New Anti-Tamper Tech, Valeora, Debuts in City Patrol: Police

Megalith

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Caipirinha Games and Toplitz Productions have released City Patrol: Police, an action racing game that features a brand-new anti-tamper tech called Valeora. The developer’s website is vague and somewhat sketchy, but the software supposedly prevents a title’s pre-existing DRM from being removed by hackers with techniques that are “impossible to crack.” It echoes a quote from Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot, who claimed the PC industry suffers from a “93-95 percent piracy rate.”

“Valeroa Anti-Tamper is extremely difficult to crack before and closely after the game release date. The protection becomes a lot easier to crack after a predefined period. We have no problem with organised pirate groups or individuals who crack Valeroa once the protection is weakened. We definitely don’t prosecute people who just play cracked games.” From the looks of it, and in theory, this appears to be a better anti-tamper tech than Denuvo. Whether developers will drop Denuvo in favor of this new anti-tamper tech remains to be seen.
 
You can take any subset of data and twist it to make any statement you want. They are called statistics at that point. NOAA approved.

These are no statistics they are bullshit put together:
"Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot has told Gamesindustry International that paying players for its PC retail games and its free-to-play products are roughly equivalent. The executive said about 5 to 7 percent of free-to-play gamers purchase content from its games, which he claimed is about the same as paying users for its PC games, given a “93-95 percent piracy rate.

5-7% want to pay for loot crates, so obviously the other 93-95% have pirated the game becuase the company is not making money off micro-transactions. The most solid logic ever used ever.
 
90% piracy rate? So wrong.
Not counting China but they don’t pay for shit anyway.

And Gen Z doesn’t even know what BitTorrent or pirating is. I’m shocked they even know how to use Windows. That statistic would mean only 5-8% of gamers are Gen Z. It doesn’t add up.

This ain’t 2004 anymore. If pirating was still a thing Single Player games wouldn’t be selling by the millions. Like Skyrim and Witcher 3.
 
So for every sell made, 9 people are playing a pirated version of the game? I doubt that. Sounds like publishers pulling numbers out their ass.
I've heard it from devs big and small for at least a decade. It's not news.
 
Of the people using pirated software, how many would/could buy it in the first place? When I was much younger, I had shoe boxes full of 5.25" floppy disks that had pirated software on them. I didn't have much money and could not have bought much software. Honestly, I spent more time trading than i did actually playing. Did I cost the developers money back in the day? Debatable. They never would have received my money in the first place because I didn't have any.

I remember when new copy protection used to come out for the C64. Eagle Soft and other crack groups would eventually crack them. Fast forward to today - sounds like the story is the same. It will eventually get cracked.

The people that usually suffer the most are the people that actually buy the software. They get stuck with the copy protection. Anyone remember the C64 disk grinding protection? It would throw your drive out of alignment!
Curious, any studies to prove that copy protection actually increases sales?
 
Maybe it means 93-95% of games have been pirated? Not that necessarily 93-95% of people playing are pirates.
 
Of course Ubisoft is bitching about piracy. People pirate their games because they over charge and have bugs all the fucking time. Hey Ubisoft, stop releasing shit and your sales will go up.
 
Of course Ubisoft is bitching about piracy. People pirate their games because they over charge and have bugs all the fucking time. Hey Ubisoft, stop releasing shit and your sales will go up.

Its not a recent statement. It was made in 2012. Ubi hasn't really commented on pirates very much in a while. Possibly because no one bought their BS back then and wouldn't buy it now either.
 
90% piracy rate? So wrong.
Not counting China but they don’t pay for shit anyway.

And Gen Z doesn’t even know what BitTorrent or pirating is. I’m shocked they even know how to use Windows. That statistic would mean only 5-8% of gamers are Gen Z. It doesn’t add up.

This ain’t 2004 anymore. If pirating was still a thing Single Player games wouldn’t be selling by the millions. Like Skyrim and Witcher 3.
This is the important part. That arbitrary "91.3%" stat can't be used as an indicator of revenue loss since there's no proof any percent of such a stat would have paid for the game in the first place, given no other option.
 
Maybe it means 93-95% of games have been pirated? Not that necessarily 93-95% of people playing are pirates.
No, you're looking too deep into it, he's making shit up. Here's his exact quote:

"It's a way to get closer to your customers, to make sure you have a revenue. On PC it's only around five to seven per cent of the players who pay for F2P, but normally on PC it's only about five to seven per cent who pay anyway, the rest is pirated. It's around a 93-95 per cent piracy rate, so it ends up at about the same percentage. The revenue we get from the people who play is more long term, so we can continue to bring content."

He said that in 2012. So let's look at a Ubisoft PC-only game that came out in 2011: Anno 2070. That sold around 1 million copies. So if you believe him at face value, that means 1 million people bought the game, and 13-19 million people pirated it. That means more people would have played it than Diablo 3, a game with NO piracy, which sold around 12 million copies during the same time and is in the top 5 of all-time best sellers on the PC.

Translation: it's all bullshit. The most generous interpretation you can take of what he said is that anyone who doesn't pay money in a free to play game is a pirate.
 
"The protection becomes a lot easier to crack after a predefined period." = " Valeroa anti-tamper does not require you to have an internet connection" ? huh?
 
I give it 6 weeks

Going to depend on what game ships with it I guess.
Given that it's some new holy grail tech I'm pretty sure crackers will go nuts, gonna laugh real hard if it's bypassed in a couple of days.

I used to pirate games before the easy return policy on Steam, after demos went away I just didn't want to "waste" money on on trash games without being able to try them first.
 
vmprotect wrapper and it was cracked in 2 days.

Was going to say. I give it 1-2 days, at most.

The only deterrent to piracy is making games "online only". Since most cracks involve replacing the main executable.
 
Well from the various articles and marketing pages and clicking through and reading.

The claim is that for any given game 93-95% of people playing that game are playing a pirated copy. They all avoid paring it down by region, so that number is globally, so if you don't sell it in china, and china pirates a bajillion copies, it's zero lost sales.
 
Get the fuck out of here. There is no way that 95 percent of people that play games on PC pirate a specific game.
Good to see that denuvo finally has competition.

I agree i wonder if the statement is true but on a spun statistic, like 95% of all games on the pc are cracked by pirates (which i could believe) and its being extrapolated incorrectly to mean that 95% percent sales lost to piracy..
 
I agree i wonder if the statement is true but on a spun statistic, like 95% of all games on the pc are cracked by pirates (which i could believe) and its being extrapolated incorrectly to mean that 95% percent sales lost to piracy..

No man don't give him any leeway. Ubisoft CEO literally thinks he is being robed by free 2 play gamers if they are not buying micro-transaction goods. In their eyes any time of the day a gamer is not paying them money they are losing potential profits.
 
I've heard it from devs big and small for at least a decade. It's not news.
Bioware was known for posting statistics about gameplay from dragon age. Quest choices and the like. Do you really think no company ever has done this to silently call home if a copy was legit or pirated?
If the numbers were remotely "bad" they would have been plastered over the news for years.

Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics.
 
in other news, 93-95% of games shipped today are broken on release, buggy as shit, require day 1 patch, are made for consoles with pc as afterthought, have less than 10 hr SP play time because of planned DLCs, or are clear money grabs with no loyalty to spirit of franchise.

stop releasing shit and maybe people will pay.

anyway, I only play POE now which is freeeeeeeeee. so take that ubisoft.
 
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