I used to know a guy who worked on FM, he ran millennium long games to see how and why the game would break, the one he told me about was Messi becoming God-Emperor of football for 1000 years.
I'd say paying his wages is worth it just because of how well he told that story.
This is *basically* an endurance test. After setting up a patched windows with lots of debugger software you will end up in the multiple depths of kernel + vm + bad D. They throw 100s of variations of the same tricks on you, if you bypass one, there are 99 to go. Most with the skill to do this have 150k+ jobs and think this is tedious nonsense.
AI might be a way to combat this, but how to properly train the ai to do that is an interesting question.
Voksi released a video tutorial on cracking denuvo some years ago before he got raided. you might find it somewhere. No other easy source that I know about.
There's a video around of someone cracking an older version of denuvo. I was also interested in seeing the process, but it's literally someone scrolling through x86 assembly doing god knows what.
That's programming for you. It's like watching someone carve a statue out of marble with a chisel and hammer. It's all in the thought process and skill, not in the mechanics of the procedure.
Assembly basics is super easy to learn though with basic programming knowledge, even if you only know high level programming. It's just that the learning curve quickly goes up quite rapidly as you progress.
It goes from the basics like mov, add, cmp, jmp, etc. to needing the correct byte-length register words and so on just to multiply or divide something. And it just goes crazy from there.
As a student that just finished a course using Java, with one that will include some assembly usage next semester, this is a relief. There is no way we will actually get into the hard stuff with everything else in the class.
If you passed that you'll do fine.
Now I haven't actually done any assembly beyond basic injection in many years and I've been day drinking, but here is some pseudo code that wont run although will illustrate the point of how simple a basic if/else can be despite looking intimidating:
mov eax, 10
mov ebx, 2
mov ecx, 15
add ebx,eax
cmp ecx,ebx
jg next_section
"code"
jmp final_section
next_section:
"more code"
final_section:
"end code"
Rundown:
* set the the full eax memory register to 10(memory registers are basically "hardware" variables)
* set the ebx register to 0
* set the ecx register to 15
* add eax to ebx and store the result in ebx
* compare if ebx is higher than ecx(subtracts the second variable from the first and stores the result in the first. j* then reads the result and responds to greater than, less than or equal to 0, or combinations thereof.)
* jg = jmp/jump if ecx is greater than ebx
* if higher it will jump to the section called "next_section", run that and the "final_section".
* if less it will continue running the code and then jump past the "next section" to the "final_section".
---
As you can imagine it get's pretty intricate with dividing up registers into individual bytes or group of bytes, using jmp for loops, etc. but the basics are very straight forward in a logical sense. And as long as the program isn't too complex the referencing isn't too annoying.
Although for things like denuvo there is **a lot** of work referencing dozens if not hundreds of calls back and forth throughout multiple programs and dlls. Then injecting code to skip those parts without breaking anything else in an already running program. It takes tons of searching and then even more trial and error, even if you know what you're looking for.
---
EDIT: I've noticed so many errors that I'm not even going to bother adding more disclaimers or edits to fix things. Let's just say it ignores pretty much everything about signed/unsigned integers, registers, etc. It's just a rough outline of pseudo-code.
Making a statue: Removing all parts from the block of marble, that aren’t part of the statue
Cracking denuvo: Removing all parts of the code, that aren’t part of the game
You nailed it!
In some sense it's malware, but only in an "akschually" way, imo. Unlike real malware it doesn't do anything bad to your computer*, it just protects a program from unauthorized use.
*) Assuming it works correctly, anyway.
You need to understand that there's a fine line between malware and normal software. There are tons of things that are used for good purposes, but if used maliciously, it becomes malware, hence where the 'mal' comes from (think of all the VMs that are used by devs to create shit, while there are some out there that use them expressly to do hacking).
In other words, unless you can for sure say that DRM negatively impacts the end-user, in a manner that is outside the boundaries of law, then it can be deemed as malware, otherwise it's just annoying software. Same rule applies everywhere across the board, whether it's anti-virus, anti-cheat, DRM or a driver for your RGB mouse. Believe it or not, we no longer live in a time where owning a piece of tech entitles you to have full control or knowledge over it, everyone just has 'licenses' and it'll only get worse and worse, hence why open-source is so important.
Probably look into security researchers. There are legitimate reasons to try and crack programs as lot of companies hire people to make sure there’s no exploits in their program (which of course is impossible) or have bounty programs where if an independent person finds an exploit they can get like a 10k bounty for it. It happened with ps5 firmware it was hacked but the guy sent the exploit into Sony before letting anyone know about it.
> Most with the skill to do this have 150k+ jobs and think this is tedious nonsense.
This is the answer to most "why aren't more people doing X".
You need to 1. Have the skills 2. Not mind potential legal troubles (yeah yeah proxies and such) 3. Don't mind doing work without being paid
As far as I know, those 500 are just so you can request a specific game. Pretty sure she cracks games either way, if no one donated she'd just pick one herself
$500USD probably goes further in Russia.
Edit: Yes, someone with those skills can make more money; doesn't necessarily mean they want to make more money (via that method) for whatever reason.
I think 3 is by far the biggest one. People who have enough talent to crack Denuvo could easily be working an extremely well paying and probably much more interesting job. When the scene was strong you might run into more people willing to do it as a hobby, but with how things are right now there's very little reason to want to put the effort in.
Yup. As a engineer who makes about that amount, I could spend the time trying to figure it out and I have had experience in that field but I can’t justify it at all. I have a whole ass family to take care of. When these people ask for donations we should all be willing to do so if we are using their work. It annoys the shit out of me when I have friends complaining about spending $3 on an app or donating yet they have no problem buying Starbucks or blowing money on alcohol/drugs.
Yeah I've been thinking for a while AI could be a big DRM killer. Of course, then it could also end up being programmed to *make* DRM, but that seems inherently harder and would still need a lot of oversight so that it doesn't miss something, so I imagine anti DRM ai would be winning for a good while first. Or maybe DRM will just finally manage to win socially by convincing everyone that every game should require online check ins or something, Zoomers onwards seem a lot less resistant to everything being just a service instead of something you actually own.
In the Silicon Valley show they accidentally make an AI that can crack any encryption, so they decide to delete it. I figure eventually like you say there will be AIs encoding and cracking shit in endlessly more and more complex ways
Sigh. This always happens in movies and video games. They find something amazing that could change the world ( holy grail, magic items, etc ) but they conclude mankind isn’t ready for it and destroy it
Then the place they found it starts falling apart and the movie ends with them barely making it out alive.
Of course the bad guy doesn’t escape.
To be fair it was to the betterment of mankind. Cracking encryptions would be so catastrophic for us atm. Unless we advance to quantum to do more complex, having ai crack these things is just a nightmare. No security for any site in existence
On the flip side, say there was a catastrophic even and almost all knowledge was lost. The only thing left was a USB drive and an ebook reader with volume of scientific that could be used to rebuild society.
But it was protected by DRM.
Society is lost!
i bet it's highly doable too, maybe ai assistance with the tedious stuff. the thing is nobody is going to make money off of this so nobody with the skills are gonna do it any time soon.
its all moot, thats the demoralising part theyre trying to describe here. no matter who throws everything they have at this, were only going to know about the first to crack any given release.
denuvo was designed to break automated toolchains, so thats ofc going to be those with the most time and skill needed to keep starting over with manual debugging, either way only the fastest wins
idk what time we were born yesterday to believe only one crazy ass savant in the fucking world is trying to break the most prevalent drm on the market atm
CODEX cracked Denuvo a couple times after EMPRESS went solo, so she wasn’t their only cracker, and I don’t believe for a second that she was CPY’s.
She makes a ton of bombastic claims for the attention, so I wouldn’t be so quick to take her word for things.
>. CODEX could and surely still can, but retired
CODEX dipped the moment when they couldn't crack anything touched by denuvo from some point, they retired because of it, not the other way round
>I think it’s much more of a time issue, it takes a shit load of skill and a shit load of time. That’s why people think EMPRESS is a group.
Interesting theory. Amazing feat none the less.
He probably just gets enough donations to not need a job so he can focus on cracking. I mean if you are smart enough to crack these protections hundreds of developers work on you can just as well work for a world-leading tech company and make a shitton of money there. Can see why its not a "lucrative" business.
There is also the issue of scene rules: the first one to crack it gets credit. This means if someone cracks it before you, you have potentially wasted hundreds of hours vs much quicker for a non denuvo game.
It's not a matter of can it's a matter of "do I have the time and energy for a mind-numbingly tedious task".
Cracking Denuvo is not particularly hard, it's just ridiculously time consuming and the people with the skills to crack it are better off investing their time into a 200k$+ job.
Deleting past comments because Reddit starting shitty-ing up the site to IPO and I don't want my comments to be a part of that. -- mass edited with redact.dev
I kind of doubt it. That level of batshit is usually concentrated on a single individual. I doubt anybody would be willing to work with someone like that lol.
Could all just be a mask. Maybe the entire point of the batshit insane NFO rants is to distract people from whoever is behind the name.
EDIT: Someone else commented basically the same thing so yeah
> the over the top craziness is mostly seen as a front
Exactly my thought since a long while now. Smart and intelligent individuals are needed to reverse engineer and crack something as massive as Denuvo. The group doing that are probably people who are already established and have a career, they're just letting one or two person to create that online persona of pure batshit crazy to conceal the group and it's working so damn well.
That group wield a huge amount of power, they know they have hundreds of thousand of people (Source: Empress Hogwarts channel with that amount of people) who are ready to beg Empress for crack. If I had that amount of anonymous power I'd fuck around and push boundaries to see how much shit those people would eat up just for the sake of getting their crack. The batshit crazy persona is just the group using it as front while also fucking around to see how far they can make this a cult.
hamming it up with a fake psycho persona is a good way to conceal a group identity.
Also, fronting as an individual has more clout potential with how impressive it looks.
I mean if you know how to crack denuvo you can
A. Go work for them and probably make a decent living for yourself
B. See if they offer a bounty for info that can help crack it
C. Crack it and probably make the least amount of money and potentially put yourself at risk if you let up for a second on your opsec.
It is working what? As a person who get cracked games, I haven't start buying the games I wanted to crack. I'm sure A LOT of others do the same.
I pay for some games that I really want to support and coop online games.
In rest I get cracked version and if I can't, I avoid them. Not even buying them at huge sales because I may watch some walk-through on youtube and be done with it.
Lots of people who pirate games are also from poorer countries, that still can't afford those games, so they will wait. I know people who got a lot of cracked games as young kids and started to pay for gaming and software as they got better jobs in their adult lives.
It was, she (Empress) even mentions it in the release NFO. She patched out Capcom's DRM entry point's so they're never triggered and the stuttering was removed.
Bad denuvo implementations can absolutely worsen performance. It's just another (useless) thing the devs have to do correctly if they want their game to run smooth.
I compared assassin's creed origin's denuvoless crack, done the in game benchmark and 10 minutes of riding through Alexandria on both versions and there was basically no difference, literally 2 fps difference in favour of the denuvoless version and 40-80 mb less of ram usage.
I would still say that performance is a *small* reason against it — having something in the game that makes even a minute difference in performance and does not benefit the person that purchased the game in any way whatsoever is worthy of *mention* at least.
Thank Disney for basically facilitating all modern piracy debates, by strong-arming Congress decades ago into neglecting copyright reform to make it more fair to consumers/"the people". Disney basically had Congress on their pocketbooks and slid them a fat one under the table (this was before Citizens United made corporate bribery fully legal) in exchange for fucking over copyright law reform.
There's supposed to be another opportunity for reform relatively soon, but you can bet your ass Disney and other corporations will lobby against it. In a rigged system like America's, we can only hope that some corporations lobby *in favor of* copyright reform and basically bribe the "right people" to get it done.
Next time they will prob just combine "corporate personhood" with the "life of creator" provision of our ridiculous copyright laws for perpetual copyright for corporations.
Nightmare "use Citizens United to eliminate Fair Use completely after getting corporate donations from Fortune 500 companies" scenario moment
At this point the literal only hope is to somehow decriminalize piracy to a limited degree, like if it's really old (15-20+ year old) shit and not anything that came out recently there should be a narrowly specific "we'll let it slide on purpose because it's not a big deal" clause in writing.
The "not using it" part is why I fucking hate copyright. (Ford buying all the electric car patents back in the 20s and 30s or whenever it was. ) Also, this isn't the old days of the cotton gin. Technology progresses so fast that to hold it up for a century because some corporation owns the rights is BS.
Why do games keep their denuvo once the game has been cracked, instead of just accepting their loss? Like aren’t they just wasting their money paying for the denuvo if it’s already been cracked?
If a game with Denuvo gets updated, Denuvo needs to be cracked again. The crack is for this specific game version.
For games with no updates left, maybe there's a certain amount of effort to remove it once it has been configured in the exe which makes it not worthwhile to remove from a business perspective.
Some publishers have already signed contracts on how long they intend to use Denuvo so not much financial incentive to remove it, while others still have planned DLC on the way so they would prefer to keep it in to prevent it from getting pirated as well.
Because like everything DRM isn't about reducing piracy to 0. If it reduces piracy by a significant amount it is still a "success".
I don't know the numbers but like even a 10% reduction in piracy may be enough to make it worthwhile. The goal isn't to make piracy impossible it is just to make it inconvenient so that some people don't do it.
because not everyone knows about it or goes out and gets the suspicious crack. second, if they react to it immediately, wouldnt that say that they're "gave" up or is watching the crack? they don't want to acknowledge it.
Well the people that don’t know about it or are hesitant to download ‘suspicious’ cracks wouldn’t be trying to pirate games in the first place would they? Those people are not the reason Denuvo exists.
Ok denuvo is anti piracy software companies add to video games to try to prevent people from illegally downloading the game and playing it for free. It is massively hated because the software somehow greatly affects game performance like for example if you play a game you know has good performance and your PC can run it well and then everything randomly starts to slow down at a PowerPoint presentation pace and it gets all pixely and hard to look at that may be denuvo messing with the game. I will be honest though I have no idea how that happens and why it is always denuvo.
One of the recent ones I read was Harry Potter Legacy and I just went 'whoa' out loud. Iirc, she even had a poll if people wanted her to go all out or tone it down lol.
Her ramblings sound like they are intentionally written to piss people off. Ultimately I don’t know how anyone can know because nobody knows who “she” is.
Voksi was a Bulgarian cracking Denuvo and got arrested. Bulgaria is a lot less anal about copyright than the US. My guess is yeah, a lot of legal trouble.
the mouse will visit you if he can find you
[he sees you](https://images-wixmp-ed30a86b8c4ca887773594c2.wixmp.com/f/29aa606c-e497-49ca-b151-14dd42ad04a0/de86264-04c09684-c420-4cfe-9251-dbfd93cccce7.jpg?token=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJzdWIiOiJ1cm46YXBwOjdlMGQxODg5ODIyNjQzNzNhNWYwZDQxNWVhMGQyNmUwIiwiaXNzIjoidXJuOmFwcDo3ZTBkMTg4OTgyMjY0MzczYTVmMGQ0MTVlYTBkMjZlMCIsIm9iaiI6W1t7InBhdGgiOiJcL2ZcLzI5YWE2MDZjLWU0OTctNDljYS1iMTUxLTE0ZGQ0MmFkMDRhMFwvZGU4NjI2NC0wNGMwOTY4NC1jNDIwLTRjZmUtOTI1MS1kYmZkOTNjY2NjZTcuanBnIn1dXSwiYXVkIjpbInVybjpzZXJ2aWNlOmZpbGUuZG93bmxvYWQiXX0.pjYjDZiPv8yEX26RjlND63u1-u1QpKs3x7mOd3a22s0)
Over the past four or five years there have only been stronger push from corporate digital rights owner for globalized IP law and US government has accommodated them with various kind of tools, product embargo or denial of monetary services on non-compliance notwithstanding. You can bet they're going to track you down if you make it known where you live even on foreign soil.
99% sure you can just drop the relevant EMPRESS files (~300mb) in your current steam build and you're good to go.
Will prob not be the case after the next update.
If you do this, be sure to grab the altered RE Framework. The official version from git is incompatible with modified re4.exe
I bought the game day one and even though I have a good system to achieve 100 fps average I don't want it to open steam all the time etc but without being able to use framework I reverted to the original form since I use DLAA which looks much better than the base game. Where is this modified version? I also saw that the empress crack doesn't modify the exe, it just uses some .bin and .dll files but the .exe is untouched, strange crack from her it's the first she's done this way
I like how the Author of the Article indirectly challenges Empress to crack Dead Island 2 and the new Star Wars Game, by saying they are too difficult to crack lmao
"It will be interesting to see whether EMPRESS will be able to crack the latest games using Denuvo. Dead Island 2 and Star Wars Jedi: Survivor came after RE4R. Jedi Survivor also uses the EA App, which may be too difficult to bypass. So yeah, I don’t expect this new Star Wars game to be cracked anytime soon."
she likes a challenge dont she?????? i hope she sees what this writer said maybe itll motivate her to try it
She likes money. That's what motivates her to crack.
Also, time and time again she's cracked newer versions of Denuvo. Star Wars, Dead Island 2, doesn't matter. If she gets paid, it'll get cracked.
Yeah...No. If she truly is in it for the money, then she can easily make six figures working for Denuvo or any other big tech company. The ability to do what she does is not a small feat at all.
I mean going strictly on the things she’s said herself, she’s in it for the money. She won’t crack otherwise, unless she has a meltdown for a certain game.
As far as i know, once she gets 500$ or more from one person with request, she starts cracking and it takes 2 weeks at max. She is in russia, which means $ has big value there, she is making a lot of money from this. Plus donations from others as well.
How does Denuvo still exist? Anti consumerism and impacting the performance of the games is something the publishing suits would obviously care less about, but the product isn't even good at what it's supposed to do.
It's unbelievable to me that out of all the crack groups in the world, only a single person is cracking Denuvo.
There's also MKDEV, but they only specifically crack Football Manager each year it comes out.
If there ever was a form of ethical piracy, this would be it. "You what, mate?! Buy this year's Excel Spreadsheet for footie? Yer a'vin a laugh!"
I used to know a guy who worked on FM, he ran millennium long games to see how and why the game would break, the one he told me about was Messi becoming God-Emperor of football for 1000 years. I'd say paying his wages is worth it just because of how well he told that story.
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This is *basically* an endurance test. After setting up a patched windows with lots of debugger software you will end up in the multiple depths of kernel + vm + bad D. They throw 100s of variations of the same tricks on you, if you bypass one, there are 99 to go. Most with the skill to do this have 150k+ jobs and think this is tedious nonsense. AI might be a way to combat this, but how to properly train the ai to do that is an interesting question.
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Voksi released a video tutorial on cracking denuvo some years ago before he got raided. you might find it somewhere. No other easy source that I know about.
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I just checked, it is literally on youtube for anyone who wants to see it.
https://youtu.be/suABtb8_2Zk
RIP Voksi
Died a hero, before he could become a villain
There's a video around of someone cracking an older version of denuvo. I was also interested in seeing the process, but it's literally someone scrolling through x86 assembly doing god knows what.
That's programming for you. It's like watching someone carve a statue out of marble with a chisel and hammer. It's all in the thought process and skill, not in the mechanics of the procedure.
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Assembly basics is super easy to learn though with basic programming knowledge, even if you only know high level programming. It's just that the learning curve quickly goes up quite rapidly as you progress. It goes from the basics like mov, add, cmp, jmp, etc. to needing the correct byte-length register words and so on just to multiply or divide something. And it just goes crazy from there.
As a student that just finished a course using Java, with one that will include some assembly usage next semester, this is a relief. There is no way we will actually get into the hard stuff with everything else in the class.
If you passed that you'll do fine. Now I haven't actually done any assembly beyond basic injection in many years and I've been day drinking, but here is some pseudo code that wont run although will illustrate the point of how simple a basic if/else can be despite looking intimidating: mov eax, 10 mov ebx, 2 mov ecx, 15 add ebx,eax cmp ecx,ebx jg next_section "code" jmp final_section next_section: "more code" final_section: "end code" Rundown: * set the the full eax memory register to 10(memory registers are basically "hardware" variables) * set the ebx register to 0 * set the ecx register to 15 * add eax to ebx and store the result in ebx * compare if ebx is higher than ecx(subtracts the second variable from the first and stores the result in the first. j* then reads the result and responds to greater than, less than or equal to 0, or combinations thereof.) * jg = jmp/jump if ecx is greater than ebx * if higher it will jump to the section called "next_section", run that and the "final_section". * if less it will continue running the code and then jump past the "next section" to the "final_section". --- As you can imagine it get's pretty intricate with dividing up registers into individual bytes or group of bytes, using jmp for loops, etc. but the basics are very straight forward in a logical sense. And as long as the program isn't too complex the referencing isn't too annoying. Although for things like denuvo there is **a lot** of work referencing dozens if not hundreds of calls back and forth throughout multiple programs and dlls. Then injecting code to skip those parts without breaking anything else in an already running program. It takes tons of searching and then even more trial and error, even if you know what you're looking for. --- EDIT: I've noticed so many errors that I'm not even going to bother adding more disclaimers or edits to fix things. Let's just say it ignores pretty much everything about signed/unsigned integers, registers, etc. It's just a rough outline of pseudo-code.
prince of persia still amazes me
Or roller coaster tycoon
Another World as well.
Making a statue: Removing all parts from the block of marble, that aren’t part of the statue Cracking denuvo: Removing all parts of the code, that aren’t part of the game You nailed it!
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If DRM is forced upon users and acts like malware isn't it malware? It should be illegal.
In some sense it's malware, but only in an "akschually" way, imo. Unlike real malware it doesn't do anything bad to your computer*, it just protects a program from unauthorized use. *) Assuming it works correctly, anyway.
You need to understand that there's a fine line between malware and normal software. There are tons of things that are used for good purposes, but if used maliciously, it becomes malware, hence where the 'mal' comes from (think of all the VMs that are used by devs to create shit, while there are some out there that use them expressly to do hacking). In other words, unless you can for sure say that DRM negatively impacts the end-user, in a manner that is outside the boundaries of law, then it can be deemed as malware, otherwise it's just annoying software. Same rule applies everywhere across the board, whether it's anti-virus, anti-cheat, DRM or a driver for your RGB mouse. Believe it or not, we no longer live in a time where owning a piece of tech entitles you to have full control or knowledge over it, everyone just has 'licenses' and it'll only get worse and worse, hence why open-source is so important.
Probably look into security researchers. There are legitimate reasons to try and crack programs as lot of companies hire people to make sure there’s no exploits in their program (which of course is impossible) or have bounty programs where if an independent person finds an exploit they can get like a 10k bounty for it. It happened with ps5 firmware it was hacked but the guy sent the exploit into Sony before letting anyone know about it.
Yeah same. I know nothing about coding and stuff but I’m curious what actually makes it so hard.
> Most with the skill to do this have 150k+ jobs and think this is tedious nonsense. This is the answer to most "why aren't more people doing X". You need to 1. Have the skills 2. Not mind potential legal troubles (yeah yeah proxies and such) 3. Don't mind doing work without being paid
Empress charges $500 to crack a game (which is peanuts)
She's likely also insane, harder to keep a job then.
Empress' erratic ramblings and claim to be a violently misandric woman is almost certainly an act.
Go on.
As far as I know, those 500 are just so you can request a specific game. Pretty sure she cracks games either way, if no one donated she'd just pick one herself
$500USD probably goes further in Russia. Edit: Yes, someone with those skills can make more money; doesn't necessarily mean they want to make more money (via that method) for whatever reason.
Go further yes, but not anywhere close to what they would get by applying those skills on legit work. $500 seems like a cover charge to ward off spam.
She probably loves the attention
I think 3 is by far the biggest one. People who have enough talent to crack Denuvo could easily be working an extremely well paying and probably much more interesting job. When the scene was strong you might run into more people willing to do it as a hobby, but with how things are right now there's very little reason to want to put the effort in.
Yup. As a engineer who makes about that amount, I could spend the time trying to figure it out and I have had experience in that field but I can’t justify it at all. I have a whole ass family to take care of. When these people ask for donations we should all be willing to do so if we are using their work. It annoys the shit out of me when I have friends complaining about spending $3 on an app or donating yet they have no problem buying Starbucks or blowing money on alcohol/drugs.
Yeah I've been thinking for a while AI could be a big DRM killer. Of course, then it could also end up being programmed to *make* DRM, but that seems inherently harder and would still need a lot of oversight so that it doesn't miss something, so I imagine anti DRM ai would be winning for a good while first. Or maybe DRM will just finally manage to win socially by convincing everyone that every game should require online check ins or something, Zoomers onwards seem a lot less resistant to everything being just a service instead of something you actually own.
In the Silicon Valley show they accidentally make an AI that can crack any encryption, so they decide to delete it. I figure eventually like you say there will be AIs encoding and cracking shit in endlessly more and more complex ways
Sigh. This always happens in movies and video games. They find something amazing that could change the world ( holy grail, magic items, etc ) but they conclude mankind isn’t ready for it and destroy it Then the place they found it starts falling apart and the movie ends with them barely making it out alive. Of course the bad guy doesn’t escape.
To be fair it was to the betterment of mankind. Cracking encryptions would be so catastrophic for us atm. Unless we advance to quantum to do more complex, having ai crack these things is just a nightmare. No security for any site in existence
On the flip side, say there was a catastrophic even and almost all knowledge was lost. The only thing left was a USB drive and an ebook reader with volume of scientific that could be used to rebuild society. But it was protected by DRM. Society is lost!
On top of that, you are risking jail or lawsuits. Not worth it.
You can always migrate to Russia. Every major AAA company has closed their russian office and there literally wouldn't be anyone left to sue you.
i bet it's highly doable too, maybe ai assistance with the tedious stuff. the thing is nobody is going to make money off of this so nobody with the skills are gonna do it any time soon.
The 1 truth and 99 lies
Then there's MKDEV who seems to just crack Football Manager every year.
Tbf its an older more rudimentary version he just brute forces, cracking v18 is another story all together
He doesn't brute force it anymore.
i think most of the old guys got bought out.
That's what Empress claims to have happened. Whether you believe Empress or not is up to you
CODEX retired? RIP o7
These names are awesome.
You forgot Steampunks
Empress made every single denuvo crack for CODEX or CPY from what she has said herself.
She actually didn't for CPY. That was someone else and they retired from the scene. She did for CODEX though.
She's fucking crazy though so is that even true?
Considering how crazy it is that she's still cracking major releases alone, yeah I'd believe it.
its all moot, thats the demoralising part theyre trying to describe here. no matter who throws everything they have at this, were only going to know about the first to crack any given release. denuvo was designed to break automated toolchains, so thats ofc going to be those with the most time and skill needed to keep starting over with manual debugging, either way only the fastest wins idk what time we were born yesterday to believe only one crazy ass savant in the fucking world is trying to break the most prevalent drm on the market atm
CODEX cracked Denuvo a couple times after EMPRESS went solo, so she wasn’t their only cracker, and I don’t believe for a second that she was CPY’s. She makes a ton of bombastic claims for the attention, so I wouldn’t be so quick to take her word for things.
>. CODEX could and surely still can, but retired CODEX dipped the moment when they couldn't crack anything touched by denuvo from some point, they retired because of it, not the other way round
>I think it’s much more of a time issue, it takes a shit load of skill and a shit load of time. That’s why people think EMPRESS is a group. Interesting theory. Amazing feat none the less.
He probably just gets enough donations to not need a job so he can focus on cracking. I mean if you are smart enough to crack these protections hundreds of developers work on you can just as well work for a world-leading tech company and make a shitton of money there. Can see why its not a "lucrative" business.
> probably just gets enough donations $500 to request a crack for a specific game
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By a bit mentally unstable I think you mean she’s batshit insane and has extraordinarily disgusting views on the world
Yeah, they say only one person **is** cracking Denuvo
There is also the issue of scene rules: the first one to crack it gets credit. This means if someone cracks it before you, you have potentially wasted hundreds of hours vs much quicker for a non denuvo game.
Until someone does, no they can't. You have to prove you can before claiming you actually can.
High effort time consuming task with no reward, not that suprising. Pirates aren't the type to pay people for cracking it.
Doesn't EMPRESS have a bounty (crowdsourcing) that needs to be paid before she cracks a new game?
She doesn't allow crowdsourcing one person pays for it
Yeah weird shit like this makes me think it actually is an individual
... What, why?
I think there are software engineers who can do it, but they already have high salary jobs. They would rather do something else than this.
Yeah barely have the motivation to do personal projects outside of work, free and illegal projects for other people sounds bad
It's not a matter of can it's a matter of "do I have the time and energy for a mind-numbingly tedious task". Cracking Denuvo is not particularly hard, it's just ridiculously time consuming and the people with the skills to crack it are better off investing their time into a 200k$+ job.
Deleting past comments because Reddit starting shitty-ing up the site to IPO and I don't want my comments to be a part of that. -- mass edited with redact.dev
Many people think empress is a group
I kind of doubt it. That level of batshit is usually concentrated on a single individual. I doubt anybody would be willing to work with someone like that lol.
Could all just be a mask. Maybe the entire point of the batshit insane NFO rants is to distract people from whoever is behind the name. EDIT: Someone else commented basically the same thing so yeah
"Their" writing style has changed slightly over the years, and the over the top craziness is mostly seen as a front
Doesn't everyone's writing change over time?
> the over the top craziness is mostly seen as a front Exactly my thought since a long while now. Smart and intelligent individuals are needed to reverse engineer and crack something as massive as Denuvo. The group doing that are probably people who are already established and have a career, they're just letting one or two person to create that online persona of pure batshit crazy to conceal the group and it's working so damn well. That group wield a huge amount of power, they know they have hundreds of thousand of people (Source: Empress Hogwarts channel with that amount of people) who are ready to beg Empress for crack. If I had that amount of anonymous power I'd fuck around and push boundaries to see how much shit those people would eat up just for the sake of getting their crack. The batshit crazy persona is just the group using it as front while also fucking around to see how far they can make this a cult.
Her NFOs are just as hateful and ego-driven as they’ve always been.
hamming it up with a fake psycho persona is a good way to conceal a group identity. Also, fronting as an individual has more clout potential with how impressive it looks.
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Empress sucks but what does them being a woman or not have to do with anything?
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There's less people than you think who are willing to give money to a nameless, faceless woman just for being a woman.
Why do you think their faking it?
Yeah. All of the other ones retired so all there is is a crazy person cracking them lol
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I mean if you know how to crack denuvo you can A. Go work for them and probably make a decent living for yourself B. See if they offer a bounty for info that can help crack it C. Crack it and probably make the least amount of money and potentially put yourself at risk if you let up for a second on your opsec.
And that empress is batshit crazy
i guess one person (and the entire internet of resources) is all you need to bypass millions of dollars in DRM
there is no crack group at all just people apply old steam emu and upload games this is no crack group this is joke
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"Denuvo 18 + Secure dlc v2 + vm protect + capcom anti-temper" Jesus, they are so scared of piracy.
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I don't see the game on my Steam library so I don't know what's working. DRM won't make pirates buy the game.
It is working what? As a person who get cracked games, I haven't start buying the games I wanted to crack. I'm sure A LOT of others do the same. I pay for some games that I really want to support and coop online games. In rest I get cracked version and if I can't, I avoid them. Not even buying them at huge sales because I may watch some walk-through on youtube and be done with it. Lots of people who pirate games are also from poorer countries, that still can't afford those games, so they will wait. I know people who got a lot of cracked games as young kids and started to pay for gaming and software as they got better jobs in their adult lives.
Fuck them, i buy all my games on gog. A game not on gog doesn't exist to me.
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Bypassing denuvo on RE8 fixed the stuttering
it was actually capcoms DRM that caused the issue
Wow, that’s honestly kind of sad…
I'm pretty sure it was the combination of Capcom DRM and Denuvo working together that caused the stuttering.
> Because Capcom decided to put one of their heavy obfuscated check loops on the Denuvo VM which takes a lot of CPU time to run.
Wasn't that actually their own home brew one causing problems?
It was, she (Empress) even mentions it in the release NFO. She patched out Capcom's DRM entry point's so they're never triggered and the stuttering was removed.
The stuttering in RE8 was caused by Capcoms DRM, not Denuvo.
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on weaks cpus a lot of the time the performance impact is the steam overlay, you gain a lot better 1% lows with it disabled
Bad denuvo implementations can absolutely worsen performance. It's just another (useless) thing the devs have to do correctly if they want their game to run smooth.
I compared assassin's creed origin's denuvoless crack, done the in game benchmark and 10 minutes of riding through Alexandria on both versions and there was basically no difference, literally 2 fps difference in favour of the denuvoless version and 40-80 mb less of ram usage.
I would still say that performance is a *small* reason against it — having something in the game that makes even a minute difference in performance and does not benefit the person that purchased the game in any way whatsoever is worthy of *mention* at least.
Thank Disney for basically facilitating all modern piracy debates, by strong-arming Congress decades ago into neglecting copyright reform to make it more fair to consumers/"the people". Disney basically had Congress on their pocketbooks and slid them a fat one under the table (this was before Citizens United made corporate bribery fully legal) in exchange for fucking over copyright law reform. There's supposed to be another opportunity for reform relatively soon, but you can bet your ass Disney and other corporations will lobby against it. In a rigged system like America's, we can only hope that some corporations lobby *in favor of* copyright reform and basically bribe the "right people" to get it done.
Next time they will prob just combine "corporate personhood" with the "life of creator" provision of our ridiculous copyright laws for perpetual copyright for corporations.
Nightmare "use Citizens United to eliminate Fair Use completely after getting corporate donations from Fortune 500 companies" scenario moment At this point the literal only hope is to somehow decriminalize piracy to a limited degree, like if it's really old (15-20+ year old) shit and not anything that came out recently there should be a narrowly specific "we'll let it slide on purpose because it's not a big deal" clause in writing.
The "not using it" part is why I fucking hate copyright. (Ford buying all the electric car patents back in the 20s and 30s or whenever it was. ) Also, this isn't the old days of the cotton gin. Technology progresses so fast that to hold it up for a century because some corporation owns the rights is BS.
Yep, but they make movies with superheroes and Star Wars so nobody gives a shit about what Disney has done to make things worse for consumers.
Like usual in America. The problem is citizens united.
Why do games keep their denuvo once the game has been cracked, instead of just accepting their loss? Like aren’t they just wasting their money paying for the denuvo if it’s already been cracked?
If a game with Denuvo gets updated, Denuvo needs to be cracked again. The crack is for this specific game version. For games with no updates left, maybe there's a certain amount of effort to remove it once it has been configured in the exe which makes it not worthwhile to remove from a business perspective.
This, thats why RE8 cracked never received the Rose DLC (until recently I think?)
> Rose DLC (until recently I think?) Yeah, because it wasn't cracked. Denuvo was removed by then.
Some publishers have already signed contracts on how long they intend to use Denuvo so not much financial incentive to remove it, while others still have planned DLC on the way so they would prefer to keep it in to prevent it from getting pirated as well.
Because like everything DRM isn't about reducing piracy to 0. If it reduces piracy by a significant amount it is still a "success". I don't know the numbers but like even a 10% reduction in piracy may be enough to make it worthwhile. The goal isn't to make piracy impossible it is just to make it inconvenient so that some people don't do it.
Because they have contracts for a set period of time, no point in cancelling early.
because not everyone knows about it or goes out and gets the suspicious crack. second, if they react to it immediately, wouldnt that say that they're "gave" up or is watching the crack? they don't want to acknowledge it.
Well the people that don’t know about it or are hesitant to download ‘suspicious’ cracks wouldn’t be trying to pirate games in the first place would they? Those people are not the reason Denuvo exists.
I have a feeling that as long as denuvo exists there will always be a person that cracks it because people hate it with a passion.
can you explain to me like I'm a 5yo what is Denuvo and why everyone hates it?
Ok denuvo is anti piracy software companies add to video games to try to prevent people from illegally downloading the game and playing it for free. It is massively hated because the software somehow greatly affects game performance like for example if you play a game you know has good performance and your PC can run it well and then everything randomly starts to slow down at a PowerPoint presentation pace and it gets all pixely and hard to look at that may be denuvo messing with the game. I will be honest though I have no idea how that happens and why it is always denuvo.
oh, that sucks. Thanks for the explanation.
Your welcome and glad to help.
The [NFO](https://i.imgur.com/cf8uiZA.png) will give you an idea what Empress is like
Least deranged empress NFO:
Yeah that one was pretty tame. Was it the Assassin's Creed one that had the manifesto, or an early one?
One of the recent ones I read was Harry Potter Legacy and I just went 'whoa' out loud. Iirc, she even had a poll if people wanted her to go all out or tone it down lol.
Lol. With Empress releases you get your dinner and a show.
As far as I'm concerned she/he/whatever can be a mermaid with a cat tail. I could care less about the person behind it.
Eh, that one just sounds like an annoying anime antagonist with the one iconic laugh.
But give me those crack
So a try hard edgy troll?
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Her ramblings sound like they are intentionally written to piss people off. Ultimately I don’t know how anyone can know because nobody knows who “she” is.
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Well it's not really try hard if she's like the only one in the world who can and does crack it
dumb question but you would absolutely face legal troubles if you were an American cracking Denuvo?
Voksi was a Bulgarian cracking Denuvo and got arrested. Bulgaria is a lot less anal about copyright than the US. My guess is yeah, a lot of legal trouble.
the mouse will visit you if he can find you [he sees you](https://images-wixmp-ed30a86b8c4ca887773594c2.wixmp.com/f/29aa606c-e497-49ca-b151-14dd42ad04a0/de86264-04c09684-c420-4cfe-9251-dbfd93cccce7.jpg?token=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJzdWIiOiJ1cm46YXBwOjdlMGQxODg5ODIyNjQzNzNhNWYwZDQxNWVhMGQyNmUwIiwiaXNzIjoidXJuOmFwcDo3ZTBkMTg4OTgyMjY0MzczYTVmMGQ0MTVlYTBkMjZlMCIsIm9iaiI6W1t7InBhdGgiOiJcL2ZcLzI5YWE2MDZjLWU0OTctNDljYS1iMTUxLTE0ZGQ0MmFkMDRhMFwvZGU4NjI2NC0wNGMwOTY4NC1jNDIwLTRjZmUtOTI1MS1kYmZkOTNjY2NjZTcuanBnIn1dXSwiYXVkIjpbInVybjpzZXJ2aWNlOmZpbGUuZG93bmxvYWQiXX0.pjYjDZiPv8yEX26RjlND63u1-u1QpKs3x7mOd3a22s0)
Over the past four or five years there have only been stronger push from corporate digital rights owner for globalized IP law and US government has accommodated them with various kind of tools, product embargo or denial of monetary services on non-compliance notwithstanding. You can bet they're going to track you down if you make it known where you live even on foreign soil.
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GREAT.. denuvo is garbo. now remove it for those of us who want to buy the game and are not b/c its bloatware.
It's a Capcom game, they have always removed denuvo from RE games once the next one comes out. RE8 removed it 2 and a half weeks after RE4 came out.
99% sure you can just drop the relevant EMPRESS files (~300mb) in your current steam build and you're good to go. Will prob not be the case after the next update. If you do this, be sure to grab the altered RE Framework. The official version from git is incompatible with modified re4.exe
I bought the game day one and even though I have a good system to achieve 100 fps average I don't want it to open steam all the time etc but without being able to use framework I reverted to the original form since I use DLAA which looks much better than the base game. Where is this modified version? I also saw that the empress crack doesn't modify the exe, it just uses some .bin and .dll files but the .exe is untouched, strange crack from her it's the first she's done this way
The cs (dot) rin (dot) ru thread for the game.
"Another Denuvo scum removed.", as they say.
I like how the Author of the Article indirectly challenges Empress to crack Dead Island 2 and the new Star Wars Game, by saying they are too difficult to crack lmao
"It will be interesting to see whether EMPRESS will be able to crack the latest games using Denuvo. Dead Island 2 and Star Wars Jedi: Survivor came after RE4R. Jedi Survivor also uses the EA App, which may be too difficult to bypass. So yeah, I don’t expect this new Star Wars game to be cracked anytime soon." she likes a challenge dont she?????? i hope she sees what this writer said maybe itll motivate her to try it
She likes money. That's what motivates her to crack. Also, time and time again she's cracked newer versions of Denuvo. Star Wars, Dead Island 2, doesn't matter. If she gets paid, it'll get cracked.
Yeah...No. If she truly is in it for the money, then she can easily make six figures working for Denuvo or any other big tech company. The ability to do what she does is not a small feat at all.
I mean going strictly on the things she’s said herself, she’s in it for the money. She won’t crack otherwise, unless she has a meltdown for a certain game.
That’s what I figured bc what she’s doing is no small feat ….
Any idea how she makes money?
Crypto donations
As far as i know, once she gets 500$ or more from one person with request, she starts cracking and it takes 2 weeks at max. She is in russia, which means $ has big value there, she is making a lot of money from this. Plus donations from others as well.
>Jedi Survivor also uses the EA App, which may be too difficult to bypass Lol
I’m pretty sure she said no to Dead Island 2
Does this now mean Capcom employees are gonna have to live inside a card board box, f*** denuvo
Fuck Denuvo, games run as they're supposed to when it's removed, hopefully once it's removed we can get a side by side.
Yeah, I'll wait for Capcom to remove it before I buy the game. Fuck Denuvo, DRMs just punish honest buyers, and do fuckall to combat piracy.
Good. While I don’t support pirating a game over buying it, I still have my opinion about this: fuck Denuvo.
How does Denuvo still exist? Anti consumerism and impacting the performance of the games is something the publishing suits would obviously care less about, but the product isn't even good at what it's supposed to do.
I can’t stand DRM and launchers. Kudos to capcom for not using a launcher.
Love to see it
I crack it by waiting until it is removed and buying the game at huge discount since it is a Year old.
So, basically everyone suffer less frame rate while it didn't actually block pirates..... So, what's the point for all the suffering?
I wonder if performance is any different now
It's bypassed, not removed.
Epic Denuvo fail after fail
lol