Denuvo unveils new tech that reinforces my zero desire to pay for ANY game that uses it.
this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2024
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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Nobody kills a boner to buy like Denuvo
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.
Even when stuff eventually goes on sale, if I see Denuvo on the game it's a hard pass.
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.
I don't worry, my 4090 Ti Super can handle it!
/s for the whoosh
And it only needs 400W+! What a bargain
How long can I run that on my car battery‽
/s for the whoosh
That's a fuckin keeper right there.
It's a game of cat and mouse again.
One leaker caught and account got banned .. Another account created.
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.
the leaker in question is about people like a qa tester or someone who got an early access review.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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 )
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.
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.
Their games are broken even without denuvo
True, but without it, at least they just run, haha!
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? )