DRM to prevent copying games without official license has always been a waste of money. It is always just a matter of time until even the hardest DRM measure is broken. Always has been like this. I remember when Ubisoft was very proud of their new fancy DRM shitware that prevented running unlicensed copies of some Assassin’s Creed title, only for it to be cracked a month later and the crackers saying “thanks for this interesting challenge”.
‘Loss’ due to piracy was always like 3%. It costs way more than that for this mess. They don’t have to be good, just annoying enough to keep 97% of people paying.
Sure, it’s always been a question of time, but Denuvo has been very effective for decades. There were very few people who were able or willing to crack Denuvo games before. Publishers really only cared about the initial release anyway, and after a few months, it wasn’t worth paying for it anymore so they’d remove it from their games.
Not only has that always been the case, but that’s the only possibility: DRM, on a fundamental level, is just encryption where Bob and Eve are the same person.
(For the uninitiated, the basic problem statement for cryptography is that Alice wants to send a message to Bob without Eve knowing what it says.)
DRM to prevent copying games without official license has always been a waste of money. It is always just a matter of time until even the hardest DRM measure is broken. Always has been like this. I remember when Ubisoft was very proud of their new fancy DRM shitware that prevented running unlicensed copies of some Assassin’s Creed title, only for it to be cracked a month later and the crackers saying “thanks for this interesting challenge”.
‘Loss’ due to piracy was always like 3%. It costs way more than that for this mess. They don’t have to be good, just annoying enough to keep 97% of people paying.
Sure, it’s always been a question of time, but Denuvo has been very effective for decades. There were very few people who were able or willing to crack Denuvo games before. Publishers really only cared about the initial release anyway, and after a few months, it wasn’t worth paying for it anymore so they’d remove it from their games.
Not only has that always been the case, but that’s the only possibility: DRM, on a fundamental level, is just encryption where Bob and Eve are the same person.
(For the uninitiated, the basic problem statement for cryptography is that Alice wants to send a message to Bob without Eve knowing what it says.)