We're an indirect competitor to Denuvo (we focus on software monetization, but not primarily in gaming), and we often have internal conversations around how much additional "security" we should add for vendors who use us.
Ironically, a bunch of our staff used to write their own cracks for games way back in the day. And what was true 15 years ago is definitely still true today: Everything can absolutely be cracked.
A vendor is incentivized to make it harder to remove the licensing mechanism in order to dissuade people from putting in the effort in cracking it. While a sensible amount of DRM might work for less popular titles, less so for very high end and expensive (think CAD, Engineering, and in this case, high end games). There are always several competent and motivated groups eager to pirate your stuff.
From the publisher’s perspective, it’s a pure numbers game:
Most AAA titles make the vast majority of their revenue in the first 14–30 days upon release of the game. If Denuvo or a hypervisor-level DRM can delay a crack by even two weeks, it forces the 'impatient' part of the pirate demographic to convert into sales. For a game that cost $100M–$200M to develop, that conversion usually represent tens of millions in revenue if the game is well received.
Game and software vendors have all sorts of middlemen and indirect costs that also need to be paid distribution, licensing, and massive marketing spends. They feel they have to protect that investment at any cost, so "preventing revenue leakage" is a no-brainer for them.
What sucks the most is that the pirates eventually get a 'clean' version with better performance once the DRM is stripped or bypassed, while the paying customer is left with the background processes, potential stability issues, and basically has no choice but to agree to have their usage being monitored.
I can't think of a definitive solution here. I lurk this subreddit often and I realize how preposterous (and maybe somewhat hypocritical given where some my team forged their software development chops many years ago) it would be to say something like "just don't pirate games.... if everyone paid for them, there wouldn't be a need for DRM".
Maybe a common sense, nuanced approach would be for the publishers to leave the hardcore DRM on for the first 90 days after a game release, and then volunarily remove it or once the game is cracked?
As a vendor I've come to conclude that this is not something I want to lose sleep over. I suggest maximizing for vendor conversion and seeking fulfillment in other venues in life. Solving a game of cat and mouse can feel like a Sisyphean task.
The gist is that every software comes with a license agreement, and the publisher can choose the conditions under which their software is available by specifying terms of use, modification, and distribution for their software.
Although, as the publisher, there are countless ways to which you can specify how restrictive or open these terms are, most industries usually have "standard" set of terms that most commercial license agreements follow, while a few Open Source Software Licenses are widely adopted. It's really inconvenient to ask end users to understand a non-generally accepted license agreement in most cases.
The history of software licensing mostly goes back to the 70s / 80s, before that time, IBM and mainframes typically gave away most of the software for free as did most computer enthusiasts. Bill Gates was somewhat controversial at the time for arguing software should not be free, in a letter he wrote to the hobbyist computer club (link to wikipedia below).
The topic of software licensing has since become philosophical, where some people think software should be free as in "freedom" and should benefit everyone. From a commercial perspective, some people see OSS as a way to grow adoption of their products. Others think it's important to charge for software in order to continue maintaining it.
Some resources:
- https://opensource.org/licenses -> lets you search by criteria (greeter or fewer "freedoms" granted for different OSS license types.)
Ironically, a bunch of our staff used to write their own cracks for games way back in the day. And what was true 15 years ago is definitely still true today: Everything can absolutely be cracked.
A vendor is incentivized to make it harder to remove the licensing mechanism in order to dissuade people from putting in the effort in cracking it. While a sensible amount of DRM might work for less popular titles, less so for very high end and expensive (think CAD, Engineering, and in this case, high end games). There are always several competent and motivated groups eager to pirate your stuff.
From the publisher’s perspective, it’s a pure numbers game:
Most AAA titles make the vast majority of their revenue in the first 14–30 days upon release of the game. If Denuvo or a hypervisor-level DRM can delay a crack by even two weeks, it forces the 'impatient' part of the pirate demographic to convert into sales. For a game that cost $100M–$200M to develop, that conversion usually represent tens of millions in revenue if the game is well received.
Game and software vendors have all sorts of middlemen and indirect costs that also need to be paid distribution, licensing, and massive marketing spends. They feel they have to protect that investment at any cost, so "preventing revenue leakage" is a no-brainer for them.
What sucks the most is that the pirates eventually get a 'clean' version with better performance once the DRM is stripped or bypassed, while the paying customer is left with the background processes, potential stability issues, and basically has no choice but to agree to have their usage being monitored.
I can't think of a definitive solution here. I lurk this subreddit often and I realize how preposterous (and maybe somewhat hypocritical given where some my team forged their software development chops many years ago) it would be to say something like "just don't pirate games.... if everyone paid for them, there wouldn't be a need for DRM".
Maybe a common sense, nuanced approach would be for the publishers to leave the hardcore DRM on for the first 90 days after a game release, and then volunarily remove it or once the game is cracked?
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