VMProtect Accuses Denuvo Of Using Unlicensed Software In Its Antipiracy DRM

from the irony-thy-name-is-denuvo dept

To date, the most remarkable aspect of the Denuvo story was the very brief stint it had as a successful DRM. Brief is the operative word, of course, as the past six months or so have seen Denuvo's vaunted status devolve into one more typical of DRM stories, with defeats for the security software coming at rates measured in days and weeks of a game's release.

But now things have taken a turn towards the ironic. A security software firm called VMProtect, which makes software to protect against reverse engineering and developing cracks of applications, is accusing Denuvo of having used its software without properly licensing it. This is the kind of thing that folks who support DRM tend to call piracy. And, thus, Denuvo may have "pirated" another company's software to make its anti-piracy DRM.

According to a post on Russian forum RSDN, Denuvo is accused of engaging in a little piracy of its own. The information comes from a user called drVanо, who is a developer at VMProtect Software, a company whose tools protect against reverse engineering and cracking.

“I want to tell you a story about one very clever and greedy Austrian company called Denuvo Software Solutions GmbH,” drVano begins. “A while ago, this company released a protection system of the same name but the most remarkable thing is that they absolutely illegally used our VMProtect software in doing so.”

drVano goes on to detail the story to a degree that seems legitimate. Denuvo had met with VMProtect about using the latter's software, but had wanted to do so under the common and cheap $500 license offered publicly as a "personal license." Rolling that software into a distributed DRM obviously fell outside of that sort of personal use license, leading VMProtect to ask for much more in the way of money if Denuvo wanted to move forward. Denvuo declined, but then apparently went ahead an bought a personal license anyway and began rolling out the software in Denuvo DRM. VMProtect revoked the license due to Denuvo's breach of the license conditions, but Denuvo kept up its distribution anyway.

Which lead VMProtect to go on offense.

VMProtect then took what appears to be a rather unorthodox measure against Denuvo. After cooperation with Sophos, the anti-virus vendor agreed to flag up the offending versions of Denuvo as potential malware. VMProtect says it has also been speaking with Valve about not featuring the work of “scammers” on its platform.

“Through our long-standing partners from Intellect-C, we are starting to prepare an official claim against Denuvo Software Solutions GmbH with the prospect of going to court. This might be a very good lesson for ‘greedy’ developers who do not care about the intellectual property rights of their colleagues in the same trade,” drVano concludes.

The irony here is delicious. The precipitous fall of DRM, once claimed to be the end of software piracy entirely, culminates in what may be piracy on the part of that same company. All while the effectiveness of that DRM has dropped to essentially zero.

If the gaming industry were ever going to learn that DRM is a failed concept, Denuvo ought to be the teacher of that lesson.

Filed Under: denuvo, drm, piracy
Companies: denuvo, grey box, vmprotect

Rime's Denuvo Defeated: Developer Gets To Work On DRM Free Version As Performance Hit Details Emerge

from the that-was-fast dept

As we had recently discussed, Tequila Works, makers of RiME, had promised pissed off customers that once the game was cracked and its Denuvo DRM defeated, it would release a Denuvo-free version of the game via a patch. The crack of the game came about almost immediately after this statement was made, because of course it was. To their credit, Tequila Works made good on its promise of a patch, while also blaming the use of Denuvo on Grey Box, its publisher.

But there's a secondary story here. The actual impact DRM has tended to have throughout its history has been mostly to annoy legitimate customers by either keeping them from playing the game they purchased at all, or by resulting in negative impacts on game performance. For RiME, it appears the issue is the latter, and the person who cracked the game is offering details of how Denuvo tried desperately to turn the dial on its software up to eleven, almost certainly impacting performance of the game.

In a fanfare of celebrations, rising cracking star Baldman announced that he had defeated the latest v4+ iteration of Denuvo and dumped a cracked copy of RiME online. While encouraging people to buy what he describes as a “super nice” game, Baldman was less complimentary about Denuvo. Labeling the anti-tamper technology a “huge abomination,” the cracker said that Denuvo’s creators had really upped their efforts this time out. People like Baldman who work on Denuvo talk of the protection calling on code ‘triggers.’ For RiME, things were reportedly amped up to 11.

“In Rime that ugly creature went out of control – how do you like three fucking hundreds of THOUSANDS calls to ‘triggers’ during initial game launch and savegame loading? Did you wonder why game loading times are so long – here is the answer,” Baldman explained. “In previous games like Sniper: Ghost Warrior 3, NieR Automata, Prey there were only about 1000 ‘triggers’ called, so we have x300 here.”

Those triggers are callbacks from the game to Denuvo's servers to verify it's legitimacy. This increase in triggers was almost certainly designed to make the game harder or more laborious to crack, though that obviously didn't work. But, as Baldman continues, the shocking 300k triggers just in the launch and loading screens was only the start. After a mere thirty minutes of gameplay, he recorded two million triggers. It's worth noting that RiME's rollout didn't go off as smoothly as the developer wanted, largely because of performance issues being reported by those who bought it. Baldman attempted to explain why at least part of those woes were likely this roided-up version of Denuvo mucking up performance.

“Protection now calls about 10-30 triggers every second during actual gameplay, slowing game down. In previous games like Sniper: Ghost Warrior 3, NieR Automata, Prey there were only about 1-2 ‘triggers’ called every several minutes during gameplay, so do the math.” Only making matters worse, the cracker says, is the fact the triggers are heavily obfuscated under a virtual machine, which further affects performance.

It seems pretty clear that whatever the percentage of the performance troubles RiME had that are the result of Denuvo, that percentage number is not zero. The DRM is having a performance impact at some level and it seems likely that having it ramped up so high would only increase the draw on power it needs to run. Denuvo is already denying that its software was responsible for the performance issues, but that should be easily cleared up now that Tequila Works is releasing a Denuvo-free version.

What remains unclear is why any developer or publisher would use Denuvo any longer. Pissing off your legitimate customers for protection that can be measured in hours is no way to build a customer base.

Filed Under: denuvo, drm, performance, rime
Companies: grey box