It really makes me sad that people are even willing to create these systems. It would haunt me forever if I took part in writing something like this.

One sad lesson I learned early on in my software career is, for every ethical stand you are willing to take as a developer, there's always some other developer who is willing set aside ethics or has a different set of ethics. Software needs some kind of baseline ethical standard, like a Hippocratic Oath. A line that we "shall not cross."

I remember my first job out of college, I was asked to write code that caused our software to cheat at a certain industry benchmark. I was very junior, but still realized it was wrong. I finally worked up the courage to tell my boss that I had an ethical problem with doing this and wouldn't do it, and to my surprise, he said "Oh, that's fine! We treat software developers well here. I'll just give you a different bug ticket to work on!"

Jim, a few cubicles down from me had no problem writing the benchmark-cheating code. It's kind of futile.

>> https://www.acm.org/code-of-ethics

It is worthwhile for us to read and reflect on the ACM Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct.*

* https://www.acm.org/code-of-ethics

That one requires a lot of free work. I believe that requiring others to work for free is morally wrong.

Well, someone develops software for nukes, citizen surveillance systems, fraud schemes and technologies for scamming people out of their retirement savings.

If you consider mechanical and chemical engineering there are also people who develop nerve gas agents (usually deployed against civilians), butterfly mines, cluster munitions and incendiary artillery rounds ready to burn your enemies cities to the ground.

Some anti cheating / piracy software that "arguably works" is pretty tame compared to that.

As an iRacing customer, I am glad the anti-cheat they use, exists.

Otherwise, I would be subjected to shitty racers who would ruin every race in the first lap, and cheaters who compete on hacks instead of talent.

I am also sure there are equivalent bad apples in every single gaming platform.

Anti-cheat and DRM are not the same thing, and having community servers with admins greatly reduces the need for anti-cheat. So does not having rewards for winning other than winning.

Some crazy rose tinted glasses here. Back in the CS 1.6 and CS:S days community admins would only catch straight up rage hacks, most aimbots and triggerbots would fly under the radar unless caught by clientside anti-cheat.

But sure, we can pretend that cheaters don’t matter as long as it’s not blatantly obvious to all other players.

We used vote kick to get rid of them. The server would clear quickly if the vote failed so it wasn't a huge issue.

But there was no way for you to know if that person was just really good or using cheats with vaguely legit settings.

>as well as "anti-cheat" protection

How do you solve cheating problem though? When I sit down playing a multiplayer game I don't want to see anyone cheating, botting etc. It's not fun.

Yes it's a cat and mouse game between the cheat makers and the devs and anti cheat solutions are not perfect but without some anti cheat system most online games would be totally unplayable.

I agree with you, but the rise of anti-cheat protection is correlated with the decline of community management of multiplayer titles. Most games now rely entirely on matchmaking playlists managed by a "live service" team, whereas it used to be that communities would run their own servers with their own rules and have admins around to kick/ban troublesome players, including cheaters.

A good netcode that does not trust the client already gets you most of the way. Games developed for consoles first trust the client to a large extent, so the PC ports are easy to write cheats for.

Remove gold farming and competitive sweatlord ladders from your game. Majority of cheats exist to make money, remove their income and they will leave.

When I played Quake 3 and other games on its engine twenty years ago, they didn't have any of that stuff, but people still aimbotted and wallhacked.

Some people just like to cheat for the sake of it.

iRacing installs an anti-cheating service which is not Denuvo.

It works fine as far as I know.

Reminder that Denuvo is not an anti-cheat, it's DRM.

Reminder not needed.

Many of these solutions, both DRM and anti-cheat, work using the principle of checking if the user is using the original unmodified files, and checking if the user is not also modifying the memory of the running program with some tool.

DRM has the additional goal of restricting who can use even those unmodified, genuine files, whereas anticheat does not.

Stuff like Denuvo was normal back when games where sold on floppies… What is this “normalization” you’re talking about?

There was nothing close to Denuvo when games were sold on floppies. I'd happily go back to a time when we had to worry about code wheels or finding the first word on a certain page of the manual instead of having your entire system infected with malware giving access to your personal data/files and having your machine's performance crippled.

That’s not what Denuvo does.

The only meaningful difference between Denuvo and floppy-DRM is that Denuvo employs a bit more sophisticated obfuscation scheme.

> The only meaningful difference between Denuvo and floppy-DRM is that Denuvo employs a bit more sophisticated obfuscation scheme.

Funny, I don't remember any code wheel having kernel level access to my system... They also never caused performance issues https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/282924-denuvo-really-does...

Ah, you’re talking about Denuvo anti-cheat which is a separate product from the same company. Not the “core” Denuvo product.

"Normalization" is a stretch, most games that have Denuvo are generally horrible by themselves which is why publishers who know it lock it out so that less people realize they have paid for garbage before buying it. The stalwarts of today's PC gaming industry like Valve, CDPR, Devolver, FromSoft etc. have yet to feel the need to rely on such cheap tricks.

Well Empress does seem to be a total lunatic, but they have been cracking denuvo games recently. eg. dying light 2 and deathloop

That "worst part" sounds like the best part from the perspective of someone who has put a lot of time, money, and effort into their game and would like to make some kind of profit.

It's the best part for execs who think piracy cuts into legitimate game sales (it doesn't). And for those who want every single copy to come with a giant amount of bloat and spyware so that a fraction of a % of people who weren't going to give them money anyways don't get to play.

> It's the best part for execs who think piracy cuts into legitimate game sales (it doesn't).

I’ve bought games because there were no cracks available, I don’t think I’ve ever bought a game after pirating it.

There’s no way I’m alone in this.

Meanwhile, back when I had time to game heavily I would, as a matter of course, pirate every single game on PC because the experience was pretty much always superior, but I would also pre-order/buy on release the same games. I didn't pirate because I didn't want to pay for it, I pirated because I didn't want to deal with a single-player games requiring an always-on Internet connection and running kernel modules in Windows to do piracy/cheat detection, degrading system/game performance, and violating my privacy and the security of my system.

I own literally thousands of games on Steam, and thousands more outside of Steam. I also relentlessly pirated every game I wanted to play for decades. The way to "fix" piracy is by companies providing a superior user experience, not by beating their paying customers with sticks.

Sure, but you can’t seriously argue that there is a significant audience of people who’d refrain from buying games if they couldn’t pirate them.

I think there's a significant audience that simply wouldn't play games at all if they couldn't pirate them, because they can't realistically afford to buy them. In that case, I don't think piracy costs sales, it just allows involvement in a cultural phenomenon and art that would otherwise be inaccessible. I leave it up to the reader to decide if that's a positive outcome or not.

I'm sure you're not alone, but AFAIK every time it's actually been studied piracy appears to actually improve overall sales. Given the number of those studies that were leaked because they were run by DRM-happy companies, I'm inclined to believe them. So: You might not be the only one, but statistically your conclusion, perhaps counter-intuitively, doesn't hold out.

What do you think is the gold standard study on this subject?

I’ve seen this claim repeated often, but never with good evidence.

It also feel ripe for confounding factors. It seems likely that popular games will both sell well and be aggressively pirated. I'm not sure how obw could control this well enough to tease out cause and effect.

I half-agree with you.

The lack of availability of a pirate version of a game increases sales. This has been observed for many very popular games. Not so much for small and unknown ones.

At the same time, I have paid for games when they became available in Steam, years after I have played them, so I disagree on that point.

Sure, but Denuvo is pretty much exclusively used by the very popular games.

> At the same time, I have paid for games when they became available in Steam, years after I have played them, so I disagree on that point.

Presumably for vastly less money than they were charging at launch?

Yeah, I would say I paid about half of their original price.

> I’ve bought games because there were no cracks available, I don’t think I’ve ever bought a game after pirating it.

Plenty of others have pirated games and then paid for them. I often pirate games after paying for them. Piracy enables people to try games in genres they aren't willing to take a chance on at full price, it serves as a form of advertising giving people a chance to get into a game or franchise they might never have come across otherwise, and plenty of people (myself included) have refused to buy or play games until a crack is available.

>Plenty of others have pirated games and then paid for them.

I doubt a meaningful amount of people did this, but I’d love to see evidence to the contrary.

>and plenty of people (myself included) have refused to buy or play games until a crack is available.

Well, yeah, but it’s HN and we have all kinds of crazy people here who aren’t very representative of the overall market.

> I doubt a meaningful amount of people did this, but I’d love to see evidence to the contrary.

Multiple studies have shown that pirates are often the best customers. (see https://torrentfreak.com/pirates-spend-much-more-money-on-mu...)

It makes sense. If somebody is supper passionate about games, or music, or movies they might pirate to get early releases, alternate versions, and to try new things. Collectors may even want to keep their purchased media untouched/unopened or may just want easy access to their purchases.

I've pirated things I've purchased just because it was faster than ripping a CD myself or even going into the next room to take a DVD off the shelf and using the player.

> Multiple studies have shown that pirates are often the best customers. (see https://torrentfreak.com/pirates-spend-much-more-money-on-mu...)

But that’s a completely different claim, no?

Also, Torrentfreak is horrible quality agenda-pushing blogspam. I wouldn’t take their interpretation of a survey of unknown quality (which they didn’t even bother to link to) at face value.

And if we were to do that, perhaps the best explanation is that more technically oriented pirates were more likely to spend money on streaming services in 2016 than the average person. Perhaps piracy was just a proxy for tech savvy?

Tell that to CD Projekt Red, Valve, Devolver Digital and scores of other good game developers and publishers (both big and small) who have had no problems at all selling their games with minimal to no DRM.

DRM today is largely used by bad publishers to prevent buyers from realizing how trash their games are before paying for them.