Re:Pirates Plunder 4K Hateful Eight, but Did They Crack DCP?
by annnnd on Wednesday September 07, 2016 @09:49AM
(#12443319)
The DRM for games is altogether another beast than DRM for movies or audio. Games are interactive so while cracking them should in theory always be possible (unless they are server based), the cracked version represents a possible threat to the users. Did really someone crack the software for the fun of it or is it malware? With movies such concerns are limited to exploiting bugs in movie players, so attack surface is much lower. Also, all one needs to do is capture the output and write it to file. The "hack" is quite trivial with proper equipment.
It depends on what the desired outcome of the DRM is. A prime example of effective DRM is Denuvo [0]. Loosely speaking, there are two main groups of people who pirate games - those who would buy it otherwise, and those who wouldn't. There's not much you can do about the latter group, so they're not really worth considering. The former group however are the potential lost sales. The sales for a AAA video game usually peak on release or very shortly after, and fall off a cliff very quickly., If your DRM system manages to keep a crack for your game from being leaked for the first few weeks of its life, you will capture many of the people who fall into the "might buy your game" category.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denuvo