It's often been the case that pirated versions are objectively superior to the crippled originals, but I don't think I've ever seen a case as blatant as this.
It's the same when you buy a movie or a television show on DVD/BR. You first get the traditional FBI warnings (that as a non US citizen doesn't apply to me) and if you are lucky you get a 3 minute unskippable scenes about how piracy is the equivalent of murdering a thousand puppies.
Somebody who pirates never see these things and have a better viewing experience.
Really glad that the market really played its role by providing customers with a near-perfect (Netflix's library is inconsistent to say the least) viewing experience.
I don't know why media companies insist on punishing paying customers.
Many have acted upon that belief and lived to regret it. The US has a surprisingly long reach when it comes to punishing what it considers illegal trafficking.
First thing I did was rip it and remove the restriction. Imagine if you bought a film and it refused to play on any screen less than 32" wide...
reminded of the unexpected (or at least, in the early days, under-reported) energy costs associated with cryptocurrencies...
Denuvo DRM happens to be... a repackaged VMProtect. Moreover VMP devs were suing Denuvo for illegally repackaging and selling a _single copy_ of VMP that Denuvo bought from them and then actively trying to evade paying licesning fees. Apparently prior to that Denuvo was talking to VMP about doing some custom development work, but they weren't able to agree on terms. [1]
VMProtect itself is a well-established virtualization-based DRM solution and it does dramatically increase the complexity of cracking of binaries. It's been around for a while now and it's popular in shareware circles as a successor to Armadillo protector, which too was a form of a code virtualizer. From what I've seen said about VMP, it is stable and reasonably light, so Assassin's Creed maxing out CPUs is more likely the Creed's own problem rather that of the VMP.
[1] https://rsdn.org/forum/shareware/6733344 (in Russian)
This feels so extreme.
https://image.prntscr.com/image/_6qmeqq0RBCMIAtGK8VnRw.png
https://np.reddit.com/r/CrackWatch/comments/79pd62/update_on...
People are blaming the DRM because the DRM simply exists; all the breakpoint proves is that VMProtect does what it says it does (decode sections of the game in the VM). It doesn't however prove that the DRM causes the stutter or performance issues, for all we know that could be a bug in the game's engine itself.
Hopefully time and more data will tell us for sure either way. We aren't there yet, although no lack of proof will stop the tech media from reporting on it.
Their approach always made so much more sense to me.
If you can delay your game getting cracked for a few weeks by using some obscure complex DRM, you've already recouped most of your investment and are in the clear.
Single player (blockbuster) games are probably one of the few industries where I would say piracy does matter. A pirate is not always a buyer, but gamers are notorious for not paying if they can. But they often will if they can't.
Not that I approve of DRM, but I understand why companies are massively worried about it -- they literally have billions of dollars riding on that one launch weekend.
That said, they should probably consider removing the DRM after a few months, or replacing it with something less complex (and resource intensive).
[Citation needed]
In argentina, people pay netflix and share accounts between friends, and some play hbo go for GoT, but thats it. In the U.S., its very rate to see pirated TV.
A sandwich might be worth 5 dollars to you, but if there are free sandwiches next to it, you will think "I would pay it if it were worth it"
The game even benefits from Threadripper, scaling beyond 8 cores, which is very unusual for games. And as it also runs on consoles with much, much less CPU power, I would suspect it is doing something very inefficient on PCs.
Copy protection. PS4 and Xbox One are both AMD x64 so you can reuse loads of code, which means that TF is indeed correct in blaming DRM.
Valve did an amazing job at building their reputation (by doing things the right way.) Very few can do DRM without pissing off people.
The switch from WON to Steam basically destoryed a huge part of the Counter Strike community (for example you couldn't play older versions anymore like 1.5)
Also Valve was one of the first company that required an online activation for a single player offline game (HL2). It was unheard back then.
Its garbage that reduces the value of games. It just increases Steam's profits.
(I also have a lot of Humble Bundle games)
Hackers will develop better tooling for VM introspection or something in the near future dropping again the time between release and initial anti-drm patch.
As a concerned consumer who buys game on pc or ps4, knowing this I will pass on the PC version and buy a second hand PS4 version.
No way I'm upgrading my 3570k for the sake of a pointless virtualization overhead.
First, I can buy all my games digitally through a single store. I don't have to install Steam, Origin, Blizzard, etc.
Second, I don't have to worry about installing DRM software that runs on my computer 24/7 even when I'm not gaming.
Third, I can play in my living room instead of hunkered down in a dark room while my wife complains that I'm hiding from the family.
If it's an Ubisoft game, it's worth paying attention when people complain about the DRM. It might not just be the pirates complaining.
It's the most backwards assed system I can think of. Why do we as an industry still pretend DRM is worth a damn?
I ended up having to pirate it in addition to buying it in order to play it the first few weeks. They eventually released a patch, but by then I had been playing the game for weeks without another problem and there was no way I was risking their countermeasures.
At the time, I was pissed that I spent my good money and they screwed me like that, and even denied the problem for weeks before fixing it.
would be another can of worms if so
I watched a streamer with a single PC setup (playing + gaming on the same PC) and he had insane frame drops on a quite decent PC (i7-4790K + GTX 1080)
I ended up having to download a cracked version of my legally owned game just to play it.
> EARLY ADOPTERS ... have been quick to moan that ...
> ... gamers have taken to the Steam forums to whine about ...
> DRM all too often seems to make users lives' a misery
They're just talking about a broken game, right? (That will likely get patched in a few days/weeks)
1. Pay for the game to support the creation of more games. This path will include invasive DRM that either causes performance problems, damages your hardware, or disallows you from playing the game you paid for, for instance when you're not connected to the internet.
2. Pirate the game, play it how you want.
That they punish the users who do the right thing and reward those who do not is crazy to me. That it has continued for so long without a collective wakeup call that you should not punish the people who give you money and play by the rules is mindboggling.
>Anvil Next engine has been rewritten with a bindless model for shaders but their DX12 renderer that goes hand in hand with this tech is only ready on Xbox One. On PC this cannot be handled so they use an extra binding wrapper to communicate between D3D11 and their renderer, this was co developed by Intel and Ubisoft. This goes against what AMD and Nvidia recommends to developers, uses a lot of extra CPU power and render their cards' power useless in certain situations (e.g. city areas in Origins).
http://developer2.download.nvidia.com/assets/gameworks/downl...
https://np.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/79qxxt/assassins_cree...
Their releases are scene releases, even with denuvo remaining as is.
The bypass "crack" Sephiroth87 is referring to is from (I believe) a non-scene person called baldman.
The same goes for games: Steam killed a big chunk of piracy, as having to crack the game and crack again after each update (not to mention no achievements and no official multiplayer) is less of an user experience than just using Steam. However, if as in this case using the Steam version comes with a 40% performance cost... then yeah, piracy gets attractive again.
That seems like a just world fallacy. The decision is made based on the perceived risk/reward by the publisher before you the consumer ever have a role to play. If they have internally decided this is "worth it", then it is _to them_.
If you want to correct their internal model of a customer, the one where it is worthwhile to use DRM, then the burden lies on you. Not that I am suggesting you can but, theirs is the incumbent position, yours is the challenger.
If you really don't like the DRM policy, don't pirate the game either. Pirating solves your problem (the DRM) but it doesn't correct their model of you. Lots of active pirates are still seen as fans of the game and potentially customers. They still see an "opportunity to convert" if they can just get stronger DRM out the door for the next title.
Saying "people do pay for content if they can" is seeing it from your perspective. To change their minds you have to see it from their perspective. Even if you feel it is objectively untrue, their perspective is that piracy is lost revenue and DRM reduces that loss.
If you're right, it's an interesting example of "artistic" DRM that is not related to copyright enforcement. Can anyone think of any others?
What cemented GoG for me was two events: One, they got the entire classic Thief series (my all time favorite game series which won't install on modern Windows from my game discs) and two, when a few games on Steam that I thought I owned were pulled or otherwise tampered with; something I paid for was suddenly gone or altered with no recourse. I still have my Steam account and I do play games on it, but going forward all of my game budget goes to GoG and thrift store finds.
I'm trying to find a way to work in a bound for the floor reference but none of them fit.
And it wasn't easy - you had to copy dozens of floppy disks, often people copied each disk 2 times, because out of 20 floppies one is bound to have read errors, if not more. It took ages.
But the prices were crazy - a game costed 60-120 PLN and people earned like 700 PLN per month.
Then piracy got much easier thanks to CD recorders and internet - but it changed nothing, because you can't go over 100% :)
Since that time piracy only got easier thanks to broadband, dvd-writers, usb pendrives, ssds, yet legal computer market in Poland increased many times and piracy is in decline. Mostly because of increasing salaries, and extras included with legal copies.
Think of this in terms of source code. If you wanted the source code for facebook, facebook might sell it to you (for billions ofc), but you cant pay for it. That doesnt give you the right to steal it.
Its just too easy to do. Its a basic microeconomics argument. But piracy has not only risks, but costs, and hence it does allow the product to be sold at a higher price. It constricts supply.
Of course it doesn't (except in some special cases, but that's another debate, and doesn't concern games - see life saving drugs for example).
But the discussion was about DRM and whether they work - IMHO they don't, because the main reason behind piracy isn't accessibility, but too high (price/perceived value). So - limiting accessibility of piracy isn't going to stop it.
Also it would have worked by now if it worked at all.
Also also :) EU did a study in 2013 which found that piracy doesn't really hurt sales, because most people who pirated X and haven't bought it later - wouldn't have bought it anyway. https://cdn.netzpolitik.org/wp-upload/2017/09/displacement_s...
> EU did a study in 2013 which found that piracy doesn't really hurt sales, because most people who pirated X and haven't bought it later - wouldn't have bought it anyway.
I haven't read that paper, but from an economic standpoint, this is still not enough to prove what people would have bought if they had access to piracy. Again, look at popcornTime. If people were fined in Argentina like they are in the US, I assure you netflix would surge in subscriptions.
I also want to point out another problem in a lot of countries is bandwidth. Limits of 20GB is not unheard-off. But GTA5, 65GB. So easier to copy a couple of rar files on usb and sneakernet it around.
Its fundamentally a problem of business model. You can't charge differential pricing based on what the customer is willing or able to do, so one way or another you compromise revenue, or content, or something else.
Naturally as this has progressed with time, the shows themselves started adding ads within the show to prevent things like this.
