (at least for some time) reduced the number of Cheaters in games like Valorant or BF, for most users this is at least a somewhat understandable tradeoff. Denuvo on the other hand is DRM and a pure tradeoff in favor of the publisher at the cost of the consumed.
I would say it was wildly successful in Valorant.
There is a user argument for anti cheat as a user = less cheater.
There is no user argument for DRM, if anything there are many against it = higher game price/less money for the actual game and devs, indirect funding of DRM software, worse performance, higher system requirements, worse preservation, worse privacy, longer loading times, online requirements, worse usability, machine activation restriction, bugs...
Kernel level anti-cheat also doesn't introduce a giant performance penalty like Denuvo-style DRM. People just want to play their games without it still stuttering on top of the line hardware.
Anticheats will still have obfuscated code for obvious reasons (they don’t want to be reversed). Not sure they don’t induce some performance drop too - though maybe smaller compared to bad Denuvo implementation.
Pretty strong to say there's no argument. I don't agree with it, but I imagine people would say reducing piracy leads to more money for the studio, which means more resources that can be put toward the game. Lots of people believe that, and we don't have a lot of data on opportunity costs for games including Denuvo.
I personally just hate it and think Piracy is overblown. The only other industry I've seen be this hostile to users is Music/Photoshop. Putting an iLok key into my computer feels bad.
How are you protecting yourself at the game itself spying on you?
No, it hasn't:
> in late 2025, the MKDev collective and the prolific DenuvOwO came up with a hypervisor-based bypass (HVB) that installs a kernel-level driver to intercept and respond to Denuvo's checks. While that's not an actual crack, it's good enough for piracy work, as the saying goes.
This. It's bypassed, not cracked. All the games released need HVB to work. They use legit Denuvo licenses from other systems.
Fyi, most of them have not been cracked, but bypassed using a hypervisor that operates in ring-1, so it is certainly a security risk..
Personally I've been voting with my wallet and *never* supporting DRM, so there have been some games where I'm just "Well, I guess I'll never play that game." At least I have an ethical option to play certain games now, I'm just gonna use a seperate blank pc cus these bypasses are novel.
All software piracy is a security risk since they could embed malware in the game.
Running Windows is a massive risk cus its made by Microsoft and it has ring 0 access to your system. I personally trust a cracker in good standing far more that I would any corp.
Cracking refers to all methods of circumventing copy protection. Bypassing is just another way of cracking something.
Ehhh, afaik thats not the case in the community. These hypervisor bypasses are considered a different category. Like look at any scene page, they will 100% say Hypervisor or HV for these.
They are referred to as Hypervisor cracks.
Yeah I guess I was being pedantic. It doesnt matter. The important thing is that Deunvo is getting royally fucked.
Interesting to finally see some action from the mouse again. Was kinda sad to see that Denuvo embodies all the worst of DRM but was so thoroughly metastasized that it was nearly inoperable and they had effectively "won".
good riddance. crazy to see game developers hemorrhaging money for malware
That's all you need to know about DRM - when "pirates" bypass it, paying users are taking the hit.
And I'm not speaking about cost of implementing a technology to actively make the product worse.
This will be used as reason to introduce remote attestation to games.
That already is how it works. Denuvo can not authenticate your game without internet access.
Are Denuvo using games marked on Steam these days?
I've been getting mostly indies so I feel safe, but maybe I should check...
There's a yellow? box just above payment options that informs you of DRM.
Oh right, it's still there. Nothing on my wish list has it :) I had to go to the store page for NBAsomething to see it.
Yes they are. On the store page.
steamdb.info should have the info too I think?
Once again I'm at odds with TH reporting. Of course you can spoof a server. That happens all the time, especially with videogames. You may not immediately be able to figure out what the call/response is, but without knowing what the check is, it could just be a simple endpoint that returns "true" on every request. Very speculative to say that whatever they do will be impossible to mimic.
> You may not immediately be able to figure out what the call/response is, but without knowing what the check is, it could just be a simple endpoint that returns "true" on every request. Very speculative to say that whatever they do will be impossible to mimic.
It’s trivially easy to use a signed response that is encoding some part of the metadata of your system in the signature to make it impossible to emulate the server. Don’t think the Denuvo devs would be stupid enough to provide a “return true” request for a server call.
Can the underlying function that checks if the server call is correct be bypassed? Sure, but that’s much harder.
Cryptography goes BRRRRR, with a proper implementation of cryptography you'd need to do things like patch out the keys in memory in order to "spoof" messages.
A great use of LLM