A group of crackers reckon the number of pirated games looks set to dry up by 2018, as David Crookes explains
You may well be aware that Football Manager is blamed for more divorces than any other game ever made. But did you know that the stat-packed title, which gives fans a chance to take the tiniest of minnows to the glory of the Champions League, is also the most illegally downloaded game of all time?
Football Manager’s main producer, Miles Jacobson of UK-based Sports Interactive, told an audience at the London Games Conference in 2013 that the game had been cracked in May that year and had subsequently been illegally downloaded 10.1 million times. It was so widespread that it earned the game the inglorious title of the most pirated videogame ever in the Guinness World Records.
Over the years, piracy has been a pain in the backside for developers of games and other software. And Football Manager has proved to be just the tip of the iceberg. In 2008, Spore was found to have been downloaded over peer-to-peer networks more than 1.7 million times. In 1987, the creators of Leisure Suit Larry said the level of piracy was so high that the company sold more hint books than actual copies of the game.
But there is a game, it would appear, that has the pirates well and truly beat, leading some hackers to throw up their arms in defeat and suggest that piracy may be a thing of the past as soon as 2018. That game is Just Cause 3, and while it may well have a story mission called An Act of Piracy, there is little chance of anyone successful breaching the title’s incredible defences, much to the annoyance and upset of the hacking community.
News of this great deterrent emerged when ‘Bird Sister’, the founder of a notorious Chinese cracking forum called 3DM ‘warned’ that there would be no pirated games to play within two years, such is the difficulty of breaking through current anti-piracy technology.
Not that it’s for a want of trying. Hackers have been pushing really hard to breach the Denuvo security that protects the game, but it eventually led to the 3DM founder writing, “Recently, many people have asked about cracks for ‘Just Cause 3’, so here is a centralised answer to this question. The last stage is too difficult, and Jun [the person doing the cracking] nearly gave up, but last Wednesday I encouraged him to continue.”
She added, “I still believe that this game can be compromised. But according to current trends in the development of encryption technology, in two years time I’m afraid there will be no free games to play in the world.”
This, as it happens, is no big surprise. The protection created by Denuvo Software Solutions GmbH has proven very effective in previous versions. Dragon Age: Inquisition took a month to crack in 2014 – something that caused a few raised eyebrows in the hacking community – and while 3DM managed to break that seal, Denuvo only came out fighting.
FIFA 16, which also had Denuvo protection, remains uncracked five months on, and Just Cause 3, which was released in December, may fall into the same bracket. Finally, to the joy of developers and publishers, the industry appears to be winning, and the old adage that any game could be cracked may well have to be revised.
Chinese Crackers
To hear that the Chinese are so adamant about trying to push for a breakthrough with Just Cause 3 only serves to highlight the world hierarchy when it comes to PC piracy. When Football Manager was cracked, a flaw called Home allowed Jacobson to discover the IP addresses of every illegal copy downloaded, and of those who snatched a free copy, 3.2 million were from China.
Enterprising lawbreakers in China have made piracy a huge problem, and there has long been a suspicion that the root cause was the country’s ban on videogame consoles in 2000. At the time, the Chinese authorities feared games had a negative impact on the development of children, and the ban meant it was difficult to buy legitimate copies of games. Crackers filled a gap, opening up a vast black market of pirated software. It then became a way of life for many people, so it has continued to be a passion for many even after the restrictions were eased in July last year.
Knowing that the ‘something for nothing’ culture has been cultivated in China when it comes to software, companies have been doing all they can to rectify the situation and change attitudes. An investigation by Microsoft, for example, discovered that every one of the 169 PCs they had purchased from shops in China had a pirated version of Windows installed on them and, worse, that 91% of them contained malware.
Such concerns prompted Microsoft to allow Chinese people using pirated versions of Microsoft Windows to upgrade to Windows 10 for free. It announced the move last March ahead of the operating system’s general release. Terry Myerson, head of Microsoft’s operating systems unit, told Reuters there were “hundreds of millions” of people in China it could reach with the initiative. BSA, an industry group that tracks the use of unlicensed software, also found that 74% of commercial software in China was pirated.
Yet the problem is not only confined to China. Jacobson found that 1.05 million of those who obtained a free copy of Football Manager were from Turkey and 781,785 from Portugal. A further 547,000 people pirated the game in Italy, and one person did so from within the Vatican. Of course, there is a need to take population sizes into account too, but there is every indication that it’s a global issue – one that Jacobson believed equated to 176,000 lost sales, on the basis that 1.74% of illegal downloaders would have bought the game if the crack had not existed.
In hard cash, the loss was some $3.7 million, and Jacobson’s despair at this sounded as if his favourite team had lost a football game by a last minute penalty. “Crackers are going to crack and people will download,” he told the audience, inevitability in his speech. The latest developments, however, suggest otherwise.
Just Do It
To discover that Just Cause 3 has been the straw that broke the crackers’ back is rather apt, given the comments of Avalanche Studios founder and head Christofer Sunberg five years ago. He said “always-on” DRM was “completely useless”, which was good news for those who say it’s a malicious feature that impacts on the free market and fails to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate users.
“Forcing people to be online all the time and so on doesn’t show respect to the people who actually buy games,” he said. Sunberg also believed there was a gold mine of talent among hackers: “50% of the people that work for me come from a hacker background.” With Just Cause 3’s publisher, Square Enix, turning to a different kind of anti-crack protection, though, the company and its publisher have been able to protect their revenue while allowing legitimate users the freedom they expect.
Yet not every game is employing the system. As it stands, just nine blockbuster games including Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain and Batman: Arkham Knight use it, but with such a prominent cracking group bringing Denuvo to the world’s attention, the number of games and other PC programs that seek to take advantage may well shoot up. Certainly, if a survey by the industry’s trade body, TIGA, is anything to go by, taking constructive and innovative approaches to piracy is important for developers and publishers. Everyone has to eat, after all.
TIGA surveyed UK developments and found UK developers and digital publishers overwhelmingly favoured the adoption of new business models to minimise the problem of piracy, with 87% of respondents preferring this approach, compared to only 10% feeling stricter enforcement of intellectual property rights is the way forward.
Piracy is clearly having an effect, with 57% of respondents saying it is a problem for their business. In spite of this, 73% of developers disagreed that people who persist in illegally swapping copyrighted files of films, music and games on the internet should have their internet connections slowed down and ultimately severed, even if they ignore warning letters to stop.
In 2013, when the survey was carried out, 73% of those surveyed said it was staying at a constant level, with 40% of respondents saying they still expected it to be a threat to their business in five years’ time. As we’ve seen, though, the crackers beg to differ, and it points to so much having changed in such a small amount of time.
The emphasis is well and truly on hinderance. Spyro: Year of the Dragon, which was released in 2000, was the first game to feature a brand new copy-protection system that booby-trapped it against piracy and ensured it took longer for people to crack the game’s code. By delaying the time it takes to crack a game, it opens up a window for legal sales. Those who want the game for free get sucked into a waiting game that, as it currently stands, can last months and may one day stretch to years.
At the same time, software companies have been employing different methods to combat piracy, by taking money out of the equation, initially at least. “TIGA’s survey shows that many games businesses continue to find the most effective response to the problem of piracy is to adopt new business models, such as subscription-based services and free-to-play games,” said TIGA CEO Richard Wilson. With those types of business models combined with technology such as Denuvo, piracy really could be off the agenda in 2018.
To What Effect?
But is this really entirely desirable? There is a school of thought that cracking can actually have a good deal of use. If you’re into playing older games on emulators, then you’re entering a whole grey area in and of itself. For a start, the emulator is mimicking a copyrighted machine, and it often means getting hold of a ROM that, in itself, can be illegal. Then there’s the matter of grabbing games from the internet. A lot of the sites that exist for the downloading of older games contain cracked titles.
Some worry that, in the future, games preservation will suffer. A lot of the older games would have run the risk of being lost forever if they were not cracked and made available to download. And just as tapes and disks can degrade or become discarded, so servers can close and digital files can be deleted. With heavy protection comes the risk that a piece of software will cease to work on a particular system in the future without being cracked. Make it impossible to crack, and the short-term gain leads to long-term pain.
Of course, the flipside to this argument is that a lack of protection would lead to less of an incentive to write software and games in the first place. At the same time, the cracking of older games has led to a market for refreshes of those games today. Leisure Suit Larry: Reloaded was released in 2013, giving the original adventure a modern-day makeover.
That said, creator Al Lowe wrote, “I’d like to say to all of those that pirated the [original Larry] games, we’re going to give you a new chance to come clean and own up – man up – and buy a copy come January.” It could be argued that the audience for the remake would not have existed without the original crackers, not the availability of the game via emulation. Not everything is black and white, after all.
Being honest, though, future proofing games to allow them to be enjoyed forever more is not the incentive of most crackers. The Reddit forum members who post ‘crack statuses’ of various games just want to play games for free. There are currently more than 5,500 comments on the matter of Just Cause 3, and there is a desperation to see the game fall, with some seeking to defend the suspected immorality of their actions. “3DM cracks games not simply to play them for free but because it’s a challenge,” writes one.
There are also those who see it as a continuing war. “I think Denuvo wins if they can last longer than the previous version,” another writes. There is even a thread entitled, “Please stop with the Denuvo s***posts please” with the opening post saying anyone writing: “Omgz DENUVO END PIRACY!!1!” will see the offending words removed. But as long as the anti-piracy measures become more and more advanced, the greater the chance that threads such as “Let’s pray that Rise of the Tomb Raider doesn’t take a long time to be cracked” will exist to frustrate gamers who don’t want to fork out for their entertainment.
In the current climate, it would appear that, yes, the tide really has turned and that crackers may well start to give up even trying, rather than dedicating months of their lives to the challenge of allowing the masses to play the top titles for nothing. That said, there is still a lot of optimism in the cracking community and among those who benefit from having free games made available. “Do you think in two years AAA piracy is dead/dying?” asked a survey on strawpoll.me. There were 406 votes, with 75% indicating “no”. But there is every chance it will die, and we can only wait and see.
History Of Piracy
Piracy has been a problem since the dawn of gaming. Here are three issues the industry has battled with.
Tape And Disk Copying
In the 1980s, a school playground wasn’t complete without someone dishing out a stack of tapes or disks with some freshly copied goodies on them. For cassettes, a twin-deck recorder was all that was needed, and for disks, there were always lots of copy programs around. Codes printed within inlays, and technologies such as Lenslok, tried to counter the efforts.
CD Copying
With the advent of CD-Rs and recordable CD drives, piracy continued on a different medium. Although they were cheaper to manufacture than cartridges, console makers didn’t initially factor in modchips. By taking a console to a dodgy geezer with the know-how, it opened up a whole world of carboot shenanigans, bringing mass piracy to consoles.
R4 Cards
Easy to pick up online, the R4 cards caused major headaches for Nintendo, which was annoyed that they allowed people to pirate games on its DS handheld. The devices looked like DS cartridges, but they had a micro-SD slot. By copying games to a micro-SD card and inserting it, it was possible to take advantage of an internet’s worth of entertainment.
Torrents
The internet brought its own problem for the PC with file-sharing networks, torrents and downloads allowing the speedy delivery of free commercial games. DRM was the main response to this, but only recently have the steps taken to prevent games from being cracked led to a drying up of major pirated releases emerging online.
Five Innovative Anti-Piracy Measures
Far Cry 4
When players of Far Cry 4 began to complain that the game did not offer field-of-view options, they were unwittingly letting the world know that they had a pirated copy of the game in their possession. As it turned out, a day-one patch for legitimate users introduced the very feature being complained about. “PC players!” said the game’s director Alex Hutchinson, “If you’re online complaining about the lack of FOV control… You pirated the game!”
Mirror’s Edge
Mirror’s Edge is known for its fast and fluid gameplay, so imagine the frustration of players when they were getting to important jumps only to find that the game was slowing down, hampering their chance of progress. This only happened when players were using a pirated copy, thanks to a special piece of detection code that worked out if the game had been legitimately purchased. It came into effect during the tutorial.
Batman: Arkham Asylum
A gamer wrote on the Eidos forums, “I’ve got a problem when it’s time to use Batman’s glide in the game. When I hold ‘,’ like it’s said to jump from one platform to another, Batman tries to open his wings again and again instead of gliding”. A user reminded him the game wasn’t available on the PC at that time and that the problem was included in the copy protection. “It’s not a bug in the game’s code, it’s a bug in your moral code,” he added.
Alan Wake
It would appear that Remedy’s head of franchise development Oskari Hakkinen was rather sanguine about the possibility of Alan Wake being pirated. “Some people are going to pay for it and some people aren’t,” he said. “At the end of the day for us, it’s about entertaining as many people as possible.” However, that didn’t stop Remedy from making the lead character wear a pirate-esque eye patch in cracked copies – just to hammer home that it was not legit.
Grand Theft Auto IV
Although it’s a game about crime, that doesn’t mean it wants rogue players to benefit from the hard work of the developers. When players got through the prologue, the camera would begin to wobble violently, making the game unplayable. Indeed, even if a player decided that they could put up with this, they would soon find trouble when they climbed into a car and realised it would zoom away with them and begin to smoke.