Rime's Denuvo Protection Cracked In 5 Days

rgMekanic

[H]ard|News
Joined
May 13, 2013
Messages
6,943
After only 5 days the Denuvo DRM in RiME has been cracked. The studio has announced that a new Denuvo free build of the game will be replacing the current one. Rime lead producer Cody Bradley also stated the presence of Denuvo was responsible for a "small performance hit" in Rime, and that they were "monitoring the situation"

We have brought you several stories of the famed Denuvo being defeated, the latest being Prey after only 10 days. The interesting part to me is what "Baldman," who claimed credit for the crack, said: "Protection now calls about 10-30 triggers every second during actual gameplay, slowing [the] game down," He added. "In previous games like Sniper: Ghost Warrior 3, Nier, [and] Prey there were only about 1-2 'triggers' called every several minutes during gameplay. While this is unverified, I look forward to seeing before/after performance testing of RiME.

After confirming that Rime has indeed been cracked, publisher Grey Box said that it will follow through on its pledge to replace the current build of the game with one that does not include Denuvo. It's also working on the first "traditional" update, which it expects will be ready to go next week.
 
I'd love to know how many man hours or how many dollars was paid for this DRM shit... and then think... they could have had that much more profit, or that easier of a bottom line not worrying about something that's pointless anyways. The fact they are willing to shit on game performance for a system they know will be beaten, says quite a lot about that dev.

Fuck 'em
 
It was annoying as hell when I first install Rime for my fiance. Our Steam link is running from a 5930k running 4.4 ghz, 1070, 32 gigs ddr 4 with the game drive on either the 951 pro or a samsung 850 evo and it still took a long time to load. I've never seen a recent game take that long to load, it felt like playing Symphony of the night on ps1 again.

Eventually it didn't bother us, but the first install was really odd...felt like the game was glitchy.

After the first load I found that either the steam link or the games was having issues and was glitchy. We had no camera control, sometimes we got caught in infinite falling animation, and our controller would just stop working mid game and require a reboot of the steam link interface (where the controller was still working fine).
 
I'd love to know how many man hours or how many dollars was paid for this DRM shit... and then think... they could have had that much more profit, or that easier of a bottom line not worrying about something that's pointless anyways. The fact they are willing to shit on game performance for a system they know will be beaten, says quite a lot about that dev.

Fuck 'em

Is it a developer (TequilaWorks) or publisher (Greybox) issue? I honestly don't know, but I do know that developer doesn't exactly mean publisher and somethings saying the wrong thing can make people bitchy for the wrong reason.
 
Good, hope developers finally do away with this shitty malware. Don't hurt your buyers by making the pirated copies run better than the legitimate.
 
This sounds like the most useless piece of DRM introduced in the last decade. How are they not being sued for delivering an utterly flawed product?
 
The funny thing IMO is that it probably took less time to crack this only because it does more "game checks" than before. At 10-30 triggers per second it makes identifying the offending code easier to find not harder. It's similar to how easy it is to find a bug that always happen at certain intervals rather than some seemingly random bug that happens after some seemingly random time.
 
This sounds like the most useless piece of DRM introduced in the last decade. How are they not being sued for delivering an utterly flawed product?
The first iteration lasted for many months, which is a wild success in the DRM world.
 
The funny thing IMO is that it probably took less time to crack this only because it does more "game checks" than before. At 10-30 triggers per second it makes identifying the offending code easier to find not harder. It's similar to how easy it is to find a bug that always happen at certain intervals rather than some seemingly random bug that happens after some seemingly random time.
QFT. I wonder what Denuvo engineers were thinking when they came up with this one. Or maybe the publisher demanded it.
 
Since a lot of you do not understand how a lot of game studios work on the back-end, allow me to explain. Many projects ( games ) get there funding from 'investors' .... these 'investors' often have ( should have ) legal representation in the form of a contract. These contracts almost always call for some sort of DRM as a deterrent to piracy. Not just DRM but contracts call for data backup, audits, scheduled payouts when software milestones are met. Etc. These investors are going to protect their investment. When game studios go to investors, this is also a promise they make to get investors to make said investments. So on and so forth. Just because something is not effective doesn't mean it's just going to go away. That's terrible self-centered logic some of the public ( you guys ) seem to have.

"Well, even tho chemo therapy can be effective and could possibly extend her life a year or more, we decided since stage 4 lung cancer has a very low rate of survival, that we would just forego the chemo and instead put her into hospice now."

Terrible example but it's also the same difference. You guys are not going to let your beloved Aunt die.

I see a lot of you carry on as if they have a choice in the matter. While some do, many don't.

If I spent 5 million on a small title with a development team of say 5 people or if I had a bigger studio with 20 people and a project that cost me 10 - 15 - 20+ million and even though I personally hate DRM ... I am sure as hell going to put DRM on my game to protect it from piracy.

If you guys think the RIME folks didn't know their title was going to get pirated in a handful of days ( History is one of our biggest teachers ) then your kidding yourself.

You guys carry on and on time and time again out of what I call "bro anger" about DRM. I hate it myself but I understand and more important accept why it's there.

If they prevented 50k - 100k --- 200k from pirating the title, then that's more money in their pocket which is exactly why they DRM'd the title in the first place and will continue to do so. This is smart money. Smart money logic is not going to go away. Smart money logic as it relates to games and DRM is not going to vanish because a bunch of Dorito eating Bawl drinking Bro Angry gamers complained and said so. LMAO

Put yourself in their shows before you blather out complaints about DRM.

When GoG tells the world all their titles are DRM free I hope you guys realize this is strictly marketing on their part to entice you to come make a purchase or two or three etc. Sure it's easier to distribute but still. If all those older titles could have had Denuvo back in the day, all of those fuckers would have put it on each and everyone of those titles no questions asked.
 
Last edited:
My issue with DRM is that it gets increasingly invasive. I can understand the need to protect an investment, but there's a point of diminishing returns. There's a point where DRM degrades your product to the point that people aren't going to want to buy it. IMO, there needs to be a balance between protecting against pirating and insuring a game runs well. Some things fall under the "cost of doing business", and I think a certain amount of pirating falls under that category.
 
If they prevented 50k - 100k --- 200k from pirating the title.......
Therein lies the problem; those who intend to pirate will pirate regardless of DRM. Those who wont dont need DRM in the first place, because they just picked up a box copy from the shelf. It's like putting a lock on your front door, it only keeps honest people out.
 
Release it DRM free or I won't buy it simple. Glad this is blowing up in their faces.
 
When GoG tells the world all their titles are DRM free I hope you guys realize this is strictly marketing on their part to entice you to come make a purchase or two or three etc. Sure it's easier to distribute but still. If all those older titles could have had Denuvo back in the day, all of those fuckers would have put it on each and everyone of those titles no questions asked.

Explain Witcher 3 then.
 
If they prevented 50k - 100k --- 200k from pirating the title, then that's more money in their pocket which is exactly why they DRM'd the title in the first place and will continue to do so. This is smart money. Smart money logic is not going to go away. Smart money logic as it relates to games and DRM is not going to vanish because a bunch of Dorito eating Bawl drinking Bro Angry gamers complained and said so. LMAO

Yet no one can ever actually come up with concrete numbers of pirated copies of a game that would have otherwise translated to sales if no pirated version had been available.

Another massive flaw in this, and it's funny since you pointed it out earlier... yes they knew it was going to get cracked, as history demonstrates. You think the pirates don't know the same? I'm not talking about the people writing the cracks, I mean the kids or whoever sitting at home who see a game just came out and knowing the recent history with denuvo just wait till it gets cracked within a couple weeks or a few days. Nothing has been deterred for them, and there's no way to validate that those people would have actually paid money for the game if it had never been cracked.

Yet what has happened as usual that we do know for certain? Paying customers have yet again been shit on by a publisher including DRM which hampers the game experience for paying customers.
 
Witcher 3 was executed beautifully, artistically, great design and story. While not having DRM certainly helped, that game sold itself. I don't think that's a very good example for a case being made against DRM. But that's just my opinion.
 
You guys are allowed to have your own opinion on the matter. DRM sucks. But these guys don't care.
 
Rather than pure conjecture, I would really like to see someone release actual gameplay performance numbers with Denuvo enabled vs. Denuvo disabled for this game. (or any game for that matter)

Also, I can't see why any company is giving Denuvo any money for their software at this point given that it has already proven that the lead time it used to give publishers is rapidly becoming non-existent. I can see why they would use it, since most sales occur around the time of release, but with Prey and this game the DRM has been cracked in record time. The time to crack is bound to become near-instant so companies should stop throwing their money at this company.
 
You guys are allowed to have your own opinion on the matter. DRM sucks. But these guys don't care.

Were also allowed to not buy their game which they may just care about. You can try to protect your game being pirated by people who wouldn't buy it anyway and in the process make people who otherwise would have bought your game not want to touch it. Seems like a lose lose for DRM. The pirates will get ytour game anyway and you will have lost paying customers.
 
Since a lot of you do not understand how a lot of game studios work on the back-end, allow me to explain. Many projects ( games ) get there funding from 'investors' .... these 'investors' often have ( should have ) legal representation in the form of a contract. These contracts almost always call for some sort of DRM as a deterrent to piracy. Not just DRM but contracts call for data backup, audits, scheduled payouts when software milestones are met. Etc. These investors are going to protect their investment. When game studios go to investors, this is also a promise they make to get investors to make said investments. So on and so forth. Just because something is not effective doesn't mean it's just going to go away. That's terrible self-centered logic some of the public ( you guys ) seem to have.

"Well, even tho chemo therapy can be effective and could possibly extend her life a year or more, we decided since stage 4 lung cancer has a very low rate of survival, that we would just forego the chemo and instead put her into hospice now."

Terrible example but it's also the same difference. You guys are not going to let your beloved Aunt die.

I see a lot of you carry on as if they have a choice in the matter. While some do, many don't.

If I spent 5 million on a small title with a development team of say 5 people or if I had a bigger studio with 20 people and a project that cost me 10 - 15 - 20+ million and even though I personally hate DRM ... I am sure as hell going to put DRM on my game to protect it from piracy.

If you guys think the RIME folks didn't know their title was going to get pirated in a handful of days ( History is one of our biggest teachers ) then your kidding yourself.

You guys carry on and on time and time again out of what I call "bro anger" about DRM. I hate it myself but I understand and more important accept why it's there.

If they prevented 50k - 100k --- 200k from pirating the title, then that's more money in their pocket which is exactly why they DRM'd the title in the first place and will continue to do so. This is smart money. Smart money logic is not going to go away. Smart money logic as it relates to games and DRM is not going to vanish because a bunch of Dorito eating Bawl drinking Bro Angry gamers complained and said so. LMAO

Put yourself in their shows before you blather out complaints about DRM.

When GoG tells the world all their titles are DRM free I hope you guys realize this is strictly marketing on their part to entice you to come make a purchase or two or three etc. Sure it's easier to distribute but still. If all those older titles could have had Denuvo back in the day, all of those fuckers would have put it on each and everyone of those titles no questions asked.

If their publisher made them do things they didn't want to do and harmed their vision for the game then they shouldn't be in business with them.
 
Witcher 3 was executed beautifully, artistically, great design and story. While not having DRM certainly helped, that game sold itself. I don't think that's a very good example for a case being made against DRM. But that's just my opinion.
Isn't it the best case for not having DRM? Make games people want to purchase and they will purchase them.
 
If I spent 5 million on a small title with a development team of say 5 people or if I had a bigger studio with 20 people and a project that cost me 10 - 15 - 20+ million and even though I personally hate DRM ... I am sure as hell going to put DRM on my game to protect it from piracy.

If you guys think the RIME folks didn't know their title was going to get pirated in a handful of days ( History is one of our biggest teachers ) then your kidding yourself.

You guys carry on and on time and time again out of what I call "bro anger" about DRM. I hate it myself but I understand and more important accept why it's there.

If they prevented 50k - 100k --- 200k from pirating the title, then that's more money in their pocket which is exactly why they DRM'd the title in the first place and will continue to do so. This is smart money

You said it yourself in your post. You don't put it in games to protect it. You put it in games to appease investors and gain access to their money.

You throw out numbers like 50-200k saved sales. Nobody has proof of jack shit about what it saves.

And you COMPLETELY ignore the key aspect of the fact that in this process, neither the publisher nor the developer concern themselves much with quality of the end product.

Users don't care if you protect yourself. They care if the game plays well.
Users don't care if it is effective. They care if it plays well.

If it were smart business money, they would spend more time trying to figure out the cost benefit, because there are several ill defined metrics people just pull numbers out of their asses for.

1) How many sales lost to piracy? It's not zero, but it's also not millions of sales either like people pretend.
2) How many sales lost due to inclusion of DRM? It's almost never brought up. It's not zero.
3) How many future sales lost due to a reputation for shit DRM implementations? This one is almost completely ignored.

I can tell you though, that I don't avoid games based on some moral opposition to DRM. But fucking up DRM has cost a whole lot of sales ot me and my friends.

I can think of two serious ones:

Assassin's creed, and worms 3d.

For assassin's creed, me and about 5-6 friends were jazzed for it. Except the DRM meant that if you wanted to play you had to be online, if you wanted to play you also needed the game to not freeze every few seconds. SO you ahd to crank it up and physically yank the network cable. Fuck that. Only one of us bough another AC game. A number of us ditched ubisoft entirely.

For me I bought stick of truth on sale eventually sometime in 2014 and rocksmith in 2014. (I got far cry 2 free with a video card and played a bit of brush fire simulator 2000 something at some point prior to that) Looking at ubisoft's list of games, they missed out on several splinter cell sales, a rainbow six sale, a cople of ghost reocn sales, and maybe a far cry sale.

I also recall worms 3d and whatever DRM they used at the time being incompatible with random models of CD drive. Their attitude was epically shitty as well. I didn't go back to that well from 2003 until 2017.

Sure some folks like me buy the game and then run the pirated version, but there's shit otns of games. I just spent my money elsewhere.

Selling me a $30-70 brick when I wanted a game is a REALLY good way to get me an a number of people to tell you to fuck off for a very, very long time.

Mild annoyance factors in as well. DRM and shitty perfromance thereof has generall lead me to lt someone else buy it first and sort that shit out. Wihich means I went form being very much a day one full price customer or buying in at the first sale if there were a bunch of good games to waiting around for discounted GOTY versions. Then steam sales became a thing, and if there was even a hint of DRM issues, you might see me give you $10 for it a year or two after publishing it.. maybe.
 
Isn't it the best case for not having DRM? Make games people want to purchase and they will purchase them.

People will buy games if they're good. But illegal downloads go up too. With Witcher 3, the game was so good and had so much positive reviews and hype around it that it was bound to be a massive success. It was still illegally downloaded like crazy, but the sales were so high that it didn't really matter. Unfortunately, not every game can be Witcher 3
 
Isn't it the best case for not having DRM? Make games people want to purchase and they will purchase them.

"Just make people want it" -- finally the code to videogame development has been cracked. :) As if there are videogame developers pouring sweat into their work day in and day out, laboring under the hope and belief that people won't want their game.

Witcher 3 wasn't a hit because it was offered DRM-free on GoG -- the majority of sales occurred on Steam, where CDPR chose to *enable* the steam launcher-integrated DRM (if they really cared about DRM-free for altruistic reasons, they could have offered it DRM-free on Steam too, as DRM is *not* a requirement to publish to that marketplace).

Witcher 3 was a hit because it had an experienced staff of hundreds and a budget of hundred of millions to develop a AAA. The fact they made it easier for pirates to steal in hopes it would bolster interest in their own GoG store didn't change anything -- years later and people can still only point to Witcher 3.
 
Last edited:
PC games being so cheap these days (generally, even during the pre-order period) and not having to deal with patches, re-cracking, etc. is enough to keep me buying games instead of pirating.
 
If the 10-30 triggers per second is true, pretty soon we'll need an entire CPU core just to keep the DRM going. Threadripper? DRMripper!

Well considering the source of the "10-30 triggers per second" claim - an anon p2p bypass guy/group trying to crack these games and undermine the DRM - forgive me if I take it with a grain of salt. He/they achieved momentary fame by exploiting a weakness in the steam-integration chain -- Denuvo was not removed or cracked, but bypassed. Denuvo isn't going away, and its a safe bet the exploit will be patched. We've been down the FUD road before - "Denuvo kills SSD's"... "Denuvo kills FPS!" --- source is always some obscure russian crack forum. Nothing has been objectively proven.

This indie game was flawed to begin with, and pirates and anti-DRM people are quick to jump on the "its all Denuvo's fault" wagon. I wouldn't expect those problems to clear up when denuvo is removed.

Meanwhile Tekken 7 also just released with Denuvo, and the game's running flawlessly. There are still more uncracked denuvo-protected games than there are cracked ones, so its doing its job. It's not going to make entitled hardcore pirates buy anything, but it will continue to mitigate a free download from being the lower hanging fruit for fence-sitters that might otherwise buy the game during the big hype window of the initial release.
 
Last edited:
"Just make people want it" -- finally the code to videogame development has been cracked. :) As if there are videogame developers pouring sweat into their work day in and day out, laboring under the hope and belief that people won't want their game.

Witcher 3 wasn't a hit because it was offered DRM-free on GoG -- the majority of sales occurred on Steam, where CDPR chose to *enable* the steam launcher-integrated DRM (if they really cared about DRM-free for altruistic reasons, they could have offered it DRM-free on Steam too, as DRM is *not* a requirement to publish to that marketplace).

Witcher 3 was a hit because it had an experienced staff of hundreds and a budget of hundred of millions to develop a AAA. The fact they made it easier for pirates to steal in hopes it would bolster interest in their own GoG store didn't change anything -- years later and people can still only point to Witcher 3.

What about Witcher 1? They started from nothing to being a AAA developer. Developers just need to suck it up and make a good game. People will come around eventually.
 
This sounds like the most useless piece of DRM introduced in the last decade. How are they not being sued for delivering an utterly flawed product?
It wasn't useless. It took them years to be able to crack denuvo. Until recently it still provided months of protections but hackers now seem to trivialize the process.
 
  • Like
Reactions: nysmo
like this
Props to the developers for responding so promptly and appropriately.
 
Rime looks like a ps1 game from the overly plain textures to the sparsely populated world design. It reminded me of the initial transition into 3d platforming from an otherwise 2d world.
 
When GoG tells the world all their titles are DRM free I hope you guys realize this is strictly marketing on their part to entice you to come make a purchase or two or three etc.
What? How is advertising and actually selling DRM free games bad? That is the main reason I prefer GOG over Steam.
 
It wasn't useless. It took them years to be able to crack denuvo. Until recently it still provided months of protections but hackers now seem to trivialize the process.
It's still providing months of protection for the majority of Denuvo titles. Some have been uncracked going on more than a year. The rate denuvo titles are releasing is outstripping the rate they're being cracked, and that gap is widening. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denuvo

The casual observer sees "such and such Denuvo title cracked" and assumes it's like AACS being cracked where it applies universally to all titles, but the reality is a lot more nuanced.
 
[QUOTE="trentchau, post: 1043034352, member: 284235"I've never seen a recent game take that long to load, it felt like playing Symphony of the night on ps1 again.
[/QUOTE]
Ghost recon wildlands also takes its time to load. I also suspect the DRM behind that. And it makes me mad.
 
This sounds like the most useless piece of DRM introduced in the last decade. How are they not being sued for delivering an utterly flawed product?
Because making a crappy game isn't illegal?

Yet no one can ever actually come up with concrete numbers of pirated copies of a game that would have otherwise translated to sales if no pirated version had been available.
That's irrelevant. If it satisfies the investors, then they get additional funding to get the game made. The system rewards investors doing whatever they want, whether it is a good or rational idea or not.

If their publisher made them do things they didn't want to do and harmed their vision for the game then they shouldn't be in business with them.
Yeah, big words, the reality is there could very well be no other publisher that would publish the title for the budget the studio would need to make the game they wanted. Or hey, maybe some of the developers wanted to feed their family, there's always that.

I'm not taking the publisher's side on all this, I'm just trying to squash the idealistic thinking of people thinking the only factor in play here is what's reasonable or not. The people with money call the shots. What they want is often contrary to what everyone else wants. This extends beyond videogames also.
 
My favorite is when DRM installs rootkits or bypasses critical system checks to function, not only making the game run crappy, but possibly trashing your OS and requiring a reinstall to clear it. I partly blame Microsoft. Games should be installed, in entirety, in a "games" directory of your choosing. No scattering goddamn files in 20 different places, and then leaving half of them there when you uninstall.
 
  • Like
Reactions: DocNo
like this
what video games are crap :notworthy: star citizen alpha 3.0 soon:smug:

inside general video game "investors" meating room, one person may say how this future cost as million in sales.
of course this and this is include in game.

like why we have soo many fps games right now :whistle:
 
Back
Top