
Average Denuvo cracking time is now 75 days - BethGagaShaggy
https://iscracked.info/statistics_denuvo
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karlkloss
The thing is, this DRM stuff causes a lot of problems, like performance loss
and even crashes. Therefore even honest buyers use the cracks, to get rid of
it.

Some people even wait until the game appears DRM-free on GOG, because of this.

~~~
cwyers
I suspect that at least 99.9% of PC game buyers don't even know whether a game
has something like Denuvo or not.

~~~
tomc1985
I suspect that number is far lower... like 95%

PC Gaming may be mainstream now but in its nerdier days awareness of cracking
was quite high... and I imagine it still is among demographics that cannot
afford to plunk down $60 for the latest whatever-they-want

~~~
Certhas
Awareness of cracking is high, but if you own a PC that can play these games
you can afford 60$ to pay for the game. Or you can just wait a little and get
one of the millions of games on Steam for approximately no money.

~~~
jdietrich
You can put together a competent gaming PC for about $400 these days. Buy a
refurb business desktop with a fourth-gen i5, add a GTX 1650 and you can run
pretty much any game at 1080p on medium settings.

A lot of young people (or people in middle-income countries) can scrape
together a few hundred bucks for an entry-level gaming PC, but would find a
$60 game to be prohibitively expensive. IMO the move away from demo versions
and physical media has substantially incentivised piracy - if you can't try
before you buy and can't resell your game, you're less inclined to hand over
your hard-earned cash for a game that you might hate.

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sadmann1
I find the dynamic between passionate hackers doing it for free against paid
DRM writers to be very interesting, gets to show you how passion for problem
solving can sometimes trump people writing software for money no matter the
money involved

~~~
discordianfish
I think it’s just much harder to write effective DRM than to break it.

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fxtentacle
I think the 75 days is mostly due to games that nobody cares about. High
profile games tend to be cracked within hours or days. For example, Star Wars
Jedi Fallen Order was already cracked by the time that my favorite gaming
magazine printed their launch review.

[https://iscracked.info/is-star-wars-jedi-fallen-order-
cracke...](https://iscracked.info/is-star-wars-jedi-fallen-order-cracked)

~~~
OriginalNebula
What about FIFA then?

~~~
fxtentacle
Is there any significant difference between the 2018 and 2019 versions?

Also, online multi-player games tend not to get cracked, because then you'd
just get banned.

~~~
thu2111
_online multi-player games tend not to get cracked, because then you 'd just
get banned_

I think that's another way of saying they're too hard to crack properly, i.e.
the servers can always detect cracked copies of the game because the
modifications aren't perfectly disguised.

~~~
Eldt
How do you crack an online service that doesn't authenticate you without a
valid license key?

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naniwaduni
I think it a grand irony that the only graphs on this page that aren't barely-
interpretable depictions of category error are, of all things, the pie charts.

~~~
ptah
Could you elaborate on that please

~~~
naniwaduni
It makes no sense to draw a (smoothed!) curve between e.g. 5 releases 450 days
ago to 3 releases 420 days ago. The most charitable interpretation is that the
y axis is releases/month, but (a) a rolling average would be a more
appropriate visualization for that figure (b) the numbers are clearly actually
just discrete releases ascribed each of the points at 30-day intervals (c)
that's not what the label says anyway.

The other line graphs have basically the same problem.

Meanwhile, pie charts are infamous for being abused to show things that don't
actually add up to 1, but in this case they're actually being used fairly
appropriately.

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the_mitsuhiko
Given the large number or urban legends about Denuvo I can only assume it’s a
pain for the cracking community and given how widespread it is, it probably
helps publishers.

Average cracking times are still way above 30 days which is the most crucial
period.

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wolco
Does someone know if insiders are releasing the cracks or are these cracking
groups independent?

~~~
huhtenberg
Denuvo is based on VMProtect, at least in part, which implements DRM through
virtualization and encryption of the original code. Since it takes days to
"crack Denuvo", I'm guessing they are cracking the encryption key or doing
some sort of statistical reassembly of the raw code from a sample base. In
either case it doesn't sound like there are any insiders involved, no.

[https://vmpsoft.com/](https://vmpsoft.com/)

The back story is that at some point VMPSoft was suing Denovo for buying a
single license of VMProtect and then using it to roll out their own DRM
system. It was a complete LOL really. They ended up settling out of court.

~~~
the_mitsuhiko
Is it based on vmprotect? I thought it can just be combined with it. There are
games that use both.

~~~
huhtenberg
From what I remember it used to be just a wrapper around VMProtect. This was a
couple of years ago though, so you are most likely right.

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oliwarner
I think it'll still deliver what publishers want until that number's under a
week.

New releases are big money. The biggest money.

It'd be nice to see them formally acknowledge this by republishing DRM-free
copies after 90 days.

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qazpot
It is still profitable to add Denuvo for game publishers, because most sales
happen in the first week.

~~~
pieno
You are assuming that everyone purchasing a game, would not purchase it if
they could download a pirated version. Call me naive, but I like to think that
a lot of people that have the money to purchase a game in the first week,
would still purchase it even if a cracked version is available. Just look at
the billions of revenue earned by Spotify and iTunes before it, even if most
music is available on release date (or even before the release date!) online
without even needing cracks. I like to think that most (!) people pirating
stuff, would not purchase the pirated product at all if no pirated version
were available.

On the other hand, you seem to be missing the number of people just sick of
DRM and all the hoops it makes you go through before actually being able to
play a game. Some people may just start pirating games because the hoops of
running a cracked version are easier than the hoops of running a legit version
with all the DRM restrictions. Or they may just give on games altogether and
decide to spend their valuable time and money on something else entirely.

So adding DRM may just as well be a net negative for game publishers.

I don't have the data to say which is correct, but just assuming that DRM is
profitable because most sales happen in the first week, before a crack is
available, seems a bit too simple.

~~~
rangibaby
Don’t forget about hyped up kids, they spend months posting to forums and
Reddit about how (new game) will be the best thing ever. Then once they get a
chance to play it are disappointed since it is impossible to live up to the
expectations they have built up in their mind, then immediately move on to the
next big thing.

Before it’s cracked they will probably buy it because of how excited they are
and FOMO

~~~
auxym
Kids also don't have much money to buy games, _and_ have lots of free time to
figure out how to pirate them. Maybe some of them can convince their parents
to buy it for them.

For me Buying a 60-80$ AAA game (I was a teen in the early 00s) by earning 5$
from time to time mowing the lawn or washing my dad's car was a hard sell.
Even when I started working retail at min wage (7$), it was still a hard sell.

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sudosysgen
There are many problems with the headline.

First of all, a lot of Denuvo games no one cares about, either due to low
popularity or because they aren't very different to the older, cracked
version. These are a dozen of games that add times in the multiple hundreds of
hours, warrantlessly.

Second, cracking groups often voluntarily hold off on cracking games so that
they are already updated by then. Often for multiple weeks to a month, where
you see the crack to be on yesterday's update.

In reality, I'd estimate cracking times to be around one or two weeks, with
some high profile, usable at launch games to be cracked in hours.

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lousken
I have about 200 games in my library but not a single one with denuvo. With
denuvo it you aren't buying a game, but just a permission which can expire at
any moment and it's gonna be up to the developer if they want to fix it or
not.

