Theft protection company Denuvo is not having a good week. First Resident Evil 7, which employs Denuvo's once-unassailable anti-tamper tech, was cracked in just five days. Now folks have discovered a bunch of unprotected content on the company's website, including what are reportedly emails from companies like Capcom and Google.
In the never-ending battle between pirates and DRM makers, there are no easy victories. Or at least, that was the case with notorious anti-tamper tech Denuvo until, well, yesterday.
Pirates say they have already cracked Resident Evil 7's PC version and have found a way to disable the game's anti-piracy measures less than a week after release.
Back in the '90s, the Sega Saturn was the most powerful video games console on the market. If the Sony PlayStation was a car, the Saturn was a military tank. But it was an expensive over-engineered machine and it failed to make an impact in the gaming market. So complex was the Saturn that some of its internal functions remained a mystery 20 years on, particularly its elusive digital rights management (DRM) system.
In July, hacker and academic Dr James Laird-Wah managed to crack the DRM and uncover its inner workings. He went through the painstaking process in excruciating detail at hacker conference Ruxcon 2016. Laird-Wah's findings could potentially save the rising number of Sega Saturn consoles with dying CD readers.
Armello is an excellent fantasy board/card game that's been on Steam since 2015. With (Fahey-approved) DLC and console versions recently released, developer League of Geeks made a curious announcement: the game's DRM-free, non-Steam PC version won't be receiving DLC.
Marcin Iwiński, co-founder of GOG and development studio CD Projekt Red, has some curious thoughts on how to handle a very thorny subject: Piracy.
More than two months after release, it's still not possible to pirate Just Cause 3. The same is true for Rise of the Tomb Raider, released for PC in late January. Cracking computer games used to be measured in hours or days, but now, it's turning into weeks and months. The nature of piracy is changing in a big way.
Super Mario 4D Universe — or whatever the next one will be called — should come with every single level in the Mushroom Constitutional Monarchy unlocked. The next Grand Theft Auto should make all of its missions immediately playable in the very first minute. Uncharted 4 should let me jump into the middle of Nathan Drake's adventures as soon as I slip the disc into my PlayStation.
First it was Windows 10 saying "no" to SafeDisc and now older versions of Microsoft's operating system will give the copy protection its marching orders. An update released this month will automatically disable SafeDisc's underlying driver file, rendering most games that use it inoperable.
If you're a fan of older disc-based games with the two notorious DRM measures, Windows 10 might not be for you.
Above, via Kotaku reader SilentAssassn87, a lovely little dig from the developers of The Witcher 3, CD Projekt Red, who are quite critical of the restrictive anti-piracy method known as Digital Rights Management (DRM).
Far Cry 4 for the Xbox One disappeared from the Xbox Marketplace for a little while earlier this week, preventing some from playing a game they own. The problem was eventually solved, but the whole thing's left me pretty confused. What exactly happened... and why? Unfortunately, Microsoft's brief statement on the issue to Videogamer.com hasn't provided any real clarity.
Well this is interesting: GOG.com, the digital retailer best known for selling old games without DRM, is branching out into film and TV. The folks at GOG are pushing hard on the "DRM-free" angle here too, promising that nothing they sell will be saddled with the copyright restrictions you might get while buying a TV show on iTunes or Amazon.
Digital rights management (known by its more villainous acronym "DRM") isn't quite the same topic it used to be when most of our games came on CDs and DVDs. Instead, they've been replaced with always-online requirements or the need to run titles through clients such as EA's Origin or Uplay from Ubisoft if you want to enjoy features such as multiplayer. The latter killed its DRM "solution" a few years back after "listening to feedback" and now maintains the stance that DRM is not the answer to piracy.
You'll see that, yes, these are folks we have written about over the past year, people with stories others have found inspirational, or whose individual triumphs show that notoriety in video gaming isn't limited to hot shot developers or esports professionals.
Video game petitions have a very long and mostly pointless history. As I've said several times, an internet petition is worth the paper it is printed on. But I'll give a little publicity to this thing, because it's the most ridiculous one I've seen yet (that includes this).
On May 26, two weeks before E3, a man named Pete Dodd started a thread on the message board NeoGAF. Microsoft had just announced their next-gen console, the Xbox One, and with it, customer-unfriendly policies like used game restrictions and a mandatory 24-hour Internet check-in. Meanwhile, Sony was staying quiet about their own possible plans for digital-rights management (DRM) on the PlayStation 4.
Complaining on the internet, I am often told, doesn't amount to much of anything. Clicking "Like" or retweeting for a cause are nothing more than "Slacktivism", a type of problem-solving that only lazy millennials could have come up with.
Microsoft just announced that its much-maligned DRM policies won't look at all like they had originally been described. They're going to more relaxed, sort of like the PS3's. Good news, you say? No. Bad news. The Xbox One just got worse.
