Be Excellent To Each Other

Another general news story about Denuvo and piracy

http://kotaku.com/the-anti-piracy-tech- ... 1759518600

Hmmm. Assuming the chat in that article is legit, and it's going to be at least partially guesswork as obviously Denuvo's not going to reveal it's secrets, a couple of things occur to me:

• That article talks about how it specifically works by piggy-backing on the initial online activation required by Steam et al. So presumably that means it doesn't and can't work for games that have been bought on disc and don't require activation? That seems like a loophole (buy disc based game, crack and distribute as normal) but I've no idea if you can even buy AAA games these days that don't require Steam etc for the activation.
• A fairly common practise is to back up your installed Steam folder when doing a reinstall or moving to a new machine and then just copying it all back afterwards, rather than having to potentially download GBs of data all over again. If Denuvo peppers machine specific codes throughout the game files at initial activation does that mean games copied from one machine to another in this way will be useless? Obviously you need to reactivate the copied games when Steam first launches on the new machine but I wonder if all the Denuvo stuff is retriggered at that point? If not then your legit game becomes instantly unplayable, and in the new world where pirated copies don't always announce themselves explicitly but just silently degrade aspects of the experience that could be a real problem.
• With my paranoid hat on (though some might say 'pragmatic' given how little trust the games industry has earned from us over the years) I do worry slightly that if this protection continues to be bulletproof it'll affect PC game prices. The fact that they're historically cheaper than the console prices is probably bugging the hell out of execs all over the games industry because, to their mind, it'll feel like leaving money on the table. If piracy is no longer really a thing it's not ridiculous to think they might start cranking prices up if people no longer have any other option. Yer standard PC Master Race person is hardly going to 'downgrade' to a peasant-class console so what else could they do but suck up the higher prices? Hell, it wouldn't even be that difficult to come up with a justification given the extra dev costs that must come with a PC release of a game (i.e. much, much more testing and big fixing due the fragmentation of the platform vs the consoles). Obviously, in an ideal world, if this did happen it would mean they'd spend more on ensuring we didn't see another Arkham Knight situation but AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

I'm sure you cant - MGSV as a classic example was released on disk last year , the disk contains the steam installer only - no actual game code (and obviously you get a steam code for the game in the package)



It would suggest so , although if thats the case then I think thats a failing for what they are trying to do - if i buy a game and have multiple machines then i want to play it on more than one (not at the same time) then I should be able to do that.

If i buy it and install to an external drive , which contains my steam folders and then take it to another machine i dont mind a small 'check' to make sure its still valid but I dont want to have to re-download the whole game.



My paranoid hat point is that there is no option for archiving and replaying these games , there are games that are 'lost' now because there was only a limited number of them and those eventually degraded and are no longer workable but there are also so many games that only still exist now due to piracy and people archiving / keeping these old copies

If piracy was not a thing i'm willing to bet a large number of 'in our lifetime' games would no longer exist in any playable state and theres no reason to believe at some point in the future we'll hit this problem

Selfishly I can't bring myself to really give a shit about this aspect. I can count on zero hands the number of times I've wanted to go back and play, I dunno, a Gamecube game in recent memory and I doubt I'll feel any different about anything I'm playing right now either. There's always new stuff to play; ever forward!

Now I want to play Mario Kart Double Dash and Eternal Darkness. Damnit, Bamba!

If there's sufficient demand then someone will re-release the stuff somehow won't they? I guess some really obscure stuff will go missing and that'll be a shame. It doesn't feel right for things that people have spent so long making, cultural artifacts, to just be completely gone even if I would likely never have any interest in playing them.

Come on, even Desert Bus got re-released.

Eternal Darkness will almost certainly be awful; your memory edits out the bits that sucked and your inability to compare it's archaic and user-unfriendly systems to newer games means it will remain pristine in your memory. Going forward we'll all be saved from ourselves when we can't play older games any more. The only downside is that irritating retro twats will be able to go on unchecked about how much better everything was before and how modern games are shit, and no one will be able to actually play the games in question to proved how deluded such opinions are.

I don't have much desire to play old games myself (although I still own an Xbox and two Dreamcasts and a GameCube for hoarder reasons.) But games are part of our cultural output, the same as books and TV shows and newspapers, and I'm uneasy with the idea that future scholars won't be able to study our times through them if we continue to make them impossible to archive.

Maybe they have plans to give the games over to GOG at some point without the protection in?

We can but hope.

I played it in 2014, and still thought it was great.

I do have a high threshold for rubbish controls, though, mainly due to my regular replaying of Project Zero on the PS2.

And now I want to play Project Zero. Damnit. Bamba!

If you play the older GTA games through steam, the xbox 360 controller by default gives you a really fucking weird mapping. I was very confused for a while as I never had any trouble controlling it back in the day, then I remembered that I used to switch to KB&M for on foot control.

What a belmer.

But it's ok, you can download a patch that gives you GTA5 style controls in the older games.

Or use the Steam controller.

Are you suggesting millions of YouTubers are wrong?

I wouldn't dare besmirch their good names with such an accusation!

My comedy running down of retro games aside, I do understand the problem and the argument. The thing is though with online activation checks being pretty standard you've got an issue with this stuff in years to come even without Denuvo in the picture. Also a lot of our current games need multiplayer servers to even allow you to experience them properly so that's another problem right there. Relying on piracy or companies being generous with GOG releases is never going to work so the problem is a lot bigger than whatever the current DRM is doing. Indeed gaming is arguably just leading the way here but look at all the original programming coming out of Netflix and Amazon Prime; those are 'online reliant' as well so unless any of the series' ever see a Bluray release (which would seem incredibly unlikely, at least in the case of Netflix) those could disappear from the collective archive at any point as well.

Psa: house of cards is available on disc. which you should all watch.

No I think games are quite unique in that regard, with films and TV pretty much whatever you do there's always a trivially easy way for people to copy them so all those shows already are in the collective archive.

I read something only the other day about GTAV and the Steam Controlller. From what I remember, because the controls change for vehicles, on foot, flying and shit the Steam Controller is terrible for this and you need some creative mapping or something. Short story: the SC is bad for GTA. So I read. T'other day.

Try reading again.

No. I read it so it must be true.

It's only true if you saw it on YouTube.

I agree and find it fascinating when people reverse engineer these old systems to make them work now

There are small groups of people who reverse engineer and get these old games up and running on current hardware - I saw a story recently which i will dig out of people who had reverse engineered an old online Star Wars game so you could play it now even though the servers had gone offline years ago

http://kotaku.com/how-star-wars-galaxie ... 1751840627

Talking about the video game industry being terrible at archiving games, apparently Sega have lost the original files to Panzer Dragoon saga. It seems unlikely that they'll ever be a re-release which is a damn shame.

Tatio have also lost the source code to Bubble Bobble

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



Not specifically games related but when whoever it was (some part of Sega?) took over Barcrest they just binned all the 'old' stuff regardless of its historical significance

Well it's taken almost forever but Denuvo protection has been cracked. Apparently it involves fooling Steam into thinking you are running a demo.

How long it will last though is a mystery. Quite a few times 3DM thought they had cracked Just Cause 3 (and released numerous cracks for it) but every time it was killed within 24 hours. But yeah, Doom and ROTTR are now cracked.

Just under eighteen months. Not bad, but Sky are still pissing themselves.

I have no idea what Sky has to do with DRM on videogames being cracked.

Sky's encryption hasn't been broken yet.

Just Cause 3 has now been hacked also. So that's pretty much all of them then. Whatever it is the hackers have worked out it seems to work on all of the titles.

Ah, it's the same demo version workaround. I expect Steam to update itself at some point today then and they'll be back to where they were yesterday. That's the issue with this hack, it requires a live version of Steam using a fake account. And I can bet there's plenty of divvies out there who forgot to use a fake IP who will probably lose their actual Steam accounts too. Could quite possibly be a blanket ban, like back in the days of the 360.

How come there are all these Chinese boxes going round that cost like £70 or something and have all the Sky stuff on them (and loads else) except the HD channels? (HD encryption is not cracked I believe?)

I don't have one because I don't watch telly, but I know of several people who have availed themselves of one from the local chap who supplies such things.

If they're like the Chinese boxes my uncle almost bought from a shady bloke down the street they are all internet driven boxes? using streaming. They stream from countries abroad like Pakistan and so on.

Or is there an actual satellite box that does it?

You have to one of those LNB wires to plug into it, which is what comes from the dish on your house I think?

There is some sort of card required to plug into it, which costs £20 per year or something, but it gives a complete Sky package and loads of other things. All very dodgy likes.

Ah OK I see. Shame I can't have a dish up

Its card sharing, so the guy you get it off buys everything Sky has to offer then sells on Linux based receivers that share his subscription giving you (if you buy one) access to everything. You also need a good speed internet connection.

Quite surprised how blatant this are on Ebay and the internet, guy at work had one and said it was OK. TBH I wouldn't take a full SKY subscription if they paid me.