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.
As someone who used to be a Pirate Party supporter, piracy has to exist in an equilibrium to avoid killing the host, and I don't know if that's possible on today's internet. Both "absurdly onerous DRM making the game unplayable, especially once abandoned" and "Rockstar spends $265m making the game, one person buys a copy, and everyone else pirates it" are bad outcomes. The optimal one is probably somewhere in the "a small number of people who Know A Guy pirate the game, gradually increasing over time" range. But that may not be sustainable either.
I think the context is important. These were people in poverty, in an extremely mismanaged society. You could get very little from actual shops. Most things would have to be bartered for. Stealing from the state accounted for a very important part of peoples' sustenance. My grandfather would try to explain it like this: even if you had money, there wasn't anything to buy. In that sense, even the factory managers were poor. Sarah C. M. Paine says that, in terms of buying power, the First Secretary of USSR's wife was poorer than an average American middle-class wife.
Fortunately the second one isn't a real thing. There are many games that have already been cracked, or that never had any DRM to begin with, and there are still large numbers of people who pay for them. Because they want the publisher to continue making games more than they want to avoid paying <1% of their annual income for something.
Which is in turn why the DRM not only doesn't work but is actively harmful to the publisher. Getting people to want to pay is a lot easier when you're not actively pissing them off. Meanwhile the DRM gets cracked anyway and then you're worse off than when you started, because not only can they still pirate it, now more of them want to.
Тащи с завода каждый гвоздь - ты здесь хозяин а не гость.
Take every nail from the factory post,
You aren't a visitor, you are the host!
This is how some people end up with parts of ICBM or space ships as part of their country datcha landscape design.
After all propaganda loved to tell that everything is owned by people's.
On the other hand, having strongly anticonsumer DRM will certainly affect sales. If you have a loss of performance or make it too much a hassle (mandatory connections, updates, etc) that will eat into your revenue, and twice as you are paying money to third parties to have consumers be shun away.
The only downsides are paying the factory workers to spin their wheels and the 2x wear and tear on tools and replacement costs of any components damaged by the constant handling.
The US does something similar with the national defense manufacturers. We don't necessarily need more of a vehicle but if that factory sits dormant for 2 years until we do need replacements, it's going to take a long time to train workers. And you run a risk of losing any tribal knowledge those workers carried. You can lower production rates so you aren't buying too many things at once but keeping a small crew busy will allow you to quickly ramp production if necessary.
You also see this with the European space industry especially in the rocket building. A lot of money is poured into the industry even if there are no massive returns or advancements just in order to keep the people and skills. If you let these slip, rebooting the sector would be a decades long affair so doing busy work sometimes is the better option.
Heck, even most large tech companies do this type of busy work assignment. They hire en-masse but many of those people are never really put to work. Their greatest value is that they stay out of the competition's hands, if there is a massive project coming up the people are already there, and they can be dumped in case of emergency to prop up the stick price.
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.
All that would be publicised would be " GTA 5 denuvo key license is now over" and people would not know
Ah, so Denuvo is always removed after ~90 days after release, as there is no point for them to keep it there?
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.
> 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.
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)
Mad Max Middle-earth: Shadow of War Deus Ex: Mankind Divided Yakuza: Like a Dragon
Good riddance.
I'd suggest "encumbered" or even "infected".
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.
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.
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.
B) no one is getting “proper scene releases” from “proper sources” any more.
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...
Now stop creating new DRMs. You can see what is the outcome. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.
The only thing that made me switch to Netflix from π-rated movies was the accessibility, availability, languages support, speed and quality. The same with games. I buy games from gog mostly because they are missing DRM (and because I'm an old dinosaur so not interested in the bleeding edge new games).
Please focus on the added value. And the wealth will come. Don't pay for denuvo - it's waste of money
The endgame is certainly flexing the machinery that is being built up over the last 20 years and spawning a SEV-SNP container on your machine that cannot be debugged, inspected and modified in any way. I don't think this is possible as of writing though.
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.
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.
When Switch 1 launched, it got re-releases (eg: Diablo 3) that were: 1. complete editions with DLCs, 2. came on a cartridge that one could swap between devices or sell, 3. supported offline play.
Online game stores were supposed to offer better UX than hardware releases. I find it interesting, and perhaps a sign of how bad the online experience can get, that the opposite can happen too.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Really? I thought Denuvo (this one) and maybe others were famous for being genuinely effective. Unless I'm muddling them up (I have memory from reading articles a few years ago) this was a library that outright prevented piracy as well as cheats for significant periods of time for a wide variety of games.
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.
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.
If you compare a game that's had significant performance patches over a period of years and had Denuvo removed to the launch version (as so many of these videos are) then no shit you see performance differences, but it doesn't tell you anything.
This channel has many comparison videos like this one.
Loading times and 1% or 0.1% low FPS are usually hit the hardest and those stutters are the most immersion-breaking.
In any case the reality is that every game I've bought on GOG has worked pretty much perfectly on Wine, I use winetricks. The main problem with Windows games these days is the DRM which on Wine will crash. Good thing GOG games don't come with any.
If you want a fancy launcher, there's always Heroic.
Also even the fixed game now is just a silly boring sandbox game, what makes it good is the story, but It's for sure overrated. I enjoyed it but still overrated.
They also censor for the CCP, the removed the game Devotion because it had a JOKE inside that was not even visible to the normal player you needed to get out of your way to see some devroom or something with it. The BLACKLISTED a game simply because they make a JOKE of the Chinese president.
All big companies are EVIL by definition. Do not act like they are the good guys because they grift of selling games without DRM, they sell them at higher prices to make big money. They grew into this immoral dirt megacorp.
Insane statement
they be wrong, there have been multiple studies even by the EU on how piracy does not reduce revenue.
Besides that studios continue to pay for denuvo even after there game has been cracked. The article literally is about how all games with denuvo get bypassed on the day of the release, which means they pay for nothing except a worse experience for there paying customers. At this point it's just a compliance checklist by corporate suits and actual people working on games and paying customer pay the price.
Actually, the legit buyers experience is better because this bypass is not a "proper" crack
1. They have to disable Windows security features before playing
2. Reboot their PC twice (before and after)
3. They're still running Denuvo code, same as legit buyer
Legit buyers experience is thus significantly better than pirates.
Only for this type of bypass using hypervisor, there are more and more actual cracks every month by voices38 that don't need any of that and deliver better performance and usability to pirates.
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.
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?
https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/List_of_DRM-free_games_on_...
I am a heavy pirate and I my favorite games come as raw files torrents with the crack pre-applied. Games these days (with DRM removed) simply execute no matter where you copy and move them they just work. The cracks themselves do not modify any registry entries or make the game write them new or differently because they simply do not use the registry. Games write their savegames in AppData or Documents and THAT IS IT. Installers are glorified copy machines with ads on them (GOG) for example. They copy files and put a shortcut in your start menu and desktop and THAT IS IT, they do not write special registry entries for a game to work. Again this has not been a thing for like 25 years. I think it was when SecureROM was a thing.
So yes some steam games actually come DRM free, and you do not even have to move them out of the original steam install folder you just need to execute the EXE without steam running and they work. So indeed it is in fact achieving if you simply keep the files somewhere. For game with basic steam DRM you can use a crack or use steamless that basically removes the steam DRM that is very basic from the exe and use Goldberg Steam Emu to emulate steam. You do all this after the fact so you CAN for all the game that to not have some advanced DRM like Denovo just achieve the games files and make them work later on without Steam.
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
GOG on the other hand takes an active stance on promoting and supporting DRM-free games. Once storefronts like GOG disappear I don't think Steam will pick up the torch and fight the DRM-free fight. Once Gabe is no longer in charge it might just get overall worse for everyone, although fingers crossed Steam can at least continue as it is.
Is it? Is there even a list of them? I know some are, some aren’t. Sometimes it’s even mixed (e.g. Pathfinder Kingmaker is DRM free, the DLCs use Steamworks DRM). As you say, they aren’t promoting it, but I’m not sure they expose that information at all.
I haven't seen their documentation, maybe the problem lies there. But there's no tool or documentation so perfect that nobody can use it wrong.
One could blame the user for not "just" holding it right. Or alternatively reconsider if the handle should have a grippy coating instead.
Thus, I believe the poor implementations are directly the fault of Denuvo.
Someone else mentioned GTA getting more aggressive copy protection out of nowhere. It's not out of nowhere. With GTA6 ads out for a while, sales of GTA5 are up as people either play it for the first time or replay it. Sales going up means they can justify copy protection.
Denuvo has layers upon layers of obfuscation that inflates nearly every instruction and function call, extra code execution that does nothing to throw off someone trying to follow code execution paths, and constant moving around where the game stores stuff in memory, again, to throw someone off watching via debugger.
It's pathetic because one company has been almost entirely responsible for people needing to buy faster and faster CPUs and GPUs trying to eek out more and more performance. CPUs, GPUs, memory - all of it has gotten enormously faster, we have more cores, etc. Despite all that, every new game barely runs at 60fps.
Do you really believe that year after year game developers and game engines get worse and worse at performance? Of course not.
How does that justify it? Adding stronger DRM when cracked copies of the same content are already out there is like trying to get insurance after your house has already burnt down.
If you strictly want to blame Denuvo then that assumes game developers cannot think of a way to spend their extra performance either. Which is obviously not the case.
Of course, one reason why there wasn't much on the shelves was it had been already stolen by other people closer to the source ...
(something of a generic problem of low trust societies, not specific to Communism. I think we sometimes don't appreciate how valuable a high trust society is to us in the West, which is why people trying to destroy it by looting from the top are particularly dangerous: the rot spreads from the top)
Way later even; It was Yeltsin who wandered (it was unplanned) into a grocery store in Texas [1].
[1] https://www.cato.org/blog/happy-yeltsin-supermarket-day-0
The best is when you guys say you want to be like Scandinavia. None of us are communist, we are a market economy like you.
USSR had NEP for several years.
> and socialism
This is incorrect. USSR policy was to build socialism, and then, when it was declared to be successfully built, "developed socialism" in 1961.
> That's why china started working after Deng, the party realised that the productive elements of capitalism can be useful in building socialism
You mean they completely abandoned the whole idea? It it is 2026 and China still doesn't have some basic things like free healthcare or a state provided housing (things Soviet people enjoyed for most of USSR existence). In fact, looking at China objectively for a moment while ignoring how the ruling party calls itself it appears to me quite authoritarian capitalist state.
> wasn't the creation of excess by capitalism as assumed by marx
What? Owners of major enterprises in China enjoy exceptional luxury created as an "excess" from their businesses fueled by cheap 996 labor.
Overall, you might want to reconsider engaging in such discussion on this forum that is full of people born in actual Soviet Fucking Union.
they did, and it was good for them. Stalin ended up gutting it and it would end up shooting the country in the foot
>You mean they completely abandoned the whole idea? It it is 2026 and China still doesn't have some basic things like free healthcare or a state provided housing (things Soviet people enjoyed for most of USSR existence). In fact, looking at China objectively for a moment while ignoring how the ruling party calls itself it appears to me quite authoritarian capitalist state.
I won't deny that they are authoritarian, I disagree with them on a lot of things regarding how they handle political freedom. They don't have free housing or healthcare, but the average person is doing fine. The healthcare isn't expensive and people can afford to "own" (they don't own it in the capitalist sense but own it in the "it's mine, I can do what I want, and don't have to worry about rent" way).
> What? Owners of major enterprises in China enjoy exceptional luxury created as an "excess" from their businesses fueled by cheap 996 labor.
I also won't deny that. It is a problem that the chinese government is currently trying to deal with. Meanwhile, the production of the goods they got rich on has built up chinas economy and created industrial capability that wouldn't exist otherwise. It's kinda hard to redistribute wealth when there isn't any to redistribute, which is ultimately (when combined with other factors) why the USSR failed
>Overall, you might want to reconsider engaging in such discussion on this forum that is full of people born in actual Soviet Fucking Union. Although it is kinda entertaining reading champagne socialist opinions of western hipsters fancying themselves left-wing (because they read couple of pages of wikipedia and voted for Bernie, who upon returning from his getting-drunk-in-a-sauna-with-party-aparatchiks trip to Soviet Union in 88 was telling you how good of a country it was when Soviet Union was actually completely falling apart by then).
again, I'm not denying your gripes with the soviet union. It was objectively falling apart and was managed very poorly. I dislike your categorization of me as a "champagne socialist" who "voted for bernie and read wikipedia" as those are both objectively incorrect (aside from the wikipedia bit, as it is where I started unraveling my misconceptions about marx and socialism before moving on to actual theory). I didn't vote for bernie and while his reforms are undoubtedly good for the working class, it's putting a bandaid on the gaping gunshot wound that is capitalism. I'm also not a champagne socialist, I don't have a lot of money and don't really like champagne anyway
So it's more like after they were cracked rather than some time window, sometimes these may have been overlap.
1 year after release is for sure not "peak sales window".
The stopper is of course denuvo, which they keep renewing the license of, for no good reason.
that's not true. Only denuvo after ~2020 is subscription based and the contracts usually are between 2-4 years.
- Forspoken: released January 2023, Denuvo removed July 2023
- Final Fantasy XVI: released September 2024, Denuvo removed March 2024
- Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster: released September 2024, Denuvo removed September 2025
These are just a few examples, there are many more. I can't say whether it was removed because the contract ran out or another reason, but, as I said, Denuvo demonstrably is often removed 6–12 months after PC release.
I love steam but even if it can barely be called a DRM, it still is. People not into computer science will have no clue how to do it, and that's what matters when talking about owning your own games, you should not require knowledge to keep something you paid for
What other choice do you have if the game is only available on Steam?
Of course in an ideal world it would be available in a true DRM-free installer but in the real world you'll always need to reach for messy workarounds that just work. This is one of them and most people probably don't know that it exists.
Also that's the point. You purchased something you should not have to crack it to keep it.
I guess communism was more efficient at doing it!
(bit tongue in cheek of course - I guess capitalism is better at pretending/leaving enough scraps for the masses so they don't notice as much)
Or are you merely arguing that it means that in practice?
I‘m sure if people want communism, they want the idealistic version.
That is what I mean. They don't want to live like the Soviets or Venezuelans or Cubans. They have a madeup idealistic version that is not real, never was and never will.
now ask yourself, who are the true communists in the US?
You said it "usually" lasts 2–4 years. Usually means most of the time. What I said is not incompatible with what you said, but in any case, you've presented no data or evidence that Denuvo is kept for 2+ years most of the time.
There was no greater cause of human suffering in the 20th century than the worldwide attempts to build communist governments.
If we stopped trying to build capitalism for the same reasons we'd all still be serfs
The issue with communism is if it never happened for real you can imagine all sorts of good amazing things from it with 0 pushback. Look atleast at the states calming to be communist. Would you rather live in Soviet or Western Europe? Ask the balts and poles...
btw Sweden is not socialist
capitalism can work with say 99% tax on estate on death. No trust funds. Tax on wealth above a certain point. Rule of law with sharp teeth. Proper investment in education. Proper anti monopoly so all large corporations gets broken up to avoid their power consolidation...
communism is dictatorship in disguise.
then you have old style feudalism with aristocracy.
anything else?
Whatever the pedantic meaning of "often" is in the context of this conversation, one thing is clear, your statement that Denuvo switched to a subscription service is entirely unsubstantiated. If you have evidence to back up your claim then the burden is squarely on you at this point to provide it.
Usually removed between 2 and 4 years since 2020
Your claim:
No because here are 4 games from the last 5 years which where removed after ~6 months which means it is often removed before that time.
My rebuttal:
That's 4 games in 5 years from well over 150 denuvo games since 2020. Simple math should tell you that below 3% is not "often".
But somehow that means my claim is false...
It is well known that denuvo DRM is a SaaS subscription software for many years. I'm not gonna entertain your tantrum further for something you can trivially look up and should already know if you where knowledgeable enough to actually discuss the topic.
- western/nordic europe, japan, singapore, usa, canada
All capitalist.