Be Excellent To Each Other

A few months back I was reading a thread on a site I visit about the game Mad Max. Apparently those who had stolen it were having issues with the crack that had been released for it. Several versions were released, but each time the game protection managed to stop the game working at certain points during the game. Up until now I had never heard of Denuvo, and if you asked me if I thought a game could be protected fully and completely I would laugh and give the usual response "Anything is hackable".

But Denuvo has actually made me rethink this. I watched as they complained over and over about Mad Max. I was laughing, because I had actually bought the game myself, but it did get me thinking.

Any way, I'd not really paid it any attention since because apparently the next game to be protected by Denuvo was Just Cause 3, and again I had already bought it as a pre order so knew nothing of it being cracked.

After reading the review of Rise of the Tomb Raider today on Bit-tech (link incoming, I'm no good at that 'here' shit)

http://www.bit-tech.net/gaming/2016/01/ ... b2raider/1

I read that they had encountered a strange bug in the game where after a few hour's play it started to act strangely, filling up all usable memory on the test machine. In the comments after the review I saw some one bring up Denuvo again, so I decided that it was time to get off of my lazy ass and do some reading. And what I have found is pretty cool ! Obviously finding information on exactly how it works is impossible. There is information that it causes R/W cycles to your hard drive so SSDs could be damaged, but that was refuted by Denuvo who said it simply didn't work like that.

Basic information on Denuvo can be found here -

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denuvo

But being the tech geek that I am I really wanted more information. So I did some digging and found a Reddit post apparently from the Chinese hackers 3DM. It reads -

Please note: No one (other than people working at denuvo) really knows how it works 100%. This post is just my observations from attempting to analyze denuvo, and it is certainly just one technique out of the N that it has and uses. However, I think this is the most crucial technique of denuvo, and why it has been so hard to crack.
So what's the magic behind Denuvo? Environment dependent obfuscation.
First of all, Denuvo is NOT a shrink wrap anti tamper system. Developers must integrate their code with denuvo, including marking non-performance-impacting but essential functions for Denuvo's obfuscation. For example, this may be a function that initializes the engine. It should only be run once, so making it slower doesn't really impact overall performance.
What Denuvo does for these functions is that it generates at least dozens of different versions that are functionally identical, but each codepath is specifically formulated to work only in one processor environment. Then Denuvo stubs out this function during the build process.
Essentially, Denuvo protected binaries come with some parts empty, that must be downloaded from the Denuvo servers after successful authentication. However, Denuvo's servers have at least dozens (if not hundreds or more) of variants for each function.
What do I mean by processor environment? It's basically any slight differences you may have with your processor. It's not just what processor you have, but what revision it is. Two i5s with the exact same model numbers, but manufactured on different dates, can have different revisions, like bug fixes or small optimizations.
To give you an idea of how many different revisions / specs there are for a single processor model, check this out... http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ ... 05554.html
There are a lot of slight differences and weird quirks in how different processor revisions operate. Some of them are tiny, like different timings of an opcode in certain situations. Denuvo definitely has put a lot of research into this, I would not be surprised if they're working directly with Intel.
So, after successful authentication that is verified by Steam or Origin, Denuvo then patches your binary with specific codepaths that will ONLY work on your specific processor.
You can't patch these away, because the game relies on them to work and the functions are crucial to the game. You can't just collect one and patch it into the "some-parts-missing" binary, because it'll only work on your processor AND you will trip the challenging integrity checks that seem to be dynamically generated, again, based on your processor. Not to mention the whole scheme is incredibly obfuscated.
Serious props to the denuvo team for such an advanced anti tampering system. And I'm sure this is just one part of it.


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So in short this protection basically tailors itself to your specific CPU, and so without it the game simply fails to function correctly. This would be why every time a hacker thought they had cracked Mad Max, for example, within hours the game would either black screen, crash, or the audio would stop working.

Just Cause 3 on the other hand? has not been cracked.

Now whilst I am anti piracy I am also anti DRM. The last time I installed Crysis on my PC back in ooo, about 2007, Securom managed to break my PC and screw up all of my virtual drives and I ended up having to reinstall Windows. Sod's law about two weeks after I had completely reinstalled my operating system they released an uninstaller for it but it put me off for life.

So, whilst I was happily handing over cash for my games I more often than not downloaded a crack for them for a few reasons. Firstly, a 50 speed CDrom drive gets really loud when being accessed, causing my PC to vibrate but secondly I don't like having to keep shuffling DVDs and changing them all of the time.

For the past couple of years I have bought a good 90% of my games via either Steam, or, somewhere like HumbleBundle who provide Steam keys. I still buy my software on DVD where I can, but these days that'e becoming increasingly harder.

Any way, food for thought.

Someone will be able to hack it eventually - and from what you've described there is no reason that it would not be instantly hackable / playable in a VM environment (as the CPU type would always be the same - one person with a legit copy installs it in VMware - then distributes the same patch and everyone uses VM to play the game - I realize there will be more to it but there will be other ways to get around an issue as you've described)

If someone can think it up , someone else can hack it

** oh and I love the list of protected games includes Arkham Knight which as far as i'm aware *still* does not really run the way it should on PC :-)

Performance overheads of a virtualisation preclude using VMs as an attack vector on games, though. That might work for apps, but if Denuvo's ability to sniff out tiny differences in CPUs is really that good it would be very easy to also work out if it's running under a VM. VMs do not do perfect processor emulation; in fact over the last ten years the main trend in virtualisation has been to stop doing hardware emulation and instead do something better thought of as a partitioning of the host architecture.

Sky Digital has never been hacked.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... count.html

?



I'd also draw a distinction here between someone being able to get things working as a one off - and someone producing something which could be mass distributed - my 'VM' example above was just pointing out that something like that would be theoretically possible - not that you would get a good gaming experience out of it (see i'm aiming for 'factually correct' saying that it could be pirated , not that it would be practical in any way :-)

Oh I don't disagree however, whilst anything is hack-able it's whether the spade work is worth it. If you are taking months to crack a game what's the point? give it a couple of months and it's so cheap that even the poverty criers can afford it.

Any by then of course the horse has bolted. Who wants to be sat for months waiting to play a game all of their friends are already playing and or completed?

I think that's where Denuvo have basically got people by the balls. I would have found it absolutely fucking excruciating for example if I hadn't pre-ordered Fallout 4 and had to wait months before I could play it. The same goes for Tomb Raider really. Even having to wait three days for AMD to release an updated driver is absolutely killing me

Those evil fiends, making people pay for stuff instead of pirating it.

I'm amazed anyone even pirates games these days, considering how reasonably priced they are in the main (and especially so if you're prepared to wait a few months for some sort of inevitable sale or special offer).

I know £30-£50 for a brand new game isn't exactly 'cheap', but considering the resources that go into creating a modern game it's hard to complain IMO. (And if you're not happy with £30-£50, it'll be a tenner or so in a Steam Sale by the end of a year.)

All the old arguments about the pirated versions being better than the real thing don't hold water any more either due to digital distribution, games being account bound so you can install them as many times as you like, and so on - (I routinely used to use NO-CD cracks for games I'd bought and owned the discs for, just because it negated the need to swap discs out of the CD-ROM drive all the time and having a howling disc spinning at 999999RPM for hours at a time when playing games).

As long as this Denuvo thingy doesn't actually break anything else on the systems it's running on, or cause onerous performances overheads and stuff like that, I have no problem with it.

I like lending games.

Well with Steam offering full refunds for games that are crap, don't work on your PC, any other reason you can find within a couple of hours any argument I had for piracy went down the toilet.

There really isn't any excuse now.

Thankfully I hang around a few gaming forums so I usually always pick them up far cheaper than retail. A friend of mine on another forum just bought three Titan X, so sold me a code for ROTTR for £20. If memory serves I paid £22 for BLOPS 3 (fantastic in co op) and £21 for Just Cause 3. Oh, today I bought Aliens : Colonial Marines for £3.46. Apparently it too is a good co op romp

I got Batman for free, thank god. I know a guy who works for OCUK and when the promotion was about to end they gave out all of their left over codes.



I've been hearing that Steam now have a friends and family feature where you can share your entire library with 'X' people (I don't know the exact details). That's pretty freakin' awesome.

Actually an interesting question from this - since its always been claimed that every single pirated copy was a lost sale and that these titles are now 'unpirateable' have they made a squillion dollars on each of these games because all those pirates had to buy a legitimate copy ?

That's clearly nonsense and always has been though, whatever 'the industry' might claim.

I've always been minded to think that folks who'll buy games will do so irrespective of the ease (or otherwise) of pirating them, and the pirates will just pirate regardless of any other factors because that's what they do.

That said I'm sure there's some grey area in the middle somewhere, which might lead to a modest uplift in sales, although it'd be very interesting to see the numbers.

I think with piracy people will download and play any old shit, because it's free. I think once you start to offer no other option than buying people would be far more fussy. You remember Rik from FF right? he pretty much used to download the internet, fill up hard drives and then remove them and fill up more. I asked him once if he'd ever actually watched/played/listened to anything he had downloaded and he pretty much replied 'no'. He just did it for the sake of it because it was there.

So the numbers of who has been downloading games may shrink or even vanish, but only those who truly want the game in question will pay for it IMO.

Been doing some digging and I came across this site.

http://www.vgchartz.com/

And I have found some answers RE - sales. Fifa 13 for example which was cracked pretty quickly http://www.vgchartz.com/game/70739/fifa-soccer-13/

Total Units

North America: 0.02m 4.9%
+ Europe: 0.31m 76.7%
+ Rest of the World: 0.07m 18.5%
= Global 0.40m

And Fifa 15 which wasn't.

Total Units

Europe: 0.25m 89.3%
+ Rest of the World: 0.03m 10.7%
= Global 0.28m

Now granted Fifa 13 has had a lot longer to sell and probably at cheaper prices but it doesn't look like they're gathering any extra sales by using protection. And the stats for the first 10 weeks.

First 10 weeks sales:
Fifa 13 143k
Fifa 14 123k
Fifa 15 122k

I'm obviously taking into consideration that they're very similar games (updates are usually just the right players at the right clubs, for example) but going by that it seems that pirates won't buy games even if they can't play them at all. If anything it may have even hurt sales.

Have you accounted for:

Number of stores selling it
Price
Release date
Games market up or down You
What else was on offer at the time
Number of consoles it was playable on

?

No, just taking the info as I find it. Fifa games have to be activated and played through Origin, which is where I imagine they get their figures from.

I also take into account that (as I mentioned) Fifa games tend to be pretty much the same only with a few new features. When my step daughter came down one summer I bought her Fifa 13 because it was on sale for a fiver and I looked at Fifa 14 when she came the following year and it looked identical, other than the fact Gareth Bale no longer played for Spurs

I think when it settles down Tomb Raider (the new one) will probably be a better comparison, though it's only just launched so it would be hard to get any decent figures yet. Tomb Raider (2013) is as follows

North America: 0.06m 16.3%
+ Europe: 0.23m 68.6%
+ Rest of the World: 0.05m 15.1%
= Global 0.34m

And with the surprising popularity of the first game (it was epic, and I've never played a TR game in my life) I will be very interested to see how the follow up sells. I don't know if the first game was cracked because I bought it on day one.

VGChartz numbers are somewhere between guesses and wild guesses, particularly when they involve sales of games distributed via digital platforms who don't release sales figures.

Anti-piracy measures just need to make pirating something a bit of a faff, not completely impossible, to put most people off I reckon.

Don't make pirating harder, make not pirating easier. See steam for example, I haven't pirated a game in years or Spotify, I have pirated music in years either.

Whereas even though I subscribe to sky movies, Netflix and Amazon prime, I still pirate TV shows and films, as quite often it's easier to do that, or even with all the subs I pay, still the only way I can watch something.

Piracy is not theft, it's copyright infringement, which is a different crime.

I don't really care if publishers use DRM to aim to prevent piracy, my main concerns are:
Does the DRM negatively impact legitimate customers in any way?
Can the DRM eventually be broken/removed so that the game can be properly archived.

Denuvo to the best of my knowledge has no noticeable impact on legitimate customers, so that's good. It would be nice if publishers patched it out of their games once they've stopped selling in large quantities.

So many art forms do a bad job of archiving their history. A great many movies have been entirely lost, same for paintings, photographs, and more. There's a startling number of modern games that have been pulled from Steam/Xbox Live/PSN etc, and are currently exclusively available via piracy. Preventing piracy of games entirely would be bad from the perspective of preserving the history of the medium.

I'm unconvinced that the existence of piracy has a massive impact on how much revenue games make.p

VGChartz's numbers are just made up. They do not have access to the data they claim to.

Yes they're definitely not there with TV/films yet. We had both Amazon Prime and Netflix on the go but cancelled Netflix in the end as the amount of stuff that was just disappearing off there without warning was alarming, and I wasn't much interested in the millions of original series they were producing that would require a commitment of 27 hours a day to keep up with.

Amazon Prime we're retaining as the selection of films is better (albeit still crap) and it comes with extra benefits like their music streaming service although that's pretty shit TBH. I think we get free delivery and stuff too. Mrs Hearthly paid for twelve months upfront so it's a bit of a done deal really, but we'll probably renew it.

The new X-Files for example, I don't even know when or where that's being aired in the UK - HANG ON GOOGLE..... Oh right February 8th on Channel 5, which is useless for us as we don't have the means to receive telly (we don't even have a Freeview box or anything, there's a dish outside which used to be for Sky Digital but we haven't had that for over a decade now and I can't remember what happened to the box, certainly the wire that comes into the house isn't connected to anything, we did have a Freeview box until a few years ago but we gave it to the in-laws when theirs broke). It's also, of course, two weeks after it was aired in the US and appeared on Usenet with each episode compressed down to 220MB using the X265 codec and with all the adverts stripped out. Tough choice!

There needs to be an Apple Music/Spotify for TV and films, but the level of co-operation and revenue sharing and licensing agreements it'd require across so many studios and companies and all the rest of it means it's most likely a long way off.

Don't trust Amazon Prime Video at all, I download most of what I watch, but did use Prime for my son to watch mostly Fireman Sam

All of a sudden some old season (5) is now chargeable on my Prime, odd that as its the only thing I ever watched on there. Older and newer seasons are still free

So I just downloaded it all and watch in on XBMC now.

Would stop downloading if there was a decent TV service that gave add free up to date content.

Sky?

There TV is still full of adds? or has that changed??

We've got -

Amazon Prime and the Fire HD box. Mrs JC subbed to this much in the same way that Mrs Hearthly did, for the shipping. There is some half decent stuff on it though. Anything super decent though costs extra.

Netflix. We don't pay for this though my step daughter lets us use hers and we let them use our NowTV.

NowTV entertainment, movies and sport (around £45 a month but I will dump sport when the season ends) can't have a dish there and there's no cable and I do love my footy.

The irony is that Mrs JC mostly spends the day watching Youtube through NowTV. So for all of that money we hardly watch any of it (Though in fairness Mrs JC did watch every Peep Show and then every Shameless but nothing really over the past two months).

We have Sky Entertainment for Trollied and Pilkington, when those are on. IIRC the movies were either free or very cheap, but we do watch the odd film every couple of months.

Sooner or later, you have to face the fact that TV is expensive to make and no-one is legally going to give it to you for free.

Netflix is great value.

Sky less so, but I like sports.

Amazon is always on the brink of being cancelled but I never get round to it.

Wait, but people pay a sub for Sky too. Adverts and £50pm does seem a lot of money.

Adverts? isn't that what tablets and phones were invented for ?

Sure, I'm one of them. That's the price you pay for getting a broad range of content while it's hot. And this isn't a rapacious price for content, if you look around the world; it's a good bit cheaper than a full cable TV lineup in the US, for example.

(Note that it's around £35/month for TV alone; you're quoting a price with movies or sport on top. Also note that no-one should pay full price for Sky, there are regular attractive offers for new customers you can usually qualify for.)

TV is probably the most expensive 'utility' we have. If you really think about it it's obscene how much you can spend on it. A friend of mine lives in Virgin territory and three or four years back he had a package on cable that was costing him £100 a month or more, internet extra (it included the now defunct Setanta, Sky Sports full movies, 3D, etc etc basically everything they could screw you for).

And I remember thinking how much money that added up to be over the course of a year. That's more than anything else I have.

I really don't mind adverts though. Not at all. I just make sure I keep my phablet on the arm of the sofa and reach for it as soon as they begin. It's great because it allows me to keep up with my emails and so on (and keep an eye on my medication reminders throughout the day). So yeah, really not fussed.

You don't have to buy it. How is anyone getting screwed?

You don't need all the packages..

I survive with BT and Netflix.

I think the sport channels cost too much. I also think footballers are overpaid (possibly because of it, but that's another debate) and it's ruined football (yet I still watch it, sucker for punishment).

And no, I don't have to buy it, but when they basically vacuum up anything they think people might watch and make it expensive and PPV only I think it's a bit of a screw job (Darts for example).

So yeah, just my opinion. FWIW I think Netflix and some of now TV is actually very fairly priced in comparison to something like a full priced Sky sub.

NowTV is excellent value, especially if you keep an eye out for the discounted boxes with several months passes included.
You can get most of the standard Sky content for under fifty quid a year.

I already pay plenty of money to download, my NAS cost a bomb and so does the disks inside it.

No issue paying, but I don't want adds or to wait for months for new content. The adverts on Sky are dreadful as soon as they come on one channel they are on every single channel at the same time.

The model is already there with NG etc, new shows are out in 1080p add free within hours of been shown in the US

TV companies just want to keep milking the same product by holding back on release dates by regions etc.

I'm never going to buy into a SKY type model as I'm too used to what I have now, but I would be happy to pay for a decent service and I'm not alone in that, so if they want more money for there products they should change the way they do things. Guess it will never happen as if they did this a lot of people who use SKY etc would move away from it.

Options include record and watch later and fast forward through the adverts, watch live but pause for 20 mins then fast forward through adverts.

Is it that much of a bother?

Yup. Unless you have some sort of "live pause every channel" button that kicks in for half an hour at 4am each morning.

How do you think that people get money to make all these shows that you watch?

Don't try to justify it on any moral basis. You like piracy.

Oh my god, are you actually saying that because you spent a lot of money on a l33t pirating setup that... it doesn't matter that no-one is paying the people who make the TV shows?

(1) Tell Sky box to record show (2) wait until a few minutes after show starts (3) start playing show (4) fast forward adverts when they come on (5) don't see any adverts

Obviously asfish's arguments here are terrible but isn't the outrage a little bit rich given this forum's proud history of TV piracy stuff? *glances at "Newsgroup download automation" thread*

I'm not going to tell anyone they shouldn't pirate, but I do think they shouldn't try and claim it's not an iffy thing to be doing. I download a number of TV shows from Usenet, mostly to work around the fairly rare shows that have a long delay before making it to Sky or to catch up on shows I missed when they aired; but I do still have a full Sky sub as well as Netflix and Amazon Prime, so I have paid for this stuff at one point or another, albeit in a different format. I'd feel a bit shitty downloading stuff if I didn't. I also don't download movies, I rent them from Play; the price is fair and the convenience is better than piracy. And I haven't pirated a game in many years.

Ha, you should see the hidden ones!

But I broadly agree with the Doc - I'm happy to admit that I'm stealing content and it's not a nice thing to do. I just don't really care.

I buy stuff as well, Films on Blu Ray as I always find downloaded stuff has crap sound no matter how big the file is.

Also have a Prime membership, and I sent 300 DVD's of TV and films to Music Magpie last year as I was sick of the clutter in the house, made sure I had downloads of it all first though.

Piracy doesn't help the industry, but the industry doesn't help itself either. I'm not trying to justify it as I don't care less to be honest. All I'm saying is the that notion of piracy being free to do is not true, I do it as I can't get what I want content wise in many areas. But these days its becoming a pain in the arse to do time and cost wise so I would be happy to pay £100 a month for high quality add free content with no region restrictions.

"You're not stealing it, you're copyright infringementing it!" - LewieP

We have Netflix and Amazon and pay the license fee. I'll happily download anything else we really want to see (although given that we watch about an hour of TV a night it's not really a lot). I guess it's possible that some American TV producer's child is starving to death as a result of my piracy but I still really struggle to feel anything at all about pirating the odd show that doesn't appear on any of those.

I'll tell you what people really piss me off, there's one at work. He tries to make out that he has some moral objection to piracy but will happily watch stuff that someone else downloads and gives to him. Basically he's scared of getting caught.

I had a work colleague asking me to download rom sets for old consoles through newsgroups because he didn't want his mum to get into trouble (he lives with his mum still). He even offered to pay me. It was all so underhanded and weird. Very odd.

All the guys from our US office are like that, they don't have any moral objections but are terrified the FBI will catch them downloading, odd thing is most of them download films but not TV so are always after stuff when they come over to the UK.

I'm not incorrect.

Copyright only exists because a bunch of rich people with vested interests successfully hired a swarm of lobbyists to make it exist. This isn't the case in many countries (most notably China).

Copyright infringement is illegal, but I think it's up for debate whether or not it is inherently immoral. I think there is less debate to be had over theft.

Regardless, if something is offered to me in the most convenient way possible, it is reasonably priced, and I am not in any way getting an inferior product compared to piracy, I happily pay for it. Otherwise I either go without or acquire a digital copy of it without the copyright holder's permission (but do not in deprive them of any of their own property).

I think film/TV will catch up with music and games eventually, but because of how messy things are with film/TV it is lagging behind.

I didn't say you weren't.

Christ, really?

I guess I'll go and register savvygamer.com.