AfterDawn: Tech news

PC game crackers admit Denuvo could end piracy in the future

Written by Andre Yoskowitz @ 08 Jan 2016 10:57 User comments (6)

PC game crackers admit Denuvo could end piracy in the future

Infamous Chinese game cracking group 3DM has warned that pirating PC games may be impossible in the near future.
"Bird Sister" of 3DM said "according to current trends in the development of encryption technology, in two years time I'm afraid there will be no free games to play in the world," The reason for the end of piracy is Denuvo Anti-Temper technology that protects DRM and stops even the best of crackers from editing any game files.

In fact, the recently released FIFA 16 and Just Cause 3 are still not cracked due to Denuvo, months after their respective release dates.

Denuvo is certainly excited with their results as director of marketing and sales Thomas Goebls added that they have "achieved good crack-free windows on every title we've protected" and "Due to our recent success in the past two years, some publishers are even considering releasing console-only titles for the PC platform."

Source:
Eurogamer

Previous Next  

6 user comments

18.1.2016 23:35

I am sorry, I just do NOT accept the fact that in two years games will be uncrackable...that is crazy! Sure it may take time for Denuvo to be cracked...but it will be at some point...NOTHING is uncrackable.

28.1.2016 23:47

Took a couple years ??? possibly more to crack the 360 if i recall correctly & perhaps a bit longer to get unsigned code to run.Tend to agree with Joe it will be cracked eventually,still 2 years on & nobody's bypassed it seems to be working pretty good,as always time will tell

39.1.2016 01:56

Will happen eventually. The game plan is to have the games not be relevant by the time they are cracked anyway. Who is going to play FIFA 16 in 2018? Surely there will be a new FIFA game by then.

StarForce was thought to be uncrackable too, and it took over a year to see some games protected with it cracked. There was also the Steinberg apps cracked that used MCFACT from Synchrosoft (a USB dongle based protection). The effort was long (1500+ man hours estimated) but it was completed. More recently, a version of the copy protection used on Netflix 4K streaming was cracked, at least partially (assumed to depend on hardware).

In terms of piracy, I think far less people downloaded any games protected with StarForce than would have otherwise had it been cracked earlier. By the time the games were cracked, many would not even recognise them or care to play.

Here is what I think is meant by 'Bird Sister' of 3DM: The main problem with encryption is it is basically uncrackable unless there's a serious bug in the implementation (see PS3). As time goes on, hardware gets even better, and more sophisticated encryptions can be used without a noticeable performance penalty. Already we have AES instructions (AES-NI) built into x86-64 that significantly improve AES encryption/decryption performance vs non-intrinsic code, and you cannot really change how that works (unless you want to build your own CPU). It is not even Denuvo. It is the hardware. Hardware is a lot harder to modify than software.

49.1.2016 03:21

No free games? Quite unlikely. No new, cracked games? Sure, for a while, at least, for AAA titles that can afford this protection scheme. And? Most AAA games blow leprous goats.

I may, of course, end up proven wrong, but claims of "uncrackability" have NEVER panned out in the long run.

This message has been edited since its posting. Latest edit was made on 09 Jan 2016 @ 3:22

511.1.2016 12:45

Well, I suppose that'll be knocking a few games off of my buy list, in the time it takes for someone to inevitably crack this protection. I don't buy a game unless I know it's good, and I only know a game is good once I've played a pirated version. It's usually much less of a hassle to play the cracked version, anyway.


Foot, meet bullet.

614.1.2016 17:55

I'd rather pay the $50 (or wait for a sale on Steam) rather than risk getting hacked cause I had to go to pirating sites just to crack a stupid game. It's really not worth it after you've had your identity stolen from these worthless assholes.

Comments have been disabled for this article.

News archive