I work on anti-DRM techniques for a living.

The experience has shifted my views of DRM. Originally, I saw DRM as highly anti-consumer, and a waste of time and clock cycles. Arguably I do still believe that - but now I have great respect for the technical side of good DRM implementations, and I acknowledge that they provide a time buffer to protect against the first wave of piracy.

I've stripped Arxran's protections from software in the past, and I might just have a look at breaking RDR2 now it's been brought to my attention...

It's definitely anticonsumer.

I've no doubt that from a technical point of view, both DRM and the efforts to crack it are fascinating and interesting.

What I don't understand is this: consumers don't crack DRM; crackers and warez groups do. Once cracked, DRM is as good as nothing and it's low effort for an everyday gamer to get and play pirated games.

So this antipiracy "buffer" is only for crackers. For gamers it's just as if the game had a delayed release date.

For legit customers, the DRM is often intrusive and, because it's so complex and fiddly, often breaks in bizarre ways, giving rise to the paradoxical situation that the legit game is harder to use than the pirated game!

Only legitimate buyers lose.

> For gamers it's just as if the game had a delayed release date.

When released, games sell for full price ($70 or whatever it is today), then the price starts going down. Most of the sales happen in a short period after the release.

Someone who wouldn't have bought the game even for $10 will not generate revenue no matter whether it's cracked on day 0 or day 60. Someone who's willing to pay $45 may buy a discounted copy if that's available before the crack, and someone who's willing to pay full price and wants the game within 10 days of release is much more likely to pay if a crack isn't available.

Games usually go from DRM to cracked faster than they go from $70 to $10.

Plus there's the issue of not buying DRM'ed games out of principle.

This post is literally about a game that never did that so what's your point?

This is literally the only recent exception.

According to CrackWatch there are at least 1025 exceptions.

As far as I could tell the game is still sold at around 40€ so OP's point still stands.

The way I see it, considering games are made to make money, the only alternative to DRM is going free to play. They then make their money with microtransactions.

Thankfully the people who made the vast collection of GOG and Humble Bundle games I own disagreed.

> Once cracked, DRM is as good as nothing and it's low effort for an everyday gamer to get and play pirated games.

I think you're overstating this quite a bit. It's basically only true for games that are single-player (with a few exceptions), and are not currently receiving frequent updates (or you are categorically not interested in updates). Besides that, e.g. Steam is extremely convenient; installs are rapid and safe, saves are synced across different machines, mods are often well integrated with Steam Workshop, etc.

For many, the above list is easily worth the price to pay. It's not like once DRM is cracked, sales drop to zero. DRM exists because the profit-minded companies find that at some level of investment in DRM, they get a good ROI.

> Besides that, e.g. Steam is extremely convenient; installs are rapid and safe, saves are synced across different machines, mods are often well integrated with Steam Workshop, etc.

For me Steam is a huge annoiance: every time I want to play a game it keep bugging me with that the client needs an update or with chat windows. It is slow and sluggish compared to the steam store website. And worst of all, some games don't play when you're offline, even though they are just single player games.

Maybe it's because I'm just a casual player nowadays so features like friends lists that keep popping up are not useful for me and the frequent updates never change anything because I'm not using any of the features they update. But Steam is not the solution for everyone.

There's two ways you can get rid of the friends list chat windows...

1. Create a shortcut for Steam that includes the "-nofriendsui" parameter in it's target.

2. Stop having friends.

Steam is indeed very convenient (though occasionally annoying: like a sibling comment said, I don't need its "social" features and its popups annoy me). Note that before Steam, GOG, etc, when games were sold on discs, piracy was really more convenient. Nowadays the issue is contested, though DRM remains annoying as hell.

I do place Steam in a different category, and I own many of their games.

> Besides that, e.g. Steam is extremely convenient;

For me, Steam is basically spyware that I don't want on my laptop. It's actually a barrier to me playing games because when I (rarely) consider purchasing something then see it's in Steam, my usual reaction is not too bother. It's my computer, I don't want a 3rd party "store" managing my installs. I feel the same way about the windows store fwiw.

> installs are rapid and safe

Just like normal computer programs then?

> saves are synced across different machines

Possibly useful but not really important to me.

> mods are often well integrated with Steam Workshop, etc.

Didn't know about this one, interesting. But I've never found it hard to install mods for games in the past, without Steam.

Overall it's something I never needed and now that it's being pushed on me, I don't want it.

Steam Workshop is also part of Valve's "walled garden" strategy. Say that you bought a game off GOG and looking for some specific mods. If they aren't on Nexus, Moddb or some other website but only on Steam Workshop (where too many are), you won't be able to get access to them. So you either enter Steam's garden where they will try everything to make sure you won't leave...or you are out of luck.

I hear you, and the privacy arguments are valid. Just to add, however:

>> installs are rapid and safe > Just like normal computer programs then?

No, not really. Compared with piracy, their servers are generally much faster than torrenting (with the exception of insanely popular items on torrents). The installs are usually one-click affairs, not needing to click through 5 pages of "next", and telling it to not try to install on the tiny C:\ drive SSD which doesn't have enough space. Installed games are listed in one place, and tend to uninstall instantly, which is not the case with most normal installers. Their installer manager can also do verification of game file integrity, which is surprisingly often a solution to people's crash problems. In terms of safety, viruses are a non-issue, unlike torrented games.

I do get the privacy arguments, and tend to agree with those. A good alternative would be GoG, which has a decent catalog of games, and offers both offline, DRM-free installers (I believe this is still the case), or a Steam-style download manager for those that want the convenience. I'm unsure, but looking at the company behind it, I would argue they are "slightly less evil", and would probably make even their downloader more privacy-friendly.

But really, I think this is all really just a case of whether our needs match that of the average bloke on the street. On HN, we tend to be very privacy-conscious, but I think it's important that basically _nobody_ outside of this niche gives one thought to how Steam is invading their privacy, or how DRM might be bad, unless they have a direct bad experience (e.g. not being able to launch a game offline). It's like the whole NoJS argument for websites - 99.99% of the world doesn't care, and unless your target audience is extremely skewed in this direction, they will not care about it.

> their servers are generally much faster than torrenting

That seems unlikely, at least for "much" faster. I torrent movies occasionally and even fairly unpopular ones often max out my download speed. Unless you're downloading something obscure, bittorrent is really fast.

It's quite possible that our experiences differ. For me, Steam is the one that regularly maxes out my line (at around 300 mbits/sec), while with torrents, I normally get around 1/10th of that. It may well be my VPN provider, though it does seem to depend on popularity, choice of exit endpoint, etc.

Steam's CDN(Limelight) provides the fastest download speed in my experience (like 600Mbps, limited by my connection). Maybe very popular torrent is also faster but not to be guarantee to be.

In a game like rimworld where it can be typical to run with 30 or 50 mods at a time and swap out different ones, you need a system and steam workshop is that system.

But it's not the only system. Factorio, like Rimworld, has a huge mod scene and has it built into the game instead. Which has the advantage of working outside of Steam on a DRM-free (or not-steam) copy, which like another reply says, just makes Steam Workshop another form of lock-in on Steam.

Except the forced updates can easily break mods and managing your mods with the steam workshop is garbage. Even the terminology is bad, subscribed doesn't mean download and install to me.

Workshop isn't perfect but it's a good enough solution for most games. Especially simulator games where the authors knew how to make a sim but have no idea how to handle mods (for example)

I think you can stick to a specific version if you want with rimworld, many mods are updated fairly fast although and even if they haven't been updated tend to work anyway.

>For legit customers, the DRM is often intrusive and, because it's so complex and fiddly, often breaks in bizarre ways, giving rise to the paradoxical situation that the legit game is harder to use than the pirated game!

This is stuff you only read on certain forums. Most people don't even notice DRM

No. I remember trying to play Batman Arkham Asylum back in the day and it was a pain in the ass. First Steam. Then it wanted me to log in to some silly Windows Game system. Why? It's a single player game and I bought it via Steam, where I'm already logged in. Anyway, I couldn't register and got tons of errors until I finally managed it. Then it wanted me to download a ton of updates (almost as much as the original download) over a slow internet connection. It's a single player game, for crying out loud -- let me choose whether I want the updates! I had downloaded the game the day before, I had a couple of spare hours and wanted to play the goddamn game (spoiler: I wasn't able to that day).

Had I downloaded the warezed version, I wouldn't have needed: a- Steam, b- the Windows whatever login, c- the updates. Best experience goes to: pirated version. (Had I wanted the patches: pirates eventually release updated versions, too).

For the record, these days I do like Steam, though I far prefer GOG and DRM-free games (when I have the time to play games at all, that is. Which is almost never).

There's even repackers who can get the file size down to less than a third of the original size.

I buy all my games these days but there are people who do lots of thankless work and I'm not sure why.

Many enjoy exploring the limits of what is possible.

I can't play games that I've purchased because of DRM. In some cases because I've switched to linux and the security breaching rootkits that they want me to install don't work correctly there. In other cases it's very old games for which the authentication servers no longer exist. It's a real problem.

>Linux I feel sorry for Linux users but you must know game companies don't really care about you guys.

Steam and Proton beg to disagree. The biggest blocker "left" for games right now is the "Easy Anti Cheat" employed by titles such as Rainbow 6: Siege

Unfortunately Epic is notoriously Anti-Linux, from their CEO down. So the status of EAC under Linux is a giant question mark

That's most anti-cheats, not just Epic's. BattleEye has taken it a step further and even blocked virtual machines. Even Valve's own VAC has issues with Proton: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/3225

I use BattleEye on my gaming VM to play Mount and Blade Warband without any issues...

Watch out then. BattleEye has started banning VMs: https://www.reddit.com/r/VFIO/comments/hts1o1/be_is_banning_...

Seems to be speculation and anecdata but thanks for the link all the same, wouldn't surprise me if it turned out to be true. Disappointing. Haven't played multiplayer in a few weeks so I could be in for an unpleasant surprise next time...

That is just Valve securing their future, and even then it never goes higher than 2%.

It is quite telling that studios rather target ChromeOS or Android than any proper Linux distribution, the days of Loki are long gone.

The anti cheat R6 using is Battleye instead of EAC.

And the reason anticheat did not works with wine is mostly because they use kernel modules, which you obviously can't run a windows kernel module on linux kernel.

If you run it in a VM, most of them will just fine with it.

(But the Battleye will give you a big "fxxk you")

Of all the games companies I have ever worked for, Linux support has honestly never really come up, except, perhaps in some side "I wonder if we can" R&D project.

Granted I've only worked in smaller studios - but anecdotally, OP is correct - game companies don't care about Linux users, high expense for such a small market share.

Which is kind of funny its very difficult to pirate games on linux but easy to pay for a pretty good selection of games.

Windows has a larger selection but its also incredibly trivial to pirate.

I've never bought more games than when I had no windows install at all.

You can trivially play Windows games on Linux thanks to Steam Play and proton. I've done so since 2018. Most games that don't work are broken because of DRM. Some more are broken because of some minor thing like missing video codec but very few games actually use proprietary codecs like WMV. The rest just work.

I didn't have a good experience with it in 2020 after much fiddling I couldn't get proton to work for anything despite having reasonable success with wine and crossover.

Maybe it works better on Ubuntu.

> Most people don't even notice DRM

Just because they don't know what to blame, doesn't mean they don't notice it.

A prominent example is performance degradation with Denuvo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_DD-txK9_Q

Those who don't notice it are those who aren't aware of what DRM even means. As long as it's not multiplayer, legit repacks and cracked releases are almost always an improvement to a DRM'd release unless the game's official release (on which the cracked release is based on) itself is buggy.

>This is stuff you only read on certain forums. Most people don't even notice DRM

I can give this a "me too" to an extant. I use to be like, "Rah rah! Down with DRM!" years ago, but at some point I kinda forgot that DRM even exists—it just no longer comes up in my lifestyle at all.

This thread is an example of this. I saw the thread title and was like, "Oh right...DRM and cracking games...right right right..." that is a thing that

> Only legitimate buyers lose.

The publishers and developers apparently also lose...

Previously on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15319476 EU commisions a study on the effects of piracy on media sells. The results are not what they expected so they try and hide them. This is "leaked" by a member of parliament.

According to that study, specifically for game piracy, every copy of the game that was pirated resulted in 1.24 copies sold, meaning that effective DRM actually reduces sales.

So the only ones who don't lose are those making the DRM.

> It's definitely anticonsumer.

If you assign the value lost to piracy as $0 (i.e pirates wouldn't buy) or you assume any extra money earned by less piracy is never going to benefit consumers in lower prices, then your argument holds.

If twice as many paying customers means half the prices, then there is a benefit to consumers. The truth is somewhere between these two extremes of course.

But yes - once the DRM is completely cracked, the game should at least be patched to remove the DRM. That would give a window of N days without making the game worse forever.

I believe the cracked games are on sufficiently obscure websites to be a deterrent to regular users. So maybe 10% of those people that would otherwise not have paid will just buy a DRM game instead of cracking it.

One could even argue that it is pro consumer by making sure the revenue will go back to paying consumers in the form of additional content, instead of paying for players who didn't buy it.

This is just one piece of anecdata, but I'm perfectly capable of pirating games yet haven't in years. I buy everything on steam or gog because it's so convenient. The last time I pirated any video games was suprise surprise when I wasn't making enough income to buy them.

TV series on the other hand I still pirate to this day (if they aren't on the couple of streaming services I sub to), because buying them is way too complicated (even impossible with a large portion of shows that aren't current, and a fair number of current shows too).

Movies are a mixed bag - grabbing cheap dvds or blu rays of pretty much anything is easy online so I usually do that, but I imagine if I preferred digital media or watched enough movies for my physical collection to be unwieldy I'd resort to piracy because buying digital copies of movies is just as complicated as TV.

Give me "Steam for Movies and TV" or a streaming service that aggregates licenses from everyone, and doesn't only host the content that they think will be most popular and I'll probably stop pirating those too.

It's the unreliability I can't tolerate. I don't pirate pc games because when I buy something on Steam it will always be available for me to download, even if a licensing problem means other people can't buy it.

With streaming, who knows? Maybe Netflix loses the rights and it disappears. Maybe their encode is garbage and it ruins the dark scenes. So, I still pay for streaming services but anything I actually care about I download and archive.

> Maybe Netflix loses the rights and it disappears.

That is interesting because it happened to me in the most annoying way possible:

I was watching Donnie Darko, a rather obscure movie that requires (or at least for me required) a bit of brainpower to watch. So I watched the first half of it and planned to watch the remainder the next day. Come the next day, and where is the movie? Nowhere to be found.

Hah. I had bookmarked Donnie Darko because, while I had already watched it (good movie, even better soundtrack!) I wanted to watch it again with my wife. I swear it was available the week before I finally decided to rewatch it, then of course it was gone when I wanted it.

(By the way, I know this doesn't actually happen, but I swear Netflix sticks in my bookmarks movies and shows I never bookmarked!)

That happened to me with Stargate SG-1. Was going through it on Netflix and suddenly it disappeared. Eventually resurfaced on Amazon Prime but the video quality is garbage on it for some reason.

Prime Video quality seems breathtakingly bad to me as well. Even their "high quality, 8GB per hour" setting looks remarkably worse than a 4GB h264 rip, to say nothing of HEVC.

I actually didn't mean video quality on Amazon Prime in general. For example, we just got done watching Mr. Robot on Amazon Prime and I had no issues with the video, personally. But Stargate SG-1 was particularly bad, for some reason. Worse than SD, lots of artifacts.

I was mid-way through watching the newly released (on Netflix) S2 of "Derry Girls" and they deleted it mere days after making it available. I was annoyed. Turns out they had messed up the rights.

https://www.radiotimes.com/news/on-demand/2020-07-14/derry-g...

> when I buy something on Steam it will always be available for me to download

At least, until Steam goes offline, or maybe your account gets lost. I for one still use Steam, but I do wonder if I'll be able to play my favorite games in 20 years.

A plain EXE from itch, GOG, or some other source will work as long as compatible hardware lives on.

a key feature missing from netflix and amazon prime (and presumably the others, I haven't tried them) is the ability to force a certain quality for the stream. AFAIK, they don't even indicate in the UI whether your stream is 480p, 1080p, or 2160p. youtube has had this feature for at least a decade and even most porn sites seem to have it now.

if this is somehow "too complicated" for the average user, just make the default an "auto" setting that does whatever it does now and bury it in a menu somewhere.

Same boat for movies. I used to use icefilms or torrents extensively for every film. But now my first stop is Justwatch to find out what service has the film I want to watch, and then I log into that service and buy it.

Admittedly some services, like RedBox, are more frustrating than torrenting though.

Another big deterrent to pirating games is the possibility of it installing malware in your system.

That danger is almost exclusive to software piracy. The probability of being infected by an evil pdf, mp3 or mp4 is really low if you know what you're doing (i.e. updating and using decent software).

An effective DRM technique would be to spread a version of the game without DRM but with lots of malware in it then.

Adding my voice to this argument: Xbox live stopped my pirating simply by providing a more easily accessible alternative and with prices that are competitive enough for me to prefer to pay for games rather than getting through the hassle of pirating.

This included RDR2. Totally worth it.

Cracked games websites are as obscure as The Pirate Bay, i.e. not very. Plus everyone who downloads a pirated game points his/her friends to the site, or directly shares the downloaded files. Even if you weren't aware of where to get warez, your friends will be.

> One could even argue that it is pro consumer

One really couldn't. It punishes buyers with encumbered software while merely delaying pirates a short while. Pirates end up with the better experience, so...

> Cracked games websites are as obscure as The Pirate Bay, i.e. not very. Plus everyone who downloads a pirated game points his/her friends to the site, or directly shares the downloaded files. Even if you weren't aware of where to get warez, your friends will be.

you might be surprised at how obscure torrents have become outside of tech circles. when I graduated college (2017), basically no one outside of the comp sci department understood how to use torrents (or even knew what they were). this would have been unthinkable when I was in high school. everyone and their mother seemed to be torrenting music and movies.

I even tried explaining how to use them to people, but they would object that the school would catch them anyway. when I explained how VPNs work, they complained that $6/month was too expensive for a poor college student. nevermind that they're already paying for prime, netflix, and hulu subscriptions every month.

I think there are two main reasons for this. a lot of people have laptops with the base storage option, often a 256GB or even 128GB ssd. phones have even less storage. this makes it unappealing to keep a local library of music and especially movies (plus now that everyone has a phone and a laptop, syncing your collection becomes annoying). second, I think video and especially music streaming services have actually succeeded in making their products just convenient enough that people don't feel like figuring out how to use torrent trackers and clients.

>as obscure as The Pirate Bay, i.e. not very

Blocked in Europe, China, Australia, ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countries_blocking_access_to_T...

... and I'm sure there are no ways around that, right? Wink, wink.

opening a pdf is a difficult task for most people

exaggerating slightly but you know what I mean

All it takes is one of your friends who knows how to. Then they'll share with you. And much like opening PDFs, this isn't rocket science.

The base knowledge here is people who know how to install and play pretty complex games. These people go to impossible lengths to install video drivers and troubleshoot problems with their computers; I'm sure they won't find this particular task very difficult.

All of these blockades are simple ISP-level DNS redirections. Simply changing your DNS to google or cloudflare or similar resolves this quite nicely, no VPN needed.

Just as recent as yesterday I accessed TPB while connected to a VPN server located in Sweden.

I don't think it's the obscurity of the website that is doing it these days. I have plenty of money so I haven't downloaded warez for a long time. But if I were even tempted the possibility of getting hit with embedded ransomware would completely deter me, my multiple offsite backups notwithstanding.

For gamers, it means that the studio may be able to afford to release a sequel to their favourite games

For pirates, it means they either have to wait until it's cracked, or buy a legit copy

Don't act like every gamer is automatically a pirate, millions of people are perfectly happy to pay for games and want to see their favourite studios continue

> Don't act like every gamer is automatically a pirate, millions of people are perfectly happy to pay for games and want to see their favourite studios continue

I'm not sure where you got the idea I said this. I don't think every gamer is automatically a pirate, though a lot of people do follow the path of least resistance.

I pay for my videogames. I support indie devs that don't bundle DRM crap with their games. For AAA DRM-ridden games, I simply don't buy or play them. (To be honest, I don't have a lot of time to play any games these days).

DRM is anticonsumer for legal buyers. It gives them a worse experience than the people who play pirated copies.

Have you ever encountered any DRM using M/o/Vfuscator (compiler that only produces mov instructions) or REpsych (psychological warfare against reverse engineers)? The DEF CON talk about REpsych is pretty hilarious and worth watching.

https://github.com/xoreaxeaxeax/movfuscator https://github.com/xoreaxeaxeax/REpsych

You may be interested in the demovfuscator - https://github.com/kirschju/demovfuscator

Unfortunately I have encountered neither in the real world, although I have defeated both in CTFs before.

The defeats sound interesting, have you documented those anywhere?

I haven't personally, but you will find multiple writeups googling for "movfuscator ctf writeup" etc.

Genuinely interested -- what type of job/career involves breaking DRM for a living?

White hat I presume.

Wait, how do you make a living from that? Like publishers need you to break their stuff out so they can resell it long after the developer is gone or something?

Organizations that apply 3rd party DRM to their products often want independent verification that the DRM functions as intended (there's a lot of snake-oil), and a quantification of how much time/effort it takes to break the DRM.

Wow. Kind of like red-team hackers testing the security of their website or whatever. Sounds like a dream job for the right person...a "drmcometru" if you will ;)

Dream job. If I thought I could get paid doing that I would have been set at 17 years old. Now I'm 38 and still dream of my reversing days. :)

Very cool, very cool. Thank you!

The user who answered you isn't the one you were asking (it's still a possible answer).

Did you get mixed up? I see

    - drmcometru
      - me
        - drmcometru
          - me

By the way, aren't you the AutoModerator guy on Reddit and also, the /r/Games moderator or something. Cool beans, dude! You made some god-tier product there.

Whoops, that's embarrassing.

I quit working at Reddit a few years ago and don't do much there any more, but yes, that's me. Thanks!

... Yes it is

Another answer is that some companies need the DRM broken on software where the original developer's company may no longer even exist, yet they rely on the (often extremely old) software for their critical production line equipment, whose replacement costs would far exceed that of breaking the DRM and sometimes "porting" the software to new hardware (i.e. breaking the DRM may be a first step.) This is often the realm of hardware dongles and such.

Yes, I'm curious about what kind of (legal) paying job needs that sort of skill set.

You should try strip away the current Denevuo, that is the big challenge, current versions nobody seems able to crack for some time.

Do you think there's any hope? Because I've lost all of it.

> I work on anti-DRM techniques for a living.

Who's paying for anti-DRM work?

Is your company hiring?

I interviewed with Arxan. I've been generally impressed with their stuff.

Was it an interesting interview? Sounds like it would be an interesting place to work.

It was a typical startup: somewhat disorganized, but with some interesting technical questions.

I didn't know nearly as much about reversing back when I interviewed as I did now. Most of the questions were on the order of "come up with better ideas than we have", which IMHO is probably not the best way to interview.

I'm also interested in what was impressive with them. STORY TIME! Tell us a story!

This type of DRM can eat something crazy like >50% CPU when playing. Dense dynamic recompilation, running inside obfuscated VM, etc.

https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/282924-denuvo-really-does...

Worked with Arxan's technology for a bit. Not surprised it is getting to the point where cracker's don't have the time to break it.

Embracing the point that everything can be broken eventually, the focus becomes just making it take a long time, such that it is not economical, or simply too time consuming "for fun". Arxan's toolkit includes peppering custom checks everywhere in the code, including mechanisms so these checks don't have the same signature and can't be searched for easily once one is found. Further, there are "silent ones", which most of the time don't do anything, but at some point will activate. This makes it so you can think you've broken the protection, and then e.g. one hour into playing the game it randomly seg-faults (crashes with an error indistinguishable from a normal bug, through deliberate memory corruption), or flags your hardware as using a cracked version and blacklists it. Imagine trying to figure out if memory corruption was on purpose or a normal bug when the corruption happened 1,000,000,000 instructions ago by a section of code that is completely innocuous and just had an off-by-1 error introduced via some index calculation. Now imagine there are 500,000 of these little silent/time-delay traps sprinkled all over the code.

In that way it can be nearly impossible to know if you've fully cracked the game. I mean you can really take the long-con with these things, and let it run for weeks, or even just never notify the user and hit them with a blacklist. Imagine playing a game for 100 hours and then out of nowhere having your progress wiped - pretty harsh lesson if you were invested in it.

Then there is the binary + in-memory encryption, and customization of protection for every install. This was one of the holy grails as I understood it - you could make the software such that the protection system is completely custom for every install of the software, which makes binary patching useless. This would be difficult when distributing the software on discs, but, and this is a key point, trivial these days where games are downloaded. It is easy to custom generate binaries for everyone. This can do things like use a custom key based on your HWID that is literally necessary to decrypt portions of the game code. There is no way around having the correct key for your hardware to literally decrypt and run the code, which through other techniques can be made custom and further checked for authenticity, making it impossible to simply get the decrypted code and patch it in to other installs. Related techniques can be used to determine if you're running a binary that was decrypted on a different machine, and that is before getting into code that is custom-encrypted and decrypted in-memory at runtime based on your current HWID. You're probably thinking you can reason your way around this, but trust me, it has all been thought of before. The closest you could probably come is forcing cracked clients to all run in some kind of identical virtual machine, which is going to be shit for playing a AAA game even if it worked and no protections were able to figure out they were running in a virtual machine, which they can.

The list goes on for this tech, and while no single tech is super effective, when they are all put together, it adds up to a knot that very few people will have the motivation or monetary incentive to sort out, or even ability to in a relevant amount of time after the games release. By the time they figure it the next update could be released, and all that is left is to look back in misery at the time of their life they wasted cracking an old version of a game.

So it's basically uncrackable. Understood.