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Comment by ineedasername | Hacker News Reader

DRM strikes again. Is there any DRM system in use that isn't broken within a few weeks of the game's release? It's an honest question, I don't follow the piracy scene any more, but it used to be a pretty rapid turn around on cracks. If that's still the case, then DRM is still just hostile toward paying customers and a speedbump to pirates.

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> Is there any DRM system in use that isn't broken within a few weeks of the game's release?

They wished, most DRM gets cracked in a few days with a few infamous ones being broken on the day of release or before release. (Plus, you get better performance by cracking legit copies you own and now having to get cracks to play most non-recent DRM'd games at all)

It is always anticipated that DRM will be cracked quickly. The point is that it steers most customers away from piracy, because that option is more complicated than buying it legitimately, or simply not yet available.

https://askagamedev.tumblr.com/post/88725419221/why-do-publi...

It doesn't need to last forever. For most games, most of its revenue comes in the first few months after its release. Mitigating piracy during that window is the name of the game.

https://askagamedev.tumblr.com/post/179082079276/when-it-com...

Which isn't to say that Denuvo in particular isn't an absolutely awful, terribly implementation of DRM. But DRM in general works.

https://askagamedev.tumblr.com/post/155630338791/a-question-...

There's a lot of words, but no data in these posts. The only argument is that sales are expected to decline very fast, so stopping piracy there is very efficient. I would argue it is quite dishonest to pretend Steam is popular because it is a DRM solution, it is popular with consumers because is is a convenient marketplace. It seems like confounding publisher and consumer mindset.

Conveniently, there isn't a single downside mentioned! Some games have stutter at launch or take a 20% performance hit, so there must be an impact on sales. Adding DRM is also far from free, it is always a good idea if you don't talk about the cost.

I would expect the picture to be quite different depending on the type of games/market. But these posts only show that there's a belief that it works.

The publishers absolutely do have the data, but they sit on it. You can see that they actively try out variations on DRM in games from time to time as test balloon. Look for the odd titles without DRM or DRM implementations different from the usual ones. These are their experiments. If DRM wasn't worth it, they would drop it (it costs money after all - licensing, customer support etc.).

That's absolutely possible but I would add another. The tendency in large corporations for someone to get some software or thing for the whole company because they've got bamboozled by the marketing and now inertia has stuck with it.

It's an easy enough one to sell to management, "stop lost sales!", Oh crikey we can't have that, this software company says all the right things and sounds professional, I'll buy it!

Good links, thanks. I'd say that just points to the need for very basic DRM instead. If a game isn't distribute by steam or some other DRM'ed platform, a simple activation code should be a sufficient hurdle for opportunistic pirates. Not these complex systems that run alongside the game and sometimes do all sorts of other system monitoring too. (Excluding anti-cheat systems-- they're half a root kit, but somewhat of a necessary evil for competitive games)

The point of most DRM is not to prevent piracy, it is to prevent a secondary market.

The existence of Steam has pretty much eliminated the secondary market.

Yes, which sucks. But I also wonder how much of the resurrection of PC gaming came from increased sales due to the lack of a secondary market and convenience of digital distribution.

Loss of that market segment could be a local minima for customers while the market as a whole improved to their benefit: more games, more conveniently.

Nonetheless I don't like that I don't quite actually own my games. While GOG doesn't allow transferring games to another user, you at least own it and can save a backup if the installer. In theory that means you could even go on the "honor system" and loan or give the game to someone else and not use it yourself anymore.

Last I heard it was a crap shoot, with some in weeks and others years.

This is what I heard too. When I brought up GP's exact point a while back, apparently it's quite common now for big releases to have DRM that lasts for 6+ months before being cracked.

It's not like the "good ol' days" any more.

Handball 17 is 5 Years

Which, to be fair, isn't exactly a high profile game a lot of pirates are clamouring for.

Denuvo is very hard to crack. Amusingly, there were quite a few instances where the developers messed up opsec or implementation and you could do things like fetch a pre release steamdepot without denuvo or the case of DOOM Eternal where the devs shipped an unprotected exe along with the protected one.

"messed up"

I'm not pro-DRM don't get me wrong. If you are saying that some DOOM Eternal developer leaked the DRM free version on purpose, It's not impossible but we will never know for sure.

Yeah I meant they mess it up deliberately! I've definitely seen DRM implementations where the game's .exe is not protected at all, but started by a protected (and mostly unnecessary) launcher.

That's exactly what most publishers care about, the first weeks.

I buy my games DRM-free as much as possible. It means I'm mostly buying old games, but that's alright for me.

I think Google Widevine's security is fairly tight. It got cracked before, but the extracted keys promptly got revoked.

Widevine is completely broken. The Nvidia Tegra Boot ROM flaw exposed the Widevine private keys of all Tegra-based devices. Google can't revoke those en masse without breaking Netflix et al on a ton of tablets and other devices. And those keys are for the highest level, since it's supposed to be handled in TrustZone. It's been game over for Widevine since 2018.

Why is there no open implementation yet then?

the DMCA

There's code for the L3, but it doesn't work since end of may because the new RSA keys aren't public

https://github.com/tomer8007/widevine-l3-decryptor

Find the code in the forks, since it was DMCA'd

There's none for L1 and L2 though

There’s code for L1 floating around, if you know where to look. Nobody bothers with L2, only L1 or L3.

"Code in the forks"? Is the Open Source community really in such a bad shape, compared to DeCSS times?

Yeah idk on what grounds it would receive DMCA. Perhaps because it contained the keys?

Probably not worth the headache of dealing with Googles lawyers, for some independent researcher.

Additionally, people still have keys for a lot of devices, either via exploits (like shofel2 as marcan said), or via the manufacturers exposing them on some open server or similar. The pirates are always going to be winning this battle, to be honest. They’ll always be a step ahead of Google et al.

Denuvo was unbroken for years

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