Piracy
Intro
"We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem," - Gabe Newell
Thoughts
Why
Games
Denuvo
Anti Tamper gaming software DRM software on top of your intellectual property.
What exactly makes Denuvo so special?
Last person keeping people from doing Piracy
From reports I've seen before. Denuvo is hard to pirate since it is very sensible to any attempts at bypassing it, anti-temper is in its name after all. It is unknown but quite unlikely that Empress, the "person" in question, is actually one person.
How it broadly works has been documented but this is my retelling of it, so some salt is recommended, essentially it gets injected in the game executable and other files (To the point that certain mods made on denuvo-locked games straight up cannot work on non-denuvo copies) so that when in-game, the program sends lots and lots of code it then re-reads, if the code has been tempered in any way whatsoever, the program will detect a cracking attempt and will cease functionning.
Tl;dr while you're playing Forespoken, the program is playing Papers please with the code.
Code obfuscation
Games
Also they use VMProtect, one of the more harder and complex ways of virtualzation of hardware, which makes it even more difficult to crack.
Basically You take your compiled program, put it into vmprotect builder and it add a protection layer to the exe.
Jus fyi It features : Compression, Encryption, Various Anti-debuggers, Anti-Virtual Machine, File integrity verification, obfuscation (meaning, it takes the code and change it to garbage / nonsense / spaghetti code that jump everywhere + add junk code), virtualisation (too complex to explain). And more.
It makes the code difficult to read, difficult to debug, and difficult to patch for the cracker.
Although some use VmProtect(Ubisoft ) started in AC: Origins, it does hammer older cpu with performance hits , might not be much on new gen cpus, but def older cpus did take a hit.
Mind Map
Scene
Empress Famous in the underground scene who usually releases or cracks Denuvo laced games defeating its DRM.
Notable Hackers
GeoHot - My fav iPhone, PS3 hacker.
The guy is amazing at what he touches, Autonomous Driving (Comma - ai) and AI/ML tiny box.
reloaded
skidrow
many former crackers (reloaded & skidrow) left cracking & went to work with Iredeto(denuvo).
Codex
- lost their main cracker empress which is why they stopped cracking denuvo games.
Cpy Cpy vanished no sign of them,
Mkdev
Baldman
baldman did the intial versions and
Volksi
volksi was apprehended by the authorities.