Comment by ronsor

4 hours ago

The software industry mostly gave up when they saw it wasn't working.

Even the music industry (of all of them!) mostly gave up.

Only Hollywood and the wider film/TV industry is so stubborn.

5 comments

ronsor

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tsss  3 hours ago

The software industry certainly didn't give up. Most smaller game studios outsource their copy protection to Steam. Larger studios use Denuvo which works better than ever. Some Denuvo games stay uncracked for years. Non-entertainment software mostly moved to SaaS with a subscription model which is essentially uncrackable or, where that was not feasible (CAD and video editing), use extremely invasive copy protection measures. For example, Dassault can catch your Solidworks cracks even on an airgapped computer. They taint every file you create as pirated and when you give that file to a licensed user, their legitimate copy will phone home and have their lawyers force the legitimate user to betray you.

  • somenameforme  2 hours ago

    Steam's DRM is completely symbolic. There are widespread cracks available and Steam is AFAIK not even bothering with the cat and mouse game, and Denuvo games released this year are being cracked in < 24 hours.

    I would never underestimate the lengths people are willing to go to to 'crack' games. Countless online-only games have been cracked with users reverse engineering the network protocol and writing their own servers. LLMs will probably greatly ease that process as well.

    • B3L  1 hour ago

      The SteamDRM wrapper tool itself, freely distributed through the Stramworks SDK, used to straight up ship with a feature to strip the DRM from any exe.

  • gk--  2 hours ago

    > Some Denuvo games stay uncracked for years

    this era is well and truly over. you've got pre-release hypervisor bypasses and then a conventional crack a couple weeks later.

    edit: i might've misinterpreted your comment, i expect some older denovo titles might never get the modern treatment

  • hollow-moe  3 hours ago

    Oh wow that's really smart of them, now you have a reason to send your hacked version along the cad file so the user on the other side can escape from their spyware :D