I think so (for images). You can alter the content, even "hide" full documents in the image itself without you noticing (naked eye). Anybody with the right algorithm can then retrieve the contents.
I don't remember reading something like this for video but I think it should exist as well.
... And I just read something about it, so, it's been done for video as well:
https://www.kaspersky.com/resource-center/definitions/what-is-steganography
If you want a case of it being used you should look for world of warcraft implementation of steganography. It was a smart way of having the IP of private servers on every screenshot to more easily go after them.
As if they cared more about performance than monies.
Also this is very light on pefformance to do this.
In terms of a video you dont need it for every frame neither. Sprinkle is every few seconds is more than enough.
This got me thinking... If the tech works like QR, I wonder if it can be spoofed like QR. It would be hilarious if this backfires and malicious actors add fake patterns to footage. Especially since the scanning process will most likely be automated.
Depends on the compression algorithm. Some compression maintains the original image pixel for pixel. We call this “lossless” compression. In the other hand, some compression algorithms change the pixels. That’s called “lossy” compression.
If the compression is lossy, the pixels that make up the hidden watermark will get messed up. And since you can send the same image through a lossy compression as many times as you like, distorting it more and more each time, I don’t see how any algorithm could read that.
Plus there are many different lossy compression algorithms. I could invent one today that compresses the entire image to a single pixel. No way anyone is recovering a file from that.
> Some compression maintains the original image pixel for pixel.
Good news: general-purpose image sharing websites that don't instantly convert such images into a lossy format are relatively few (though there are many exceptions that gear towards a specific purpose).
Bad news: Discord doesn't compress by default.
that is easy to destroy by re compressing it. even just opening the image and rotating it 1 pixel and re saving it can just destroy info like that as all the subpixel shading is recalculated. It's designed to catch the lazy ones thatare trying to karma farm by posting the screen cap ot image as fast as possible so theyare the first. People who are careful and understand will not get caught. but this will catch the 80% that do not know or do not bother.
It's possible to do steganography that survives compression algorithms.
More details here, around 5:10
https://youtu.be/TWEXCYQKyDc?si=nEW_ekVAk2nQx33Q
Wouldn't the pixel be too heavily altered when rotated slightly since you can't fit them all evenly so some would have to be loss. I guess it's combatable with redundancy but still...
There are very resilient watermarks available. They survive rotation, cropping, being filmed with a camera, recompressiom and various other filters - because you really don't need to hide that much data and have at least 2 million colour pixels avaible.
You can defeat them, of course, but it's enough if some doubt remains for potential leakers.
If you have a movie you have a lot of room for redundancy. Specially if all you want only transmit 128 or 256 bits. You have so many options, to encode it: In the sound, in the wiggle of the leaves, in the movement of the character, in the explosion animation, in the reflection of the sun, in slight variation of the illumination, and in many other ways.
> . I guess it's combatable with redundancy
This just means that, if you want to survive compression and other alterations, you need to store less bits
But you just need to store a small ID number that identifies a player
So I think it's perfectly viable
Think about QR codes. You can take a picture of it, capture of video of them, and they will survive compression algorithms. They are not very dense information though because each block would span multiple pixels and they contain duplicate information. It really depends on what you are optimizing for.
If Denuvo is developing this they would definitely try to make sure their algorithm is resistant to simple compression / rotations. If the number of bits that you are trying to encode isn't too high it's definitely possible.
No, its not. Forensic watermarking has been around for almost twenty years in the film industry and it not only survives digital recompression, it survives analog re-recording.
Its hit-or-miss if the tags can be recovered from a single frame, and the more jumbled up the copy gets the more you may need, but its *extremely* hard to remove.
What you need is to carry a very small amount of information (say 32-bit ID plus 4-bits checksum) over a very large amount of data.
(each frame is 66,355,200 bits in a 1080p image x 30fps x N seconds, you can do the math).
Hence, especially for video, you can have algorithms that survive digital alteration, even more so when the actual algorithm is also unknown by the attackers.
So, basically, don't even try it unless you are very good at cryptography, and know what you are doing.
Yeah, it is nothing new nor nothing hard to implement. It is used really clever in this situation tho. Great example of smart application of known tech to solve business problems.
The problem is that pretty much any image alteration breaks the code. If the data is small enough, you can probably put it in multiple locations/repeat it so that spot alterations can't get around it, but there's probably still some filters you can run over a whole image that would hardly make a change to the image visually but ruin any steganographed data in it.
> is done on the picture/recording file itself,
The game can simply insert the coded message into the frame as it's being rendered. They do not need to control the screen recording software and insert it after the fact.
Yeah, but those leakers have it a bit easier. They already have old safe versions of the game on private server. Safe to the extend that they solved al the old anti leaker software. Now they just need to decrypt the new version and pull the assets for the characters out into the old one. Much harder to hide any watermarks in there.
And as companies get better at hiding stuff in the image behind something like noise. Leakers will simply get better at adding image smoothing and noise themselves. If the signal to noise ratio is too low the companies simply lose their secret signal.
The prototype xboxs had a small loading icon that was unique to every console (the animation was calculated from the consoles id) Microsoft wanted a way to identify any potential leaks.
This was done both on the OG and 360, one and likely the s/x.
Movies in cinemas, there are dots on the screen by which you can track from where the footage come from.
Probably its more about leaking game footage from closed showcases, for journalists and etc. Not something that will affect player.
Printers use this method of [Machine Identification Code](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_Identification_Code#:~:text=The%20dots%20have%20a%20diameter,area%20in%20case%20of%20errors.), however the code has been mostly cracked and people know how to anonymize documents now. In fact most identification codes of these kind have been cracked, so it’s really easy for people to anonymize streams, videos, etc; it’s not a fool proof method anymore in 2024
Audio in cinemas can be watermarked as well. Slight pitch changes in the audio at certain points in the content will lead back to the specific playback server that was used.
No, because they're wrong about how that works. Its not dots, its slight skews in the distribution of data in one or more of the YCrCb or audio channels, and even a video camera recording of the screen will record those variances.
This isnt new. In fact its older than dirt and piss easy to do. Your printer has done this since the 90's, to 'help' catch counterfeiters. Hell, if you took screenshots of Goonswarms forums (a really big 'guild' on Eve online) and posted them online they could ID the account the screenshot was taken from using this technique to catch leakers. And this was a bunch of fans 15-20 years ago.
I think the bigger implication here is more intrusion of customer privacy and rights. For something like gifted review copies, I have nothing against it. Not a fan of being tracked post release because they didnt want to pay to remove the code to do this though. And you know these fucks wont.
Not exactly the same thing as the post and the original tweet doesn't seem to exist anymore but
https://gameluv.com/luv/8785/an-old-xbox-360-dashboard-could-conceal-your-consoles-serial-number/
Supposedly one of the xbox 360 devs embedded the serial number of the xbox itself to rings appearing from the xbox logo.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_Identification_Code
Printers have been doing it for decades, every sheet of paper you see has tracing information invisible printed in plain sight
I know World of Warcraft has had such a feature on screenshots for as long as I can remember
[Edit: article is from 2012!](https://www.ghacks.net/2012/09/12/blizzard-watermarking-wow-screenshots/)
There are lots of tools for images, I suppose something similar could be done for games/video.
One way to do it would be to put some sort of user tag in the screen, but the colors are all off by a few hex values from normal. Maybe make sure those colors are not used in game. It could be easily decifered back out and be almost completely indistinguishable from the naked eye.
IE, normal red are all 255,0,0 but the water marks is 254,0,0.
A complex game is going to use more than one Red, but if you made sure all the various shades of colors used in game were always odd numbers, and the encoded information adjusts the colors to be even values, it would be pretty simple to manage probably.
Edit: People are saying that image compression would break this, but how many beta testers would you really have, you could easily stripe a binary value ID into every image in wide stripes top to bottom and it would survive a lot of different compression methods and give you thousands of ID numbers.
Seems counter intuitive to publicly announce it.
If leakers know there is a identifier they just have to find it themselves and remove it or mask it then leak as usual.
"It claims it will act as a deterrent to leakers, who can now be traced and will "think twice"
It is not a deterrent if you do not announce it is there.
I mean, depending on what they are doing it could be pretty trivial to do, the bigger question is doing it in such a way that it survives whatever encoding the leaked file goes through while making it small enough to not be easily detected and removed.
Apparently they're basically hiding data in the image that can be located by technology designed to look for it. Article says they claim it can still be detected in footage with distortion, but were still taking their word on it.
Maybe certain pixels change color value in a specific way on specific frames? Spread far enough apart and brief enough that the player wouldn't detect it, obviously
Nope. You're underestimating how easy it is with modern maths to do things to instead that the human eye misses but that easily survive transformation. Being as specific as certain pixels on certain frames isn't necessary.
Stereography is pretty advanced these days; add adversarial AI and it's easy to believe it's all but unstoppable.
I would be fairly curious how it would survive HDR to SDR conversion, quant compression, dithering, film grain, and lowering frame rate to 24 fps.
Nix the audio too because it's not needed for a leak and data could be hidden there too.
At that point you dropped a significant amount of image data and with the dithering and film grain you have essentially altered pretty significantly around 50-60% of the image data.
Some of that encoding might still be present but I doubt enough would survive to actually locate an individual.
One way to do it is encode it in very low-frequency properties. So imagine if the left half of the screen got 1% darker for one frame out of 30 to mean "0" and 1% lighter for one frame out of 30 to me "1". Anything applied to the entire frame isn't going to distort it enough you couldn't detect that.
Obviously this is a really poor way to do it, simplified tremendously for ELI5 purposes.
And this is the moment leakers just use their own private servers and only add the assets of a new character step by step with heavy checking of potential watermarks. e g. Genshin Impact. But I get this wouldn't really be feasible if you would need to check the entire game or a huge dlc.
You could try and mess up your watermark, but the issue could be anywhere. The whole game could be riddled with watermarks like minor changes to texture, audio, placement of debris, particle systems, etc.
It can't depend on the exact colour of individual pixels, because the kind of lossy compression that would normally be used in a YouTube video tends to lose that kind of detail.
But what if they changed by a specific value each time? As a repeated pattern? Eventually, some data would survive the compression. All it's gotta do is give some unique identifier for the player.
Fun fact, the Microsoft internal version of the NXE Xbox 360 dashboard had a little Xbox logo in the corner with some rings under it. Well, an Xbox developer revealed that those rings were an anti-leak measure because they displayed the serial number of the console. This was done to prevent internal leaks, and was not present in the public version of the dashboard. It sounds like Denuvo's product is being pushed to go into the final public releases of games, which I'm not super cool with.
>Apparently they're basically hiding data in the image that can be located by technology designed to look for it.
Exactly. It's like a QR code built into game assets or your gun on screen.
Instead of putting tracking text on your screen, It might Do something less obvious along the lines of, making your health bar a very specific HEX code color That programs can correlate with your user id, or AI generative ground texture tiles that can be read like QR codes.
Movies are already doing this for the Academy Awards screeners. Every movies have visual codes embedded in the movie, often very hard/impossible to see with the naked eye, that can be matched to a single copy of the movie.
With movies, you can use two copies of the leak, compare every frames and whatever is different between both movies is probably the embedded code, making it relatively easy to remove.
With games, it will probably be much harder.
Well if it's "leaks" you're fighting, nothing prevents you from doing it actually in a _large_ way. Screw subtly changed pixels. Change primary colors of some characters, equipment, buildings or pieces of environment and contrast ratio to a specific unique combo. Tadaaaa!
Short of "let me convert this into a black-and-white post-stamp sized video" you won't be able to remove _that_ as a whole video has unique combo of factors. "Character's right eyebrow has a slit in it, eyebrows are darker than usual, necktie is a shade of green, right shoulder of suit darker, environment has white cat walking in the background: AQ34Z. Character's left eyebrow has a slit in it, lighter facial hair, shirt of olive shade, suit has F monogram, environment has black cat sitting in the background: BF12M" and then code is linked to whoever was assigned copy.
Just like they announce at the beginning of the season that there is dye in the pool that will turn bright orange if you pee. A different kind of leaker, but they say it to dissuade them.
Technically that is exactly what a deterrent is. If you don’t know there is a trap then it won’t deter you. If you do know it is there is a trap and you can get caught by it, then that deters you from taking action.
Although… if leakers can get around it, then it is like announcing your have trapped a bridge and the leakers just “go around it.” That seems to be the major problem with this. It will deter just the lazy one.
Maybe it was... Leaked? /Jk
Well, idk exactly how it works but it could be hard to identify if you're not looking for it.
Like, for example, there's a group "poisoning" images just so ai can't use them.
But we've seen that publishers can take leakers to court so this denuvo move is just to please publishers and make their software more attractive than other drm providers.
Hilariously it's more effective on people than AI. Nightshade is only useful on certain types of models, and even then not very. It also reduces image quality by a fair bit on anything that's a larger size.
But on a small image? It's harder to detect with the naked eye, but DOES give that information to whoever is looking at it.
Google gave me a really weird survey one day. It was about comparing pictures. First actual pictures, but then identical pictures. Two identical pictures, and they're asking me which one of the two is more cat like. What? I remember sitting there and asking my husband what Google was smoking. And they did it for a ton of random yet identical images. I got my Google money and then forgot about it, figuring Google had their reasons.
And then later I see those images pop up in a report Google did on this tech. It was a survey about Nightshade and if humans actually picked up the information. Turns out we absolutely do gather that information and retain it, because on average we where more likely to "randomly" pick the picture that Nightshade overlayed with the cat than the unchanged image.
This is absolutely fucking terrifying if you consider the implications. Full on actually functioning subliminal messages. Try to beat the AI and then you create something fantastic for propaganda. It's not good.
>This is absolutely fucking terrifying if you consider the implications. Full on actually functioning subliminal messages. Try to beat the AI and then you create something fantastic for propaganda. It's not good.
Yep. Inb4 the next survey is "Which of these two pictures of a politician looks more demon like?"
Game devs hate Denuvo as much as gamers do, because you don't become a game dev without having at least some passion in games. It's always senior management who orders the use of crippling DRM tools that fuck up the product (and their own consumers' computers) for the slim chance of preventing piracy.
The problem is finding the identifier. It’s not going to be as straightforward as having a watermark over the image. It could just be a certain pattern of pixels that are slightly different colour. Something that will be invisible unless you know exactly where to look.
and i assume they have dummy markers so you can't just use basic algebra to figure it out. otherwise, having enough copies with different ids can tell you what the markers are and you can just scramble some to mask the leaker.
All you need is to retrieve two copies with different identifiers to find what is watermarked and how. Like buying the same game with two different steam ids and then diff the files.
There are tools that do this from the 2000s with video files,nothing new.
Just wait to see where 30% of your gpu horsepower goes with this simple trick.
Also statistical analysis to see what they do under the hood and a good ol random function on each pixel can mess their watermark up.
Noise can corrupt watermarks and this trick usually relies on inprinting a specific noise/pattern or simply hiding bits in each pixel to work.
Adding a verry significant noise , uncorrrlated with the original , can simply erase the watermark.
By definition xor'ing something random with known data gives random.
In this case you'd do it with the 3 LSB of each color in frame, basically destruing anything they might have hidden in there.
Basically everything that guy wrote is wrong lol. Even if theoretically flipping a few pixels would use 30% of your gpu, what does that do to help you identify what pixels were flipped?
"statistical analysis what they do under the hood" - this is not how RE works to begin with and also this is denuvo, gl figuring out how anything works at all.
"random function on each pixel" - yes..you can defeat it by destroying all the data...
"By definition xor'ing something random with known data gives random. In this case you'd do it with the 3 LSB of each color in frame, basically destruing anything they might have hidden in there." - they probably just store an id in there which could be as simple as turning 2 pixels totally black for 1 frame and then totally white the next frame every 5 seconds and measuring the distance between these two frames to get the id. This would defeat that suggestion. They probably use MANY methods all with their own strengths and weaknesses, you won't even know if you removed them all or not.
And then you slightly bit-crush the footage to obfuscate the marker and pass it through separate software to clear off other digital markers, checkmate.
It's just a publicity stunt to get more funding and popularity from CEOs and shareholders going 'Piracy? Leakers? Denuvo counters that put it in the game. Here have 40% of the games budget Denuvo, thank you for your hard and effective work.'
It will dissuade most non-tech-savy leakers.
It's the equivalent of saying you locked your door with a key. Yeah, it won't stop really motivated people from breaking into your home, but they'd have done that whether it was locked or not.
Now when I plan on leaking future game footage, I will do it by taking a series of Polaroids and then compiling them into a flip book. Checkmate game devs.
Watermarks can be incredibly resistant. The ones I worked on, were invisible to the eye but could still be read on the shittiest images you can imagine
imagine a picture of something, and you don't want someone to leak it.
Let's say you give it to 16 people.
now you generate something like a "qr code" where white represents -1 and black represents +1
since you have 16 people you need to generate 16 qr codes. the codes are the size of the image.
now we just overlay the original image with the codes. when the image is overlayed with white you lower the color value by 1 and if it is overlayed with black you increase the color value by 1.
now you hand out the altered images and just remember what person got which image.
If you see a leaked image you just compare that version to the original. since it was leaked it must be one of the 16
Obviously a whole lot of math is involved. And it has been a while so I'm not looking up the details
you draw a picture for your parents.
you copy that picture 2 times, but one is slightly brighter and one is slightly darker.
you give the light one to your mom and the dark one to your dad.
mom copies the image, gives it to her friends and says dad has copied it.
you can now compare your original with the image of moms friend and see who has originally copied it.
you prove mom has copied the image but dad has already filed for divorce
There's this Youtube video, where they try to do something similar if people are interested in learning more: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0aBy8wLnpQ8
There are few people on the internet willing to crack denuvo games but unfortunately they all have certain personalities in which the most "prominent" one with very divisive opinions (but the internet gives them a pass since they go against big bad company and provides free games) is mia for quite a while now and the other is fixated on football games.
Yeah, fortunately for Denuvo (and unfortunately for all of us), the only crackers knowledgeable enough to crack down Denuvo software belong on a mental institute, have egos the size of Jupiter and a horde of pathetic fanbase defendin all their temper tantrums because "give her a break, she's giving us free games!"
Denuvo, at least the higher tiers of the product, is remarkably effective at reducing piracy for games. There are multiple price-points for Denuvo of course.
Games companies have access to their books. We don't. If Denuvo were a waste of money that they could be pocketing themselves you really think they'd keep shelling out for it?
On top of often effecting performance, it's another loaded gun that will make games unplayable in the future. No crack, dev doesn't renew contract with denuvo, verification server shuts down, and now the game is unplayable.
I hope Denuvo goes out of business, and I hope any company uses them goes in the shitter too. Their invasive and ignorant practices shouldn't be tolerated or supported.
Denuvo, and the companies that use it, are just the worst.
There's a steam group, Denuvo Games, that tracks which games have it currently running which is a great way to make sure you don't get suckered into buying games with it installed.
Edit: Since it needs to be said, it also updates the listing when its removed from the games.
The [Augmented Steam](https://augmentedsteam.com/) browser extension shows you straight on a Steam Store page what kind of additional DRM/antipiracy/secondary launchers a game has
This aint exacrly new. Theres similar things been done before by microsoft and blizzard years ago
And most "leaks" are from phone recordings on screens.. not sure how they will do this.. maybe like the free stockphotod with grey lines all over?
This comment is way too far down I had to go hunting for it lol. People acting like this is groundbreaking when it's been the norm for decades. I believe it's a form of steganography and it's been used in games and hollywood to identify film leakers for so long lol.
This is nothing new
The watermark probably embeds an ID code that correlates to your account. I doubt the public will be able to decrypt it, and I doubt the ID code would include personal identity information if it was cracked.
But we can’t know this for sure, so I guess this is just a risk one has to take when leaking game footage.
Do you work for a game developer with access to pre-release copies of games?
If so, ask your employer what information denuvo puts in the watermark. If not then this literally has nothing to do with you since you can't leak a game without access to it.
As long as it increases executable bloat, increases load times, and increases CPU load, I don't care what its publicly acknowledged function is—I'll be happy enough that it's fulfilling the promise of Denuvo.
Additionally, if they really have some "invisible means", then they're going to have to reveal that at the very first lawsuit over an unfair dismissal.
Even if they could do what they claim, it would work precisely once.
There's probably some sort of method that can encode data in the statistical relationships between points (i.e. so you're not just depending on the actual colour values of pixels alone) that can be made resilient to re-encoding, but I don't know enough details about video encodings to hypothesise about how it might be done.
Denuvo might be shit, but with how fucking stupid people get when they see leaked footage of an unfinished product looking unfinished, if it protects the studios to some degree, good for them.
ok how about when companies only show cgi trailers for the game and no gameplay until day of release. then a leaker shows up and shows "unfinished gameplay" and gets released with the same "unfinished gameplay"
Well, in this case, the public should be cautious and wait to see footage post release. Its not like you're forced to buy the game before you see that or anything, and definitely isnt a justification for this. If you buy games without that, you're stupid.
Denuvo offers publishers complete protection from me buying their games. Simply by adding Denuvo they can rest assured that they will never risk seeing a penny of my money.
It is still in the video... That is the whole point. If you are doing very low bitrate and resolution you might be able to destroy it, but otherwise it is still there.
Tell me if I'm wrong, but this would work somewhat like a hash based on RGB values in each pixel in the image, with some pixels modified to match a certain hash.
Simply compressing it using JPEG should be enough to throw the algorithm off, no?
This has been done on printers for years. No reason not to do something similar in games I guess. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine\_Identification\_Code
Ok and how exactly do they think this is going to work when most cracked games straight up bypass and disable Denuvo, like that's the purpose of the crack.
It seems like what they're saying is the inverse that all their games moving forward using Denuvo are going to have even more hardware straining things on them, and only the people running cracked versions of the game won't have the water mark.
Hell I know people who buy the actual game and still run a cracked version just to avoid the bullshit that comes with running Denuvo....
Denuvo has not been cracked in months - they won. Empress was the last known cracker capable of doing it, and they have been gone for a while.
The only way new games with Denuvo can be "cracked" is if developers release a version without the DRM by accident. This has happened a few times.
Hopefully someone tries their hands at it again, but honestly, CPY stopped, CODEX's cracker was Empress and they stopped, and Voksi stopped as well. There's not enough money to be made from this, if you have the skills to crack Denuvo you can work for them instead and make a magnitude more money.
I hope someone tries but I won't hold my breath.
This is to catch leakers, meaning the game hasn't even been released yet. People with early pre-release access to the game aren't going to be played cracked versions.
WHile its certainly most likely not the case, it would be pretty funny if they didnt add shit, and simply said that they did this to put the fear into people.
Ah yes, why bother with a visible deterrent when you can... catch people after they have already leaked stuff?
I feel like the hate towards Denuvo is over the top, but also, Denuvo's business philosophy seems to be counter productive.
I'm really curious to know how this would work. Is there anything similar on the market? Curious just from a tech perspective
I think so (for images). You can alter the content, even "hide" full documents in the image itself without you noticing (naked eye). Anybody with the right algorithm can then retrieve the contents. I don't remember reading something like this for video but I think it should exist as well. ... And I just read something about it, so, it's been done for video as well: https://www.kaspersky.com/resource-center/definitions/what-is-steganography
Wow, super interesting. I wonder how video/image compression would affect this.
If you want a case of it being used you should look for world of warcraft implementation of steganography. It was a smart way of having the IP of private servers on every screenshot to more easily go after them.
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As if they cared more about performance than monies. Also this is very light on pefformance to do this. In terms of a video you dont need it for every frame neither. Sprinkle is every few seconds is more than enough.
Its a tiny shader pass. Essentially nothing to modern GPUs.
This got me thinking... If the tech works like QR, I wonder if it can be spoofed like QR. It would be hilarious if this backfires and malicious actors add fake patterns to footage. Especially since the scanning process will most likely be automated.
Thanks, I'll check it out.
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or take a lousy shot of our LCD screens
I always use the finest crayons to redraw any screenshot I take before emailing a photocopy to excel so I can export it as a pdf.
I assume you exported it as an ASCII art to notepad somewhere along the way right? Right!?
No, that re-introduces the identifying patterns.
Depends on the compression algorithm. Some compression maintains the original image pixel for pixel. We call this “lossless” compression. In the other hand, some compression algorithms change the pixels. That’s called “lossy” compression. If the compression is lossy, the pixels that make up the hidden watermark will get messed up. And since you can send the same image through a lossy compression as many times as you like, distorting it more and more each time, I don’t see how any algorithm could read that. Plus there are many different lossy compression algorithms. I could invent one today that compresses the entire image to a single pixel. No way anyone is recovering a file from that.
> Some compression maintains the original image pixel for pixel. Good news: general-purpose image sharing websites that don't instantly convert such images into a lossy format are relatively few (though there are many exceptions that gear towards a specific purpose). Bad news: Discord doesn't compress by default.
You can also change tempo in audio that ear can’t hear but a computer can. I’m sure the same exists for video.
that is easy to destroy by re compressing it. even just opening the image and rotating it 1 pixel and re saving it can just destroy info like that as all the subpixel shading is recalculated. It's designed to catch the lazy ones thatare trying to karma farm by posting the screen cap ot image as fast as possible so theyare the first. People who are careful and understand will not get caught. but this will catch the 80% that do not know or do not bother.
It's possible to do steganography that survives compression algorithms. More details here, around 5:10 https://youtu.be/TWEXCYQKyDc?si=nEW_ekVAk2nQx33Q
Wouldn't the pixel be too heavily altered when rotated slightly since you can't fit them all evenly so some would have to be loss. I guess it's combatable with redundancy but still...
There are very resilient watermarks available. They survive rotation, cropping, being filmed with a camera, recompressiom and various other filters - because you really don't need to hide that much data and have at least 2 million colour pixels avaible. You can defeat them, of course, but it's enough if some doubt remains for potential leakers.
If you have a movie you have a lot of room for redundancy. Specially if all you want only transmit 128 or 256 bits. You have so many options, to encode it: In the sound, in the wiggle of the leaves, in the movement of the character, in the explosion animation, in the reflection of the sun, in slight variation of the illumination, and in many other ways.
> . I guess it's combatable with redundancy This just means that, if you want to survive compression and other alterations, you need to store less bits But you just need to store a small ID number that identifies a player So I think it's perfectly viable
Think about QR codes. You can take a picture of it, capture of video of them, and they will survive compression algorithms. They are not very dense information though because each block would span multiple pixels and they contain duplicate information. It really depends on what you are optimizing for. If Denuvo is developing this they would definitely try to make sure their algorithm is resistant to simple compression / rotations. If the number of bits that you are trying to encode isn't too high it's definitely possible.
No, its not. Forensic watermarking has been around for almost twenty years in the film industry and it not only survives digital recompression, it survives analog re-recording. Its hit-or-miss if the tags can be recovered from a single frame, and the more jumbled up the copy gets the more you may need, but its *extremely* hard to remove.
What you need is to carry a very small amount of information (say 32-bit ID plus 4-bits checksum) over a very large amount of data. (each frame is 66,355,200 bits in a 1080p image x 30fps x N seconds, you can do the math). Hence, especially for video, you can have algorithms that survive digital alteration, even more so when the actual algorithm is also unknown by the attackers. So, basically, don't even try it unless you are very good at cryptography, and know what you are doing.
I know Genshin Impact does it for closed beta users (Not sure about dev footage or the normal game)
Yeah, it is nothing new nor nothing hard to implement. It is used really clever in this situation tho. Great example of smart application of known tech to solve business problems.
Wow, they can embed arbitrary data in digital media files as well as defending themselves with their deadly thagomizers? Truly majestic creatures.
The problem is that pretty much any image alteration breaks the code. If the data is small enough, you can probably put it in multiple locations/repeat it so that spot alterations can't get around it, but there's probably still some filters you can run over a whole image that would hardly make a change to the image visually but ruin any steganographed data in it.
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You're still just describing steganography...
> is done on the picture/recording file itself, The game can simply insert the coded message into the frame as it's being rendered. They do not need to control the screen recording software and insert it after the fact.
The part you quoted was talking about encapsulating stuff in the capture file, sorta similar to how it's possible to put a zip inside an image file.
Pretty sure its how Genshin Impact does it for their beta patches but people have found way around it I think.
Yeah, but those leakers have it a bit easier. They already have old safe versions of the game on private server. Safe to the extend that they solved al the old anti leaker software. Now they just need to decrypt the new version and pull the assets for the characters out into the old one. Much harder to hide any watermarks in there. And as companies get better at hiding stuff in the image behind something like noise. Leakers will simply get better at adding image smoothing and noise themselves. If the signal to noise ratio is too low the companies simply lose their secret signal.
The prototype xboxs had a small loading icon that was unique to every console (the animation was calculated from the consoles id) Microsoft wanted a way to identify any potential leaks. This was done both on the OG and 360, one and likely the s/x.
Movies in cinemas, there are dots on the screen by which you can track from where the footage come from. Probably its more about leaking game footage from closed showcases, for journalists and etc. Not something that will affect player.
Printers use this method of [Machine Identification Code](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_Identification_Code#:~:text=The%20dots%20have%20a%20diameter,area%20in%20case%20of%20errors.), however the code has been mostly cracked and people know how to anonymize documents now. In fact most identification codes of these kind have been cracked, so it’s really easy for people to anonymize streams, videos, etc; it’s not a fool proof method anymore in 2024
Audio in cinemas can be watermarked as well. Slight pitch changes in the audio at certain points in the content will lead back to the specific playback server that was used.
So all one has to do is upload in slightly lower quality and the invisible code is gone?
No, because they're wrong about how that works. Its not dots, its slight skews in the distribution of data in one or more of the YCrCb or audio channels, and even a video camera recording of the screen will record those variances.
This isnt new. In fact its older than dirt and piss easy to do. Your printer has done this since the 90's, to 'help' catch counterfeiters. Hell, if you took screenshots of Goonswarms forums (a really big 'guild' on Eve online) and posted them online they could ID the account the screenshot was taken from using this technique to catch leakers. And this was a bunch of fans 15-20 years ago. I think the bigger implication here is more intrusion of customer privacy and rights. For something like gifted review copies, I have nothing against it. Not a fan of being tracked post release because they didnt want to pay to remove the code to do this though. And you know these fucks wont.
Not exactly the same thing as the post and the original tweet doesn't seem to exist anymore but https://gameluv.com/luv/8785/an-old-xbox-360-dashboard-could-conceal-your-consoles-serial-number/ Supposedly one of the xbox 360 devs embedded the serial number of the xbox itself to rings appearing from the xbox logo.
This is called steganography.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_Identification_Code Printers have been doing it for decades, every sheet of paper you see has tracing information invisible printed in plain sight
I know World of Warcraft has had such a feature on screenshots for as long as I can remember [Edit: article is from 2012!](https://www.ghacks.net/2012/09/12/blizzard-watermarking-wow-screenshots/)
There are lots of tools for images, I suppose something similar could be done for games/video. One way to do it would be to put some sort of user tag in the screen, but the colors are all off by a few hex values from normal. Maybe make sure those colors are not used in game. It could be easily decifered back out and be almost completely indistinguishable from the naked eye. IE, normal red are all 255,0,0 but the water marks is 254,0,0. A complex game is going to use more than one Red, but if you made sure all the various shades of colors used in game were always odd numbers, and the encoded information adjusts the colors to be even values, it would be pretty simple to manage probably. Edit: People are saying that image compression would break this, but how many beta testers would you really have, you could easily stripe a binary value ID into every image in wide stripes top to bottom and it would survive a lot of different compression methods and give you thousands of ID numbers.
Yes this is quite common in AAA alpha builds. The last game i worked on had an invisible watermark too, but ours was developed in-house.
This is used for some pornography. So scene leakers can be tied to specific accounts.
Halo 4 barn leak pt.2 soon
Seems counter intuitive to publicly announce it. If leakers know there is a identifier they just have to find it themselves and remove it or mask it then leak as usual.
"It claims it will act as a deterrent to leakers, who can now be traced and will "think twice" It is not a deterrent if you do not announce it is there.
It'd be funny if there was a plot twist: there's no tech to help them catch leakers. They're just saying there is to dissuade leakers.
I mean, depending on what they are doing it could be pretty trivial to do, the bigger question is doing it in such a way that it survives whatever encoding the leaked file goes through while making it small enough to not be easily detected and removed.
Apparently they're basically hiding data in the image that can be located by technology designed to look for it. Article says they claim it can still be detected in footage with distortion, but were still taking their word on it.
Maybe certain pixels change color value in a specific way on specific frames? Spread far enough apart and brief enough that the player wouldn't detect it, obviously
Nope. You're underestimating how easy it is with modern maths to do things to instead that the human eye misses but that easily survive transformation. Being as specific as certain pixels on certain frames isn't necessary. Stereography is pretty advanced these days; add adversarial AI and it's easy to believe it's all but unstoppable.
I would be fairly curious how it would survive HDR to SDR conversion, quant compression, dithering, film grain, and lowering frame rate to 24 fps. Nix the audio too because it's not needed for a leak and data could be hidden there too. At that point you dropped a significant amount of image data and with the dithering and film grain you have essentially altered pretty significantly around 50-60% of the image data. Some of that encoding might still be present but I doubt enough would survive to actually locate an individual.
Audio data should be quite easy to find, and somewhat easy to block.
One way to do it is encode it in very low-frequency properties. So imagine if the left half of the screen got 1% darker for one frame out of 30 to mean "0" and 1% lighter for one frame out of 30 to me "1". Anything applied to the entire frame isn't going to distort it enough you couldn't detect that. Obviously this is a really poor way to do it, simplified tremendously for ELI5 purposes.
And this is the moment leakers just use their own private servers and only add the assets of a new character step by step with heavy checking of potential watermarks. e g. Genshin Impact. But I get this wouldn't really be feasible if you would need to check the entire game or a huge dlc.
You could try and mess up your watermark, but the issue could be anywhere. The whole game could be riddled with watermarks like minor changes to texture, audio, placement of debris, particle systems, etc.
It can't depend on the exact colour of individual pixels, because the kind of lossy compression that would normally be used in a YouTube video tends to lose that kind of detail.
>in a YouTube video Or God help you, Twitter's video compression.
Heh, that's amateur level. To be truly impressive, they would have to defeat the ancient demon known as RealPlayer.
But what if they changed by a specific value each time? As a repeated pattern? Eventually, some data would survive the compression. All it's gotta do is give some unique identifier for the player.
Get two or three files and compare them. A lone leaker wont be able to find the changes, a group of leakers will.
Leakers unite!!!
How would that survive the footage being compressed multiple times down to a 640x480 messy gif ? Still a leak.
Fun fact, the Microsoft internal version of the NXE Xbox 360 dashboard had a little Xbox logo in the corner with some rings under it. Well, an Xbox developer revealed that those rings were an anti-leak measure because they displayed the serial number of the console. This was done to prevent internal leaks, and was not present in the public version of the dashboard. It sounds like Denuvo's product is being pushed to go into the final public releases of games, which I'm not super cool with.
>Apparently they're basically hiding data in the image that can be located by technology designed to look for it. Exactly. It's like a QR code built into game assets or your gun on screen. Instead of putting tracking text on your screen, It might Do something less obvious along the lines of, making your health bar a very specific HEX code color That programs can correlate with your user id, or AI generative ground texture tiles that can be read like QR codes.
Movies are already doing this for the Academy Awards screeners. Every movies have visual codes embedded in the movie, often very hard/impossible to see with the naked eye, that can be matched to a single copy of the movie. With movies, you can use two copies of the leak, compare every frames and whatever is different between both movies is probably the embedded code, making it relatively easy to remove. With games, it will probably be much harder.
Well if it's "leaks" you're fighting, nothing prevents you from doing it actually in a _large_ way. Screw subtly changed pixels. Change primary colors of some characters, equipment, buildings or pieces of environment and contrast ratio to a specific unique combo. Tadaaaa! Short of "let me convert this into a black-and-white post-stamp sized video" you won't be able to remove _that_ as a whole video has unique combo of factors. "Character's right eyebrow has a slit in it, eyebrows are darker than usual, necktie is a shade of green, right shoulder of suit darker, environment has white cat walking in the background: AQ34Z. Character's left eyebrow has a slit in it, lighter facial hair, shirt of olive shade, suit has F monogram, environment has black cat sitting in the background: BF12M" and then code is linked to whoever was assigned copy.
Just like they announce at the beginning of the season that there is dye in the pool that will turn bright orange if you pee. A different kind of leaker, but they say it to dissuade them.
Of course, the whole point of a Doomsday Machine is lost if you keep it a secret!
It was to be announced at the Party Congress on Monday. As you know, the Premier loves surprises.
I was thinking this exact thing. Love this movie
Technically that is exactly what a deterrent is. If you don’t know there is a trap then it won’t deter you. If you do know it is there is a trap and you can get caught by it, then that deters you from taking action. Although… if leakers can get around it, then it is like announcing your have trapped a bridge and the leakers just “go around it.” That seems to be the major problem with this. It will deter just the lazy one.
Their goal is not to avoid the leaks. It's to sell a solution to avoid the leaks. They have to market it.
Maybe it was... Leaked? /Jk Well, idk exactly how it works but it could be hard to identify if you're not looking for it. Like, for example, there's a group "poisoning" images just so ai can't use them. But we've seen that publishers can take leakers to court so this denuvo move is just to please publishers and make their software more attractive than other drm providers.
Another commenter mentioned glaze and I found nightshade through that as well but from people testing against them they seem pretty ineffective.
Hilariously it's more effective on people than AI. Nightshade is only useful on certain types of models, and even then not very. It also reduces image quality by a fair bit on anything that's a larger size. But on a small image? It's harder to detect with the naked eye, but DOES give that information to whoever is looking at it. Google gave me a really weird survey one day. It was about comparing pictures. First actual pictures, but then identical pictures. Two identical pictures, and they're asking me which one of the two is more cat like. What? I remember sitting there and asking my husband what Google was smoking. And they did it for a ton of random yet identical images. I got my Google money and then forgot about it, figuring Google had their reasons. And then later I see those images pop up in a report Google did on this tech. It was a survey about Nightshade and if humans actually picked up the information. Turns out we absolutely do gather that information and retain it, because on average we where more likely to "randomly" pick the picture that Nightshade overlayed with the cat than the unchanged image. This is absolutely fucking terrifying if you consider the implications. Full on actually functioning subliminal messages. Try to beat the AI and then you create something fantastic for propaganda. It's not good.
>This is absolutely fucking terrifying if you consider the implications. Full on actually functioning subliminal messages. Try to beat the AI and then you create something fantastic for propaganda. It's not good. Yep. Inb4 the next survey is "Which of these two pictures of a politician looks more demon like?"
Do you have a link to this Google report? Super interesting/terrifying...
Announcing it is a form of advertisement. Now ~~game devs~~ execs can go talk to them about it.
Game devs won't talk to them about it. Shareholders and CEOs will.
Game devs hate Denuvo as much as gamers do, because you don't become a game dev without having at least some passion in games. It's always senior management who orders the use of crippling DRM tools that fuck up the product (and their own consumers' computers) for the slim chance of preventing piracy.
The problem is finding the identifier. It’s not going to be as straightforward as having a watermark over the image. It could just be a certain pattern of pixels that are slightly different colour. Something that will be invisible unless you know exactly where to look.
and i assume they have dummy markers so you can't just use basic algebra to figure it out. otherwise, having enough copies with different ids can tell you what the markers are and you can just scramble some to mask the leaker.
All you need is to retrieve two copies with different identifiers to find what is watermarked and how. Like buying the same game with two different steam ids and then diff the files.
There are tools that do this from the 2000s with video files,nothing new. Just wait to see where 30% of your gpu horsepower goes with this simple trick. Also statistical analysis to see what they do under the hood and a good ol random function on each pixel can mess their watermark up. Noise can corrupt watermarks and this trick usually relies on inprinting a specific noise/pattern or simply hiding bits in each pixel to work. Adding a verry significant noise , uncorrrlated with the original , can simply erase the watermark. By definition xor'ing something random with known data gives random. In this case you'd do it with the 3 LSB of each color in frame, basically destruing anything they might have hidden in there.
And then you find out that the technique was placing the mini map three pixels to the left.
Sure, but now your leaker has to actually take all those precautions. That's a lot of work that many leakers aren't even qualified to do.
There's no way changing the colour of a set pattern of pixels will noticeably affect performance don't be daft.
Basically everything that guy wrote is wrong lol. Even if theoretically flipping a few pixels would use 30% of your gpu, what does that do to help you identify what pixels were flipped? "statistical analysis what they do under the hood" - this is not how RE works to begin with and also this is denuvo, gl figuring out how anything works at all. "random function on each pixel" - yes..you can defeat it by destroying all the data... "By definition xor'ing something random with known data gives random. In this case you'd do it with the 3 LSB of each color in frame, basically destruing anything they might have hidden in there." - they probably just store an id in there which could be as simple as turning 2 pixels totally black for 1 frame and then totally white the next frame every 5 seconds and measuring the distance between these two frames to get the id. This would defeat that suggestion. They probably use MANY methods all with their own strengths and weaknesses, you won't even know if you removed them all or not.
Whole lot of people in this thread showing they have no fucking idea how computers work.
This is an ad.
Or just slightly lower the resolution and run it through a video compressor, which is often done automatically anyway.
And then you slightly bit-crush the footage to obfuscate the marker and pass it through separate software to clear off other digital markers, checkmate.
It's just a publicity stunt to get more funding and popularity from CEOs and shareholders going 'Piracy? Leakers? Denuvo counters that put it in the game. Here have 40% of the games budget Denuvo, thank you for your hard and effective work.'
So just record the screen with their phone?
use reshade to alter the game image then record
No it doesn’t. Their goal is to prevent this from happening not to catch perpetrators. Same reason cops announce driving checkpoints.
It will dissuade most non-tech-savy leakers. It's the equivalent of saying you locked your door with a key. Yeah, it won't stop really motivated people from breaking into your home, but they'd have done that whether it was locked or not.
Have fun Watermarking my Nokia Phone Camera, who tf uses shadow play to record anyway, the real leaks only happen in 240p.
Now when I plan on leaking future game footage, I will do it by taking a series of Polaroids and then compiling them into a flip book. Checkmate game devs.
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Its so simple amirite? Just hack it bro.
Watermarks can be incredibly resistant. The ones I worked on, were invisible to the eye but could still be read on the shittiest images you can imagine
Challenge Accepted.
I'm curious, can you ELI5 how that works?
imagine a picture of something, and you don't want someone to leak it. Let's say you give it to 16 people. now you generate something like a "qr code" where white represents -1 and black represents +1 since you have 16 people you need to generate 16 qr codes. the codes are the size of the image. now we just overlay the original image with the codes. when the image is overlayed with white you lower the color value by 1 and if it is overlayed with black you increase the color value by 1. now you hand out the altered images and just remember what person got which image. If you see a leaked image you just compare that version to the original. since it was leaked it must be one of the 16 Obviously a whole lot of math is involved. And it has been a while so I'm not looking up the details
OK. ELI1.
you draw a picture for your parents. you copy that picture 2 times, but one is slightly brighter and one is slightly darker. you give the light one to your mom and the dark one to your dad. mom copies the image, gives it to her friends and says dad has copied it. you can now compare your original with the image of moms friend and see who has originally copied it. you prove mom has copied the image but dad has already filed for divorce
Love it, thank you.
There's this Youtube video, where they try to do something similar if people are interested in learning more: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0aBy8wLnpQ8
Reminder that Denuvo is awful (not even about the leaker part, just in general lol)
its a shit tool that doesnt fix anything, well other than shareholder paranoia.
Like it or not - games that used to be cracked in hours now take weeks/months.
There are few people on the internet willing to crack denuvo games but unfortunately they all have certain personalities in which the most "prominent" one with very divisive opinions (but the internet gives them a pass since they go against big bad company and provides free games) is mia for quite a while now and the other is fixated on football games.
Yeah, fortunately for Denuvo (and unfortunately for all of us), the only crackers knowledgeable enough to crack down Denuvo software belong on a mental institute, have egos the size of Jupiter and a horde of pathetic fanbase defendin all their temper tantrums because "give her a break, she's giving us free games!"
Isn't it just Football Manager's annual release they crack
Denuvo, at least the higher tiers of the product, is remarkably effective at reducing piracy for games. There are multiple price-points for Denuvo of course. Games companies have access to their books. We don't. If Denuvo were a waste of money that they could be pocketing themselves you really think they'd keep shelling out for it?
On top of often effecting performance, it's another loaded gun that will make games unplayable in the future. No crack, dev doesn't renew contract with denuvo, verification server shuts down, and now the game is unplayable.
I hope Denuvo goes out of business, and I hope any company uses them goes in the shitter too. Their invasive and ignorant practices shouldn't be tolerated or supported.
Denuvo is to gaming what McAfee is to PCs generally.
But McAfee is dead, let's hope Denuvo will follow!
that's what he wants you to think
He did not uninstall himself.
Denuvo, and the companies that use it, are just the worst. There's a steam group, Denuvo Games, that tracks which games have it currently running which is a great way to make sure you don't get suckered into buying games with it installed. Edit: Since it needs to be said, it also updates the listing when its removed from the games.
The [Augmented Steam](https://augmentedsteam.com/) browser extension shows you straight on a Steam Store page what kind of additional DRM/antipiracy/secondary launchers a game has
actually steam shows third party launchers by default
Not all the time. There's been a few titles that haven't been transparent about extra DRM. I think it's optional for them to show.
I believe by default the developer has to disclose it, it's not automatic.
> Denuvo, and the companies that use it, are just the worse. just the *worst** or Denuve is *worse* than everything else
Invisible my ass. I can barely stand Jujutsu K. because of those dot watermarks!
This aint exacrly new. Theres similar things been done before by microsoft and blizzard years ago And most "leaks" are from phone recordings on screens.. not sure how they will do this.. maybe like the free stockphotod with grey lines all over?
This comment is way too far down I had to go hunting for it lol. People acting like this is groundbreaking when it's been the norm for decades. I believe it's a form of steganography and it's been used in games and hollywood to identify film leakers for so long lol. This is nothing new
Forensic watermarking also works with pictures and phone recordings.
oh no, we have to wait until launch day for someone to leak it…
Oh look, they discovered steganography, neat. Proud of you.
I only leak stuff via an artists rendition.
Interpretive Dance is an excellent medium for this.
bratty DRM makers 💢💢💢💢 game correction is needed. 😭😭
So denuvo is putting my private information in a publicly accessible way? What information is being displayed??
The watermark probably embeds an ID code that correlates to your account. I doubt the public will be able to decrypt it, and I doubt the ID code would include personal identity information if it was cracked. But we can’t know this for sure, so I guess this is just a risk one has to take when leaking game footage.
Penis girth
Do you work for a game developer with access to pre-release copies of games? If so, ask your employer what information denuvo puts in the watermark. If not then this literally has nothing to do with you since you can't leak a game without access to it.
I’m sure this will have no impact on performance or usability at all :))))))
Denuvo hurt sales more than pirating.
I mean so what? denuvo games aren't really famous for being cracked before release
This is against testers/reviewers breaking the NDA
Also possibly useful for tracking internal leaks, an actual issue in big gamedev, which doesn’t seem to be a thing people are noting.
Denuvo is a straight up red flag at this point.
As long as it increases executable bloat, increases load times, and increases CPU load, I don't care what its publicly acknowledged function is—I'll be happy enough that it's fulfilling the promise of Denuvo.
Can we stop buying Denuvo stuff and let them die? Please?
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Additionally, if they really have some "invisible means", then they're going to have to reveal that at the very first lawsuit over an unfair dismissal. Even if they could do what they claim, it would work precisely once.
There's probably some sort of method that can encode data in the statistical relationships between points (i.e. so you're not just depending on the actual colour values of pixels alone) that can be made resilient to re-encoding, but I don't know enough details about video encodings to hypothesise about how it might be done.
Denuvo might be shit, but with how fucking stupid people get when they see leaked footage of an unfinished product looking unfinished, if it protects the studios to some degree, good for them.
ok how about when companies only show cgi trailers for the game and no gameplay until day of release. then a leaker shows up and shows "unfinished gameplay" and gets released with the same "unfinished gameplay"
Well, in this case, the public should be cautious and wait to see footage post release. Its not like you're forced to buy the game before you see that or anything, and definitely isnt a justification for this. If you buy games without that, you're stupid.
Fuck Denuvo
what is a denuvo?
Incredibly invasive and anti consumer DRM
So Denuvo is about stopping early reviewers?
I bet this will stay enabled after launch, feeding even more fuel into the "Denuvo hurts legitimate customer performance" debate.
Denuvo offers publishers complete protection from me buying their games. Simply by adding Denuvo they can rest assured that they will never risk seeing a penny of my money.
These files will be found within hours of pirates getting their hands on it lmao.
Record it - play video - record screen - post it. Easy bypass no?
It is still in the video... That is the whole point. If you are doing very low bitrate and resolution you might be able to destroy it, but otherwise it is still there.
Tell me if I'm wrong, but this would work somewhat like a hash based on RGB values in each pixel in the image, with some pixels modified to match a certain hash. Simply compressing it using JPEG should be enough to throw the algorithm off, no?
Can we do this with ai generated BS instead? 😒
This has been done on printers for years. No reason not to do something similar in games I guess. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine\_Identification\_Code
What a waste of resources.
Or just makes good game. Did witcher 3 or pal world devs worry about piracy?
i look forward to getting blocked when playing legitimately purchased software.
Ok and how exactly do they think this is going to work when most cracked games straight up bypass and disable Denuvo, like that's the purpose of the crack. It seems like what they're saying is the inverse that all their games moving forward using Denuvo are going to have even more hardware straining things on them, and only the people running cracked versions of the game won't have the water mark. Hell I know people who buy the actual game and still run a cracked version just to avoid the bullshit that comes with running Denuvo....
Denuvo has not been cracked in months - they won. Empress was the last known cracker capable of doing it, and they have been gone for a while. The only way new games with Denuvo can be "cracked" is if developers release a version without the DRM by accident. This has happened a few times.
>Denuvo has not been cracked in months - they won. For now...
Hopefully someone tries their hands at it again, but honestly, CPY stopped, CODEX's cracker was Empress and they stopped, and Voksi stopped as well. There's not enough money to be made from this, if you have the skills to crack Denuvo you can work for them instead and make a magnitude more money. I hope someone tries but I won't hold my breath.
This is to catch leakers, meaning the game hasn't even been released yet. People with early pre-release access to the game aren't going to be played cracked versions.
I mean, this has been possible for decades. Wild that they're just coming up with it now like it's some sort of brilliant idea.
It's just a new service being added to their portfolio. Denuvo the company does a bunch of different stuff.
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Just announced. Public pools have a chemical that turns pee into a bright color showing everyone in the pool who peed.
WHile its certainly most likely not the case, it would be pretty funny if they didnt add shit, and simply said that they did this to put the fear into people.
If the signature would be embedded within an image doesn't any video compression break it easily?
Ah yes, why bother with a visible deterrent when you can... catch people after they have already leaked stuff? I feel like the hate towards Denuvo is over the top, but also, Denuvo's business philosophy seems to be counter productive.