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.
