The Denuvo DRM Thread

[Valky]

Funny how valve cocksuckers defended their drm by saying shit like securom went away thanks to steam, and now we have denuvo as well as multiple storefronts that impose their own form of DRM.
Great news to see that a pirate version has removed drm entirely - something that people can't buy a version of lol - but in the end it's still on a forgettable fast food video game from ubisoft.

 

[Sentinel]

Funny how valve cocksuckers defended their drm by saying shit like securom went away thanks to steam, and now we have denuvo as well as multiple storefronts that impose their own form of DRM.
Great news to see that a pirate version has removed drm entirely - something that people can't buy a version of lol - but in the end it's still on a forgettable fast food video game from ubisoft.

How are those contradictory? The first companies to use Denuvo were companies that were outside of Steam, namely EA with FIFA and Dragon Age.

 

[DalekFlay]

I think the point is more that Steam hasn't prevented other DRMs from existing and being used often (for AAA games anyway).

 

[Sentinel]

Of course not. No one has ever claimed that Steam prevents other DRMs from existing or has done so. It certainly helps make other forms of DRM less popular, but by itself it has no power or intent to weed them out.

 

[Raghar]

The stutterfest would be a pretty good gotcha if he provided proof that he actually ran the corresponding benchmarks multiple times in each version.

AC: Origins

DRM-protected

Run 1) 114sec
Run 2) 64sec

DRM-free

Run 1) 29sec
Run 2) 29sec

Looks like he did run it at least twice.

Assuming first time it loaded into cache, the difference is between running game from SSD, and running game again when DRM didn't killed whole cache.
Second game simply shows that when there is no DRM, the game is basically streamed without delay.

Even games without Denuvo can be a complete stutterfest if it doesn't properly preload all the needed shaders.

I assume game developers are quite capable. And we are comparing game without DRM. Single game same shaders.

 

[T. Reich]

Steam is a DRM platform as well, just a relatively mild one.
Doesn't make it less annoying.

 

[Hirato]

The stutterfest would be a pretty good gotcha if he provided proof that he actually ran the corresponding benchmarks multiple times in each version.

AC: Origins

DRM-protected

Run 1) 114sec
Run 2) 64sec

DRM-free

Run 1) 29sec
Run 2) 29sec

Looks like he did run it at least twice.

Assuming first time it loaded into cache, the difference is between running game from SSD, and running game again when DRM didn't killed whole cache.
Second game simply shows that when there is no DRM, the game is basically streamed without delay.

Even games without Denuvo can be a complete stutterfest if it doesn't properly preload all the needed shaders.

I assume game developers are quite capable. And we are comparing game without DRM. Single game same shaders.

I believe those were the times the games took to get to the main menu, not to actually get in game.
Most games don't load the full rendering pipeline at this stage, but rather do it when presenting the loading screen when attempting to go ingame.

Poorly coded games won't do that, and instead stutter like very badly until you've played for a few minutes, so it had a chance to encounter and compile the bulk of the shaders you need.
For comparison, consider how CEMU or RPCS3 perform when you play a game for the first time.
I wouldn't put it past ubisoft to not set up the pipeline correctly for DirectX.

Heck, this kind of thing is a big reason why Valve has started distributing downloadable shader caches through steam, so it can precompile these shaders at launch instead of letting the game stutter due to compiling them.

 

[Hirato]

This overlord chap made another one.
I'd like to point you to 12:00, as he included Gears 5 there which includes a CPU metric that is really useful in showing the actual overhead garbage like Denuvo has.

As you can see there, framerate differences are minimal.
However, you can also see, the time needed to run game logic has increased quite significantly.

There are a few ways to read this:
1: Game Logic: Requires 17% more CPU power to compute
2. Game Logic: maximum potential performance is down by 14%
3: CPU Frametime: each frame requires 15% more CPU power
4: CPU Frametime: Potential performance is down 12%
Difference between the two is that one includes sending instructions to the GPU, the other doesn't.


Now if only he had the good sense to produce some numbers like these for a few Denuvo titles...
That's the kind of metric I want to see, and it's the only actually useful metric for measuring the impact of DRM - at least until DRM starts running on our GPUs too.

 

[Norfleet]

What is great about the AC: Origins crack is that it's based upon the latest game version executable. Tards can't fall back on "b-but the game lacks the most recent patches, doesn't prove a thing!!" argument. I mean, why the heck would you even defend it in the first place? Mind-boggling.

This seems like an absolutely terrible argument if their premise is "the DRM has no statistically significant impact, the difference is all in having the most recent patches"...except the "recent patches" made the game WORSE.

 

[BlackAdderBG]

This overlord chap made another one.
I'd like to point you to 12:00, as he included Gears 5 there which includes a CPU metric that is really useful in showing the actual overhead garbage like Denuvo has.

As you can see there, framerate differences are minimal.
However, you can also see, the time needed to run game logic has increased quite significantly.

There are a few ways to read this:
1: Game Logic: Requires 17% more CPU power to compute
2. Game Logic: maximum potential performance is down by 14%
3: CPU Frametime: each frame requires 15% more CPU power
4: CPU Frametime: Potential performance is down 12%
Difference between the two is that one includes sending instructions to the GPU, the other doesn't.


Now if only he had the good sense to produce some numbers like these for a few Denuvo titles...
That's the kind of metric I want to see, and it's the only actually useful metric for measuring the impact of DRM - at least until DRM starts running on our GPUs too.

I agree, what is the point of making your GPU bottlenecked to test CPU heavy DRM . Either he is hiding something or just stupid. Drop the settings, put weaker CPU and see if there is actual difference.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

I agree, what is the point of making your GPU bottlenecked to test CPU heavy DRM . Either he is hiding something or just stupid.

I'm gonna go with stupid, because if you watch the video he states "since our numbers were indisputable, peasants used semantics to split hairs".

 

[racofer]

FitGirl is mad as hell:

NEED FOR SPEED: HEAT P2P CRACK IS ACTUALLY A STOLEN CODEX ONE. AND WHY IT’S BAD

Yesterday ShivShubh (CorePack team, currently almost non-active, so don’t blame the whole group) released a P2P crack for Need for Speed: Heat. In the attachment he has added that this crack was sent to him by some “private friend” (citing: “This crack was made possible entirely with the help from a very private friend so credits to him but his identity I will not disclose.”). Well, no.

I was happy in the beginning. I had the repack ready since the game official release, and that 16.2 GB were sitting there for 1.5 months already. I quickly verified the crack files and then ran it on three PCs I have access to. On my home Windows 7 it worked. But on the other two Windows 10 PCs it crashed after a few seconds in the task manager. That was strange. I’ve experienced similar behavior before, with older DeltaT cracks, CPY’s Octopath Traveler, some CODEX cracks. It always ment Denuvo triggers in place.

And then I took a closer look at the crack files itself. And they looked very familiar to all latest CODEX Denuvo cracks. Yep, even the main crack file has the denuvo64.dll as a name and it is almost the same size as last CODEX Borderlands 3 crack. But that doesn’t mean anything, right? Wrong. If you open that DLL in CFF Explorer and go to Exports table, you will see a phrase “DenuvoIsFinished”, which is a CODEX “watermark” for all of their D cracks. You can find it in the said BL3 crack as well.

What is different though is the compressibility of those files. NFSH dll can be compressed to less than 100 KB, while other CODEX cracks are almost uncompressible due to custom protection/compression they use to protect their Denuvo findings from competitive groups and Irdeto, the owner of Denuvo.

Just to be 100% sure I asked a few renowned members of cs.rin.ru about that crack (who know stuff about cracks, debugging and so on) – they all confirmed my suspicions. So currently the situation looks like this to me.

CODEX did their crack on November 15 (timestamp on a file) and started testing it. It’s a major group, they have to have at least a dozen of testers on different setups to check their cracks. It’s almost a New Year now – 1.5 months has passed. The only reason of them NOT releasing this crack is a bad state of it. Not working on two of my machines just confirms the theory.

Unfortunately, one of their testers wasn’t as good as they thought. And he/she leaked outside the group. I don’t know when it happened, but the tester who did it is a complete fucking idiot.

Not only he leaked what had to stay private, but he leaked the unprotected crack. Which is now in hands of Denuvo engineers – and trust me, they are not dumb, they will make all their best to NOT allow those methods to work anymore. So, my dear tester idiot and ShivShubh (who confirmed that he shared that crack with COREPACK TESTERS before releasing the crack to public). You both just made Denuvo stronger. And nobody will tell when CODEX or CPY or anyone else will make their Denuvo cracks again, if ever.

Congratulations.

Nobody did better job for this DRM than you two. You can now go and apply for a position in Irdeto.

And you, my fellow pirates, let’s just hope that anti-Denuvo war will continue after that huge blow. But don’t expect miracles now. Even if it’s a New Year Eve. And yes, even if the crack would be perfect, after I’ve discovered it’s been stolen I would never make a repack based on it. Yep, I’m not a scene, but without those guys repackers are nothing and every single group deserves respect for their efforts.

 

[Sentinel]

Who cares about this tranny seething. His repacks are fucking shit and take longer to install than it takes me to download and install the regular releases.

 

[flyingjohn]

Who cares about this tranny seething. His repacks are fucking shit and take longer to install than it takes me to download and install the regular releases.

Also is a intel shill.
Russian repacks make her look like a very slow snail in terms of time and cpu usage.

 

[Black]

her

You fell for hir lies.

 

[CyberModuled]

Who cares about this tranny seething. His repacks are fucking shit and take longer to install than it takes me to download and install the regular releases.

You don't have to care about the tranny itself seething. You should care about the fact that the exploit CODEX (not directly related to FitGirl) has been consistently using for their bypassed cracks is now open in the air to the point where it's very likely Denuvo engineers will fix it meaning less cracks in a timely manner.

 

[Valky]

That just means a new equation to solve and a new exploit to make. A scene crack is just as exploitable to reverse engineering as the DRM it is made to patch, I'm sure the people making the exploits know this.
Every single person working at Denuvo is human scum and deserves a public flogging, they are an enemy against mankind.

 

[Sentinel]

Who cares about this tranny seething. His repacks are fucking shit and take longer to install than it takes me to download and install the regular releases.

You don't have to care about the tranny itself seething. You should care about the fact that the exploit CODEX (not directly related to FitGirl) has been consistently using for their bypassed cracks is now open in the air to the point where it's very likely Denuvo engineers will fix it meaning less cracks in a timely manner.

Sounds like nothing will change then. Codex hasn't cracked anything that mattered in a timely manner in a very long time. Besides, Denuvo and companies of its kind have people infiltrated in these cracking circles, you don't really need leaks for them to catch up to cracker code. Even if they didn't have insider info, they always investigate released cracks, so codex obviously knows that everytime they release a crack it's back to the trenches for 3 months to crack a new version.

 

[CyberModuled]

Sounds like nothing will change then. Codex hasn't cracked anything that mattered in a timely manner in a very long time. Besides, Denuvo and companies of its kind have people infiltrated in these cracking circles, you don't really need leaks for them to catch up to cracker code. Even if they didn't have insider info, they always investigate released cracks, so codex obviously knows that everytime they release a crack it's back to the trenches for 3 months to crack a new version.

Even though in recent memory they've been the only ones really doing it at this point (especially when CPY have been mostly dormant this year)? Besides they did Fallen Order, Code Vein, and BL3 within a week (BL3's version they cracked was the Oct 24th patch and the bypass was released on the 31st) and a few others in recent memory. Also keep in mind that they were the ones that recently made the first iteration of the complete removal of Denuvo with AC:O which while late is at least some form of progress to actually push drm free exes.

 

[karoliner]

corepack is dead

It's time to say goodbye. I wish it hadn't come to this but sadly it has. We have had a bumpy ride over the years and as a team we tried our best to keep things going as smoothly as possible.It wasn't perfect, we have had many problems, most of them were caused by our own mistakes and incompetence back in the day. Which in the end, decided to come back and haunt us.

I don't wanna hide the fact that sometimes administration didn't see eye to eye and the inability to make compromises made things worse. We're tired of apologizing all the time, even for the things that happened long before my time, to which I had no control over. I guess the recent incident with NFS Heat put the final nail in the coffin, so we've decided to close the doors forever and say goodbye to everyone.

We would like to thank all the staff members, for doing such a great job managing the community, Programmers (especially Razor12911, Gupta, Jiva Newstone), Repack Testers, Donors, Designers, VIPs, Uploaders for your priceless contributions towards the CorePacks community over the years. Finally, our members, you guys kept the community going, you gave us a purpose to keep going on, you were the ones that made us different from other groups. So thank you so much for being a part of CorePacks Community.

I would like to clarify something which i was going to avoid writing here. But i think it's necessary, it will help us go with our minds at ease.I have seen people trying to make it look like we ran this site for financial purposes. That's not true. We had zero income from this site. We had zero advertisements on our site. I paid for hosting, domains out of my own pocket. The little amount of money that came from donors went directly into purchasing game accounts for offline activation (CorePack Deadnuvo program). The money from Knight's link protector on his repack topics went towards renewing seed-boxes. We didn't make any fortune from running the site as some people have often claimed.
And please note that shutting down the site has nothing to do with other rival repack groups, so please don't put any blame on them.

Now to answer the question that most of you asked.
NO, CorePack will never come back. This is not a temporary goodbye. The site will be closed forever.

The site will stay online for 24-48 hours for you to collect anything you want.

Cheers and Thank you!
corepacks@protonmail.ch

 

[karoliner]

Devil May Cry 5 Update Removes Denuvo DRM

A Devil May Cry 5 update has removed one of the restrictions that could have kept PC players from enjoying it to the fullest. The latest patch has taken Denuvo DRM out of the game. The Steam product page has also been updated to reflect that the anti-tamper has been removed.

As a reminder, back in March 2019, a version of Devil May Cry 5 PC appeared briefly that didn’t have Denuvo. As Eurogamer pointed out at the time, there is a notable performance difference between one that does or doesn’t have DRM enabled.

Even with Denuvo in the PC version, Devil May Cry 5 has been performing well for Capcom. The company recently said that it “performed well” at its February 4, 2020 third-quarter investor’s meeting. It was also listed as having sold 2.1 million copies back in May 2019.

 

[Valky]

Capcom has no idea what they are doing when it comes to PC. Sometimes the port is good, sometimes it's shit, sometimes they put denuvo in, sometimes they release on GOG.

 

[Goi~Yaas~Dinn]

Didn't Capcom go through a major corporate upheaval about 5-7 years ago anyway, though? I seem to remember "bankruptcy" being the word on everyone's lips regarding them for a bit, before they got their corporate assets sorted out.

 

[Urthor]

Capcom has no idea what they are doing when it comes to PC. Sometimes the port is good, sometimes it's shit, sometimes they put denuvo in, sometimes they release on GOG.

It's more that under Capcom the independent studio heads have a lot of power, including over Denuvo but also other areas. Just no company wide policies about anything.

 

[CyberModuled]

With Capcom, it's fair to say at this point the general pattern for them is to release a new AAA game with Denuvo and then remove it once they're done with support. Happened with RE7 after its last DLC dropped (late 2017) and removal (early 2019 right before REmake 2), REmake 2 quite recently (along with recently adding it onto REmake 3's store page), and now DMC5 because they're done with any support of it until a potential Special Edition (which will probably be an entirely new version similar to 4 to 4SE). Exceptions to the rules would be MvC Infinite (which most likely got it removed very early in its lifespan because it was dead by even PC fighting game standards) and Dead Rising 4 most likely because they want everyone to forget that abomination ever happened. Not happy that they still use it at all but the fact they actually have the decency to remove the fucking thing once they're done supporting a game makes their use of it better than 90% of the AAA market.

Didn't Capcom go through a major corporate upheaval about 5-7 years ago anyway, though? I seem to remember "bankruptcy" being the word on everyone's lips regarding them for a bit, before they got their corporate assets sorted out.

They did (along with rumors of outright selling some of their IPs to Sony/Microsoft to stay afloat) but that more or less extended out towards how much they ineptly handled their IPs during the 7th gen resulting in a bunch of high budget releases that appealed to almost nobody. They've mostly sorted their shit out minus the fighting division that still needs to get it together post SFV but even they've been doing some restructuring for the long term.

sometimes they release on GOG.

Unfortunately they've only done that once with a modern release (Dragon's Dogma) and that didn't even have Denuvo to begin with. Hard to say if they just didn't find it profitable enough to care or GOG never came up to them for another opportunity (or maybe a mix of both). Shame since they clearly know it exists, they just don't use it enough.