this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2024
149 points (98.1% liked)

Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

54826 readers
592 users here now

⚓ Dedicated to the discussion of digital piracy, including ethical problems and legal advancements.

Rules • Full Version

1. Posts must be related to the discussion of digital piracy

2. Don't request invites, trade, sell, or self-promote

3. Don't request or link to specific pirated titles, including DMs

4. Don't submit low-quality posts, be entitled, or harass others



Loot, Pillage, & Plunder

📜 c/Piracy Wiki (Community Edition):


💰 Please help cover server costs.

Ko-Fi Liberapay
Ko-fi Liberapay

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
all 28 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 122 points 8 months ago (3 children)

Denuvo unveils new tech that reinforces my zero desire to pay for ANY game that uses it.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Nobody kills a boner to buy like Denuvo

[–] [email protected] 23 points 8 months ago

While I'm no fan of the crippleware, I don't think this product from them would effect your average gamer. It looks to be focused on beta testers and reviewers.

But, knowing the human's facility for laziness, odds on it will filter into general release.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 8 months ago

Even when stuff eventually goes on sale, if I see Denuvo on the game it's a hard pass.

[–] [email protected] 74 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Update: it causes even more hung processes while corpo shills and fanboys argue online that Denuvo has zero negative effect to infected games which is immediately disproven or ignored by those with brains.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 8 months ago (2 children)

I don't worry, my 4090 Ti Super can handle it!

/s for the whoosh

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

And it only needs 400W+! What a bargain

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

How long can I run that on my car battery‽

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

/s for the whoosh

That's a fuckin keeper right there.

[–] [email protected] 37 points 8 months ago (2 children)

It's a game of cat and mouse again.

One leaker caught and account got banned .. Another account created.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

I can't say I know anything about how they choose their beta testers, but if I were to guess, there is probably some kind of vetting process that includes looking at how reputable you are. It would take a long time to build up that reputation.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

the leaker in question is about people like a qa tester or someone who got an early access review.

[–] Willy 25 points 8 months ago (2 children)

that's an interesting idea. would they have to compile individual versions for the testers? will it work after final release and people stop having NDAs and can compare several copies with each other?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago (1 children)

If I were building it, I’d do the watermarking on the individual assets & textures.

Your asset pipeline would publish these to the solution, which would pack it up ready for distribution.

Except, each beta tester logs into the game and the publishing system gives them a personalised set of assets with a unique noise filter thrown over the top.

Mr leaky beta player publishes a video or screenshot of the gameplay, and then the studio can just reverse the noise algorithm to get their unique ID.

Absolutely terrible for large scale content delivery. But for a small closed beta, probably not an issue.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Wouldn't capturing in high-res, then scaling down or compressing the picture/video defeat the noise filter? Or if you threw a bit of noise on it yourself?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago

Steganography is a (fascinating) bitch. There are a lot of ways to hide a message in an image which is very resilient to manipulations like resizing, compression or even the loss of information by actually filming a screen versus taking a screen capture.

If you adjust your approach to not rely on a single picture to reliably convey a short message, but part it out over tens or hundreds of frames in a video, it's basically impossible to make sure that the message was erased without knowing the algorithms used or rendering the video unwatchable.

It's an awesome field and nothing new.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

They could do it without recompilation, but something like changing the obfuscation and recompiling for every copy would likely make it much harder to get rid of the watermarks even if you can compare several different copies

(though they could also have multiple watermarked sections so that any group of for example 3 copies would have some section that is identical, but still watermarked and would uniquely identify all three leakers. The amount of data you need the watermarks to contain goes up exponentially with the amount of distinct copies, but if you have say 1000 review copies and want to be resistant to 4 copies being "merged", you only need to distinguish between 1000^4 combinations so you can theoretically get away with a watermark that only contains about 40 bits of data )

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

That's ridiculously tiny, especially considering that the game itself is likely around 100GB. They could probably watermark every single copy that ever goes out.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Publishers don't seem to understand that Denuvo is detrimental to them as much as for gamers. That crap regularly breaks games. Ask Bethesda, they should know.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Their games are broken even without denuvo

[–] [email protected] 9 points 8 months ago

True, but without it, at least they just run, haha!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago

fighting piracy would be easier if they Develop a working and final build of the game - We are no paying full 70 usd price to be an Alpha tester

instead of 70 usd make it 50 usd more people will have a second thought when pirating with a lower price Do not include core in-game function as DLC ( New Game Plus as dlc? )