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.
Meanwhile the "pirates" enjoy a superior experience. They don't have to put up with this nonsense. They can use the devices they want. They can install the games on as many machines as they want. They can play the games offline. Their games are faster because there's no obfuscated nonsense code running. They don't have to suffer idiotic invasive kernel mode DRM nonsense on their computers, software whose only difference from literal malware is legal boilerplate in a document that nobody reads but that everybody theoretically accepted when they fast forwarded through the installation screens furiously clicking next so they could play the game they paid for.
Makes me feel like a total moron for buying games every single time.
One could blame the user for not "just" holding it right. Or alternatively reconsider if the handle should have a grippy coating instead.
Ah, so Denuvo is always removed after ~90 days after release, as there is no point for them to keep it there?
The stopper is of course denuvo, which they keep renewing the license of, for no good reason.
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.
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.
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...
That would mean that game developers pay license fees for anti-piracy solutions because they are completely economically illiterate. Is this really the most likely scenario or is it perhaps the one you’d like to believe the most?
You mean the companies that have an unnecessary 5 min file load wait in GTA5 are also the same companies that insert the same files into a binary multiple times to speed up load times by having sequential reads for all art assets?
The world is irrational.
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
Efficient market fallacy strikes again.
No, is is absolutely possible that use of Denuvo results in a net loss and it is still used. Executives don't always behave rational and it is not like you can AB Test that thing or even easily measure its impact.
Look at their own/industry data of comparable games that have been published with or without protection. I worked in the game industry, for AAA studios it's a no brainer. Denuvo for a big title that sells millions of copies runs about high six or low seven figures in costs, so about 1-3% of the budget, whereas preventing piracy in the first 12 weeks meant something like a 10-20% increase (tens of millions) in sales.
If everyone colludes, then the game publishers wouldn't need to suffer for including Denuvo. And the nature of the collusion doesn't require some literal conspiracy, it just requires that the personalities at the top of the pyramids (of which there are but a few) are assholes who have an ideological bent. We are all aware of the type: they would spend themselves into the poorhouse making certain no one can "steal" from them, and what they consider theirs isn't entirely congruent with what the law says.
>The level of copium involved in piracy debates is always a sight to behold. I'm no saint, I've pirated stuff too b
I've never pirated anything. I don't hijack ships at sea. I have infringed copyright, but when copyright laws are bought and paid for my lobbyist slush funds, I don't feel any reason to give a shit about those laws. They were only ever utilitarian anyway, not some moral principle, and right now they're not even utilitarian.
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.)
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.
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.
> Brown hands typed these words.
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.
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 ($8), a massive majority of the PC audience will choose "free" regardless of the developer's size or struggle.
https://web.archive.org/web/20161118042043/http://arstechnic...
https://web.archive.org/web/20131214165241/http://aussie-gam...
P.S.: It bears repeating that the game cost only 8 dollars.
Someone playing/watching/listening to something for free doesn't mean they would still do it if they had to pay for it.
(https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/09/eu-study-finds-piracy...)
It doesn't provide data suggesting that piracy doesn't hurt sales. It literally doesn't provide any data at all.
Several points:
* A pirate can pirate infinity +1 games for free, that will skew any statistic compared to legitimiate buyers that have to manage a finite budget. It also means that you aren't looking at 93% lost sales.
* It wasn't a new indy game, but a port of an existing mobile game, so I wouldn't be surprised if legitimate buyers weren't in a rush to get their hands on it on day one. The steam statistics from the first month mention a peak concurrent player count of over 7000 so it certainly didn't stay at 200 copies.
Most pirates aren't people who could pay for this stuff. This is utterly meaningless.
So much in fact I don't even want to link counter examples to it.
No/very few paying user pirates even single player games these days if they can afford it as a luxury please understand that.
I would likemy regular updates bug fixes patches and new feaures ASAP. And on sale at 8$ 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.
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.
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.
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.
IMO drm is understandable at the games release, but it should be removed after the initial period.
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.
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.
Or are you misunderstanding the fact that you can just copy/back up the Steam game and play it anywhere. That's why I say many people have that misconception about Steam games
Mad Max Middle-earth: Shadow of War Deus Ex: Mankind Divided Yakuza: Like a Dragon
Recent example: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3357650/PRAGMATA/
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.
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)
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.
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.
As this isn't the case, I have been waiting for several years to buy many games. Denuvo still hasn't been removed, so I continue to wait.
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.
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.
There are none. Or rather they fall in the margin of error.
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).
What exactly separates a kernel dev from a non-kernel dev?
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.
Good riddance.
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.
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...
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.
> 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.
One big difference is that the bypass method _requires_ Microsoft Windows in order to function. You cannot use the bypass on Linux.
I don't have a Windows install anywhere, so if I want to play the game I have to either purchase it, or wait for a crack that will remove Denuvo from the executable.
I get this probably doesn't matter to most people because they're on Windows anyway and will happily disable whatever security is required to access free games, but it's disappointing to have the technical distinctions and broader implications glossed over.
The release will have an .sfv file with a CRC32 checksum for each rar file.
The FTP server checks them after the upload completes. Back in the day glftpd with zipscript was a very popular tool to manage an FTP site. This Readme sums it up well: https://github.com/pzs-ng/pzs-ng
The sfv can be tampered with but the propagation of releases to FTPs happens very fast, within minutes. It would take you longer to meaningfully alter it than it takes the racers to distribute the original files. And once the release is completely uploaded you can't modify the files anymore.
If the release is bad, for example if it doesn't work at all or if it contains a virus, then it simply gets nuked. This propagates within minutes.
And I'm not speaking about cost of implementing a technology to actively make the product worse.
I've been getting mostly indies so I feel safe, but maybe I should check...
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.
This has implications - the bypasses cannot run on Linux for example where a cracked executable could. They are not the same thing.
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.