• 2 hours

    why do people still play/buy games with Denuvo,it reduces your fps anyways.
    maybe Denuvo is as bad as Kernel level anticheat.

    • 1 hour

      I’d guess most players aren’t even aware. I play a lot of games (though probably none that have this stuff enabled) and before joining Lemmy I’d never even heard of Denuvo. The average user just buys a game and plays it.

  • 17 hours

    I certainly hope Denuvo steps on something pointy, but there’s no way I’m installing an HV bypass on any machine.

    • That shit does not run on Linux, so I guess I’m in luck. I bet Denuvo is doubling down and adding kernel level DRM to all games. Bit worried about what that means for Linux gaming, but I will survive. I’ve been on Linux for like a decade now, I won’t install windows to play some silly games.

      • Playing it on a Windows VM on Linux with your GPU passed through is probably the safest way to play these hypervisor bypass games.

        • 11 hours

          So, an OS that runs a HV that runs a HV that runs an OS that runs a translator that translates a windows-game to the original OS.

          If you had told me that absurd shit 30yrs ago I would have laughed at you.

          • Yes, and all that to bypass, not remove, a protection mechanism that runs 100% in user space with no additional privileges. It really would be impressive if it wasn’t so horrible for consumer rights and preservation.

            • 2 hours

              It is…I always trusted pirates more than companies (I was a big player back in the days) but this is way too much. I just don’t play these games now (thanks denuvo) and I surely won’t play those hv-“cracks”.

              But…the worse thing is what denuvo will do now. Either they’ll vanish or they’ll step up by getting absolute total control kernel-side. I’d prefer vanishing. Why would anyone buy denuvo now if they don’t react fast…

      • That may be, but using Denuvo is not free, and the more invasive implementations affect performance more, and by extension reviews and system requirements. I don’t believe you will see a huge uptick for those reasons alone.

      • 13 hours

        It’s the bypass in question that falsifies validation data to the Denuvo DRM. It runs under the OS (Windows in this case), which gives it more permissions than your operating system itself. You have to disable a significant amount of your security, reboot, run your game with the HV bypass, reenable your security, reboot, and then you can use your PC normally again. Even if you trust the HV bypass software (and I don’t personally think that’s a good idea), you are still opening your machine up to attack. If you are perfect in your actions and very cautious you can minimize the risk, but slipping up could leave your PC compromised. It’s just too much risk.

        • 8 hours

          You can just renable it after you are done playing

        • 13 hours

          On my last computer I downloaded the Harry Potter game and it was cracked by Empress, a vicious anti-trans right-wing Russian woman. I just hung out in a telegram when the game was released and man the toxic shit she spewed was nasty. Proper fking nasty.

          And I purposefully disabled the security on my PC and installed something she made.

          Yes it was stupid, but I was lonely and really nostalgic for Hogwarts and felt less like donating actual money to a billionaire trans-hater than possibly giving a Russian trans-hater access to my machine.

          • 2 hours

            I thought fitgirl was the crazy one. I could never bring myself to install them. I only put software thats foss and discussed so its difficult to allow their stuff on my pc.

          • In real life, she is probably a gay male accountant from Ohio. I feel like people in these situations go out of their way to create alternate identities.

            • Probably not in the US but yes…

              Everyone who does this kind of shit in the ‘land of the free’ gets to find out just how much freedom corporations have.

            • 11 hours

              Idk man, should’ve seen the shit she was writing. Also she’s a pretty big deal in the cracking circles afaik.

              https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empress_(cracker)

              But yeah nothing there to disprove your hypothesis though, but the way it’s been going in the world, there’s definitely more Russians pretending to be Americans online than the other way around. Lemmy is chock full of Davels ([email protected])

        • I think it is fine if you install the games on a PC that

          • Doesnt contain any personal data and is only for playing PC games

          • Is never connected to a network, public or private (always offline)

          Otherwise I wouldn’t recommend ever installing HyperVisor, and if you do, wipe the drive and reinstall the OS. Maybe even better, wipe the drive, destroy it, and then replace it with a new drive. That is the best way to know for certain there is no security compromise on the drive.

          • 2 hours

            In simpler terms you need to have an entirely dedicated isolated system to play these games on, at which point the economical option is undoubtedly just to buy the damn game…

            Computers not connected to the internet are almost entirely useless for anything else, and computers that are connected to the internet are inevitably logged into to services, and being logged in to something automatically means there’s personal data on it. If only credentials and authentication cookies.

            Just stay away from this. Get a console of Denuvo freaks you out, or just stay away from these games untill they patch denuvo out, like you should anyway. The only reason they keep using Denuvo is that they aren’t adequately punished for doing so. Gamers are notoriously bad at voting with their wallet.

          • 6 hours

            Is never connected to a network, public or private (always offline)

            99% of all modern games won’t even start

    • The HV bypass is a blow to both the industry and piracy. All games are easy to pirate now, but aint no way I’m messing with my machine so much just to pirate those games.

      • Games are already a security nightmare. Apex had am RCE in a game with fucking kernel level anticheat.

        Fucking think about that.

        If you care about privacy or security you should’ve started playing games in a VM with pass through years ago.

        If it doesn’t run in a VM it doesn’t get played.

      • I don’t think the situation is practically any worse than before for piracy if you just ignore these bypasses. It’s not like there was a huge crowd of crackers ready to take on denuvo before they were pushed out by these bypasses. Proper cracks still depend on basically just that one guy.

      • I have stacks of 1-1.5 tb sd cards in a holder on my steam deck case because I can never delete a game but I don’t have time to play them either.

        • 18 hours

          Remember to power them once in a while since the stored charge slowly leaks.

            • Like once every few years at least. More often if they are cheap or if the cells have been rewritten a lot.

          • 14 hours

            What? I have never heard this before. I have loads of cards strewn about

            • Flash memory is not considered a good long term storage medium for archival purposes. The data slowly dissipates, a new card can hold the data around 5 to 10 years, theoretically. A cheap card even less. But the cells will wear down with every write so the charge in the cells will dissipate quicker if they have experienced lots of write cycles. So yeah I would power flash memory at least once a year to be safe.

        • I’m collecting my games too, so they’re available when i do get around to playing X game

    • Are any of them worth playing?
      I played the demo for Pragmata. It seems like a good 3rd person capcom shooter.

  • I played RE9 recently thanks to voices38 crack.

    Even the achievements were working, insane experience for something pirated.

    It’s not the same convenience of Steam, but you can achieve similar:

    • I used a PowerShell script with rclone + Ludosavi backup to backup all my game saves periodically.
    • Add to Steam as non-Steam game to get controller support, screenshot and recording features.
    • And Hydra launcher (or Achievement Watcher) to save my played hours and get achievements notifications.

    Pro: You actually own your data instead of Steam owing it. All tools are open source and you can backup the database files.
    Cons: Less convenience.

    Already 100% all achievements.

    • 24 minutes

      If you have a server to Self Host stuff, you can also use Gamevault. It’s like steam but Selfhost. You can Backup your Save Files onto your Server (you need to modify the Open Source Client for that, otherwise it’s behind a Paywall.) It tracks your Playtime. You can install .7zip files, iso’s and gog games very simple. You can also see what your friends are playing, if you share your Server.

      I also love it to collect fan games in it like PokeMMO, Mario 64 PC Port etc.

      • Ik, but RE9 was one of the few games cracked properly. That and Black Myth Wukong today.

        Given the rate voices38 is doing it, I dare to say he’s cracking all the rest, he probably figured out something at this point, just need to reapply the same skills on different Denuvo games.

          • Empress only cracked a select few games anyway (and I believe she tired of it like a year or two ago?)

        • Thanks, I didn’t know black myth was cracked today. I certainly hope you’re right since these hypervisor bypasses seem to be soaking up all of the attention instead of proper cracks.

          • It was cracked today, I just can’t share it here I guess. The rest are still HyperVisor unfortunately.

            • 6 hours

              Wow. I might try it since the game is expensive right now and I wanna see if I’ll even enjoy it considering some people compare it to soulslike.

        • 19 hours

          The bypass probably allows more extensive dynamic analyses to be run on the running process. Crack development was seriously hindered by Denuvo’s limit of five activations per day.

      • 20 hours

        The voices38 crack is not a hypervisor bypass though.

  • Playing a game for free is not even remotely worth allowing a crack to have absolute root access, but maybe this will make companies reconsider whether it’s worth paying for Denuvo. Probably not.

  • 8 hours

    Been out of the loop lately, how much time does it takes them on average to crack a new released game?

    • 15 hours

      It’s just a few weeks per game. It has gotten to the point where people are working down the list of uncracked games from the previous years.

  • 18 hours

    Ain’t no way I’m paying full price for less updates and a rootkit. It’s always better to wait on these games.