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0 pointssoerxpso1y ago0 comments

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.

0 comments

jsheard1y 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.

AnthonyMouse1y 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.

jsheard1y 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.

AnthonyMouse1y 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.

1 more reply

dvngnt_1y ago

there's only one person releasing cracks for modern denuvo and their last release was a year ago, and they're crazy

AnthonyMouse1y 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.

1 more reply

tasn1y 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).

loeg1y 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_w...

[2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/CrackWatch/comments/ieo7u4/crack_wa...

theshackleford1y 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.

Neonlicht1y 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.

rescbr1y 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.

winocm1y 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.)

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

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jsheard1y ago

AnthonyMouse1y 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.

jsheard1y 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.

AnthonyMouse1y 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.

1 more reply

dvngnt_1y ago

there's only one person releasing cracks for modern denuvo and their last release was a year ago, and they're crazy

AnthonyMouse1y ago

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.

1 more reply

tasn1y 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).

loeg1y 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_w...

[2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/CrackWatch/comments/ieo7u4/crack_wa...

theshackleford1y 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.

Neonlicht1y 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.

rescbr1y 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.

winocm1y ago

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse