Seems like gaming piracy is really dying this time for sure. Most sites are compromised and untrustworthy, big teams are retiring, the one remaining denuvo cracker that i heard of is apparently psychotic... It doesn't seem like it bodes well
this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2023
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Isn't just piracy that's dying, in my opinion, it's gaming itself, or, at least, gaming as it used to be.
Besides Denuvo being a technology so bad that actually makes the original game worst than a copy without it, everyday comes with tons and tons of games with a pay-to-win approach or some kind of PBE. The only new, original and fun games nowadays are the indies, and it will be that way for a long time, as the industry seems to focus more and more in the mobile market since it's already bigger than the PC and console together.
Gaming is definitely not dying it is a huge market. I don't agree with the direction it's heading though. But there are enough games released to keep my interest.
Gaming is definitely not dying it is a huge market.
Because of it I said "gaming as it used to be."
I think people are less excited for new games than it used to be.
I expect all games to be bad by default now and don't let myself get hyped up at all anymore. I waited on the edge of my seat since before the first teasers for CP2077 and still haven't bothered to play it. I backed Star Citizen in 2013 lol... Was disappointed by Fallout 4 and 76 too, as a huge Fallout fan.
I loved Fallout 4…once there were enough mods to fix everything that's wrong with the vanilla game.
Which is par for the course with Bethesda. 🤷♂️
Yeah, I played it on release. Been trying it again lately with mods and it seems much more polished. The writing quality is still a pretty big disappointment, and the yes/yes/yes/no chat system.
Sadly, mods can and do remove the horrid dialog wheel thing, but they can't add more interesting dialog options.
For sure, indies are where it's at. Most of my time gaming has been on indies for many years now. They are actually willing to do interesting things instead of chasing trends and money.
Occasionally you get large studios doing things like Baldur's Gate 3, but it's rare. Larian and FromSoft are about the only studios I trust to make good experiences that aren't designed by the business team to make as much money as possible.
Sometimes , things have to go down to go up.Justo wait, its like a roller coaster.
Looking at the world rn, I dont think things have a tendency to get better on their own. In a decade or two people won't even believe we lived in the wild west era of internet where you could just get stuff for free without a subscription, online connection or drm.
When people run out of money to pay for a billion subscriptions, companies will have to think hard about their business model. I don't think the current trend can last forever.
Look at the fragmentation of streaming services. Piracy is on the rise again because of it.
That's why I said gaming piracy before, I don't think denuvo can protect media files (yet) and those are less likely to be malware or cryptominers anyway. So I think that aspect is safe for now at least, but rip gaming.
Sure on the rise maybe in this small circle but it has declined alot from its peak.
Looking at the world rn, I dont think things have a tendency to get better on their own
This is called a recency bias (I think lol) - you're looking at the world rn and assuming its trends must continue. When you look at history you see that there are ebbs and flows, and that stasis is rare. If you focus on certain things, you may certainly decide we're in a downtrend. There will always be an uptrend afterward. And vice versa
That's way too big of a generalization. The fact is that technology advances and makes other technology obsolete, and the pirates are dwindling while DRM companies are getting more and more money to fix the issue. It is not going to just magically reverse at one point. If anything the people are just going to get more accustomed to it like they have already with copyright laws, subscription services and simply not owning anything digital anymore.
The second thing you're not addressing is how long the "ebb and flow" takes anyway, if gaming piracy has a resurgence in 50 years then I don't think I'm gonna care much about it by then lol. Blizzard games aren't getting cracked anymore and by the time they do, if ever, I'm not going to care about them.
Are Blizzard games worth cracking any more?
Precisely the reason they'd be worth cracking I'd say. Anyway that was just an example, same goes for many EA / Ubi games for which it's just a matter of time before are perma-online or under denuvo.
Playing cracked games helps spread the popularity of said game.
The fact is that technology advances and makes other technology obsolete,
Yeah, it happens on both sides, it's an arms race. It will swing the other way eventually - it always has and always will
The second thing you're not addressing is how long the "ebb and flow" takes anyway
That was intentional. There's no estimating a timeline, but with the development of technology it's not unreasonable to expect a reversal even in a decade. Anyway, if you're trying to ward off doomerism you're not going to do it by only looking at what you stand to gain
Plus Nintendo Switch has Denuvo too now, creating even bigger demand.
Nooo I can't live without piracy
two last images point to the same link
Damn, another legend lost. Denuvo won (for now).
How come they've stopped?
The images are too compressed, so I can't really make out what they say. I'm guessing that EA finally updated their outdated Denuvo implementation, making it much tougher to crack now
Must be a client issue. Are readable here
We need to start creating an AI for that as soon this might get too complex for a human to crack.
Current AI is not smarter than humans. It needs supervised training, and then acts according to that. That's inherently incompatible to novelty and correct exploration.
It's not even real AI lol there's no thought, just text transformation
This problem seems like the sort of thing machine learning could be good at though. You have some input binary code that doesn't run, you want an output that does, you have available training data of inputs and correct matching outputs.
AI is good in doing complex things but bad at doing easy things. Supervision is required at first for learning of course, there's no AI that works out of the box.
That assessment entirely depends on what you consider "complex" and "easy".
What do you mean by it's bad at doing easy things but good at doing complex things? I don't see how something complex would work better than something easy.
In short.
Look up what AI does good right now, like finding complex solutions to mathematical issues a human couldn't. Calculate stuff very fast, replicate natural language etc.
Look up what AI struggles with at the moment, like drawing hands or recognizing objects or driving a car.
This statement is only valid in this current state, as AI is advancing faster than most peoples mind by now. Most people have yet to understand LLM or generative AI models.
That's what I'm talking about. If you look at the process required to crack Denuvo, then you'll notice that there's a lot of guesswork done, something the AI is good at if learned properly. The amount of people who know how to and are willing to spend time cracking Denuvo is shrinking by the day. The amount of software DRM encrypted is rising every day. We need automation soon.
AI will soon be mandatory for software security as malicious actors will use AI to find zero day exploits and you want an AI to protect you from those real time threats. Anti Virus software already work somewhat into that direction by now but there's still much room.
i really dont think ai is the solution to this problem. if humans made it, humans can crack it
That's false.
how so? ignoring mathematically unbreakable things like encryption, given enough time, i think pretty much anything could be reverse engineered and cracked, its just a matter of how much time it would take
ignoring mathematically unbreakable things like encryption
That's literally how it's false.
yeah but your cpu has to run the unencrypted game, and so i would think its currently impossible to have a local, 100% uncrackable game
DRM already only does check for validity every other frame or even minute. There's no use in a game that just closes because it recognized a violation. You do know what causes Denuvo fps spikes? It's whenever it checks. Of course the software got better by now so it's less of an issue but it's still there.
Look up RSA algorithms and project that to other mathematically complex DRM protections. You're wrong because you don't understand the tech.
all im saying is that, if I own the CPU that runs the game, there are incredible advanced techniques for reverse engineering, and given enough time and effort i think it would always be possible.
encryption isnt exactly the same thing here, because encrypted data just sits there until its unencrypted, but it NEEDS to be unencrypted for your CPU to run it.
the CPU has to read code that it can execute, and if you can get that code, its probably impossible to have an uncrackable game. that doesnt apply to video game cracking, but I'm sure the NSA could crack denuvo if they wanted to, and could crack any game DRM.
at the very extreme, if i know the state of all of the transistors and etc inside my computer, nothing is uncrackable. thats all I'm trying to say. yes denuvo will likely get too complicated for anyone to try to crack it, but given enough time and resources, it would be cracked.
No, any sufficiently advanced A.I can and will outclass humans. For example: there are chess A.I's that have beaten GM's as good as Magnus Carlsen on multiple occasions. The better an A.I gets at something the tougher it becomes to counter it. This is one of the biggest risks of A.I development that one day we might make something that makes us seem obsolete. On the positive side that day is really really far.
Where between being beaten in chess and making us obsolete do you think we are? Where do you think cracking games is between chess and human mind?
I think your estimation is off by a lot.
ok.
i have my own opinions on ai, but all of that doesnt matter in relation to cracking denuvo because humans can and do crack it.
i bet everyone with the skills to reverse engineer it has a nice job in cybersecurity (like working at denuvo), instead of cracking video games for some donations.
First: you're comparing Chess, what's a super simple algorithm, in what machines already "outclassed humans" like, years ago, with anything humans can do. That's is simplist and wrong.
Second: until today, the so called Artificial "Intelligence" were only capable of, by consulting a human made big catalogue of many things humans did, reproduce some parts of it or resume a little, what is not that difficult if you have a good synonyms dictionary and tons of human people training you on what is a decent resume and what isn't. In resume, A."I." doesn't do anything that people didn't did before, and, when it comes to write texts, it does something objectly worst, in a self-help level of writing. A."I." isn't creative.
Third: still, there are objectly a bunch of works that are under attack by A."I.". The thing about this works is that: or they were obviously possible to be automated before, or they are pointless, or they've been doing automatically (a.k.a. alienabally) by the workers, or all the above.
Fourth: the big guys who are trying to sell everyone the idea that A."I." will "outclass all of us" want to believe that there's no need for human work to generate income, what's is materialistically and economically not true at all. They say they dream of a world without hard work, actually they mean a world without us, working class people. But they're wrong, they are still depending on our existence as a class and always will be until the day there will be no classes anymore.
I don't know if AI is technically better it's just different and doesn't play like a human. Humans hate lossing pieces but AI doesn't care as long as the outcome is a win.
Newsflash: Humans also sacrifice pieces in chess. Chess engines are mathematical beasts that are designed for these things only. But what is more important: Chess engines also needs to be made by humans.
AI absolutely plays like a human as it's trained by humans. The only difference is, AI will do the most optimal move, while humans might hesitate. That's also the reason why it's bad to put AI into fighter or bomber jets. The AI has a clear goal but a human might struggle to fire at an unknown target. Because the human has to life with the consequences.
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