Friday, November 30th 2018
Valeroa Anti-Tamper Tech Tries To Protect Initial Sales, "Cannot Be Cracked Within Reasonable Time"
The launch period of a game is the most important from the sales perspective, and piracy can seriously damage those initial earnings. Several anti-tamper systems have been launched to avoid this, but none seems to be really effective. Denuvo is well know on this front, but its protection has been defeated over and over (and over) again, for example. There's a new anti-tamper technology called Valeroa to fight these issues, and its approach is somewhat different.
As the developers explain, Valeroa "is not a DRM" and it doesn't affect the performance of games because "only a handful of functions are protected by Valeroa". This technique doesn't even require an internet connection, it doesn't read or write the hard drive continuously and "does not limit the number of daily installations or changes of hardware". The most interesting bit comes with its approach to the actual protection, which according to their developers Valeroa "is extremely difficult to crack before and closely after the game release date. The protection becomes a lot easier to crack after a predefined period".
Caipirinha Games and Toplitz Productions have already used Valeora with 'City Patrol: Police', so we'll have to see if this protection works better than Denuvo's. There's a final statement on Valeroa's FAQ that's intriguing: they confess that they "have no problem with organized pirate groups or individuals who crack Valeroa once the protection is weakened. We definitely don't prosecute people who just play cracked games". We wonder what Caipirinha and Toplitz think about that.
Source:
DSOGaming
As the developers explain, Valeroa "is not a DRM" and it doesn't affect the performance of games because "only a handful of functions are protected by Valeroa". This technique doesn't even require an internet connection, it doesn't read or write the hard drive continuously and "does not limit the number of daily installations or changes of hardware". The most interesting bit comes with its approach to the actual protection, which according to their developers Valeroa "is extremely difficult to crack before and closely after the game release date. The protection becomes a lot easier to crack after a predefined period".
62 Comments on Valeroa Anti-Tamper Tech Tries To Protect Initial Sales, "Cannot Be Cracked Within Reasonable Time"
I used to pirate all my games when I was younger because I couldn't afford them. Now that I can , it's much less of a hassle to get games than it used to be (although I am cheap and wait for those sweet, sweet discounts).
When are they going to get it ? If it was made by humans, it can be cracked by humans. Rather fast even after a bit of understanding on how it works.
Long live GoG !
No DRM, no BS.
Imagine working for a software security project and with everything you release, you say 'it may break over time, but initially, all looks well'
They based their proposition on all of the inevitable things that happen to software like this. Its so obvious its almost criminal.
they know once a game is in wild crackers will start to work and bypass their protection, which i assume is hidden code deep in game
basically they estimated that after launch crackers will need a "predefined period"(few weeks?) to do their work and in this time game will be bought minimizing the losses..
is a fair approach as all known protections were cracked and will be...
An anti-tampering software doesn't check licenses, but something has to.
The whole industry is basically in hit-and-run mode. Generate hype, grab as much cash as soon as possible, fix only what you have to afterwards. The only titles that don't follow that pattern these days are online titles that actually need you to stick around so you can buy more "microtransactions".The general idea is that if you can keep it scarce, more people will buy. And that's true. But like you said, nobody actually put numbers on the % of converts because of DRM.
In the end, all of this DRM is supported by a simple business case: piracy is considered more costly than implementing the DRM.
I don't understand how they think it's going to be difficult to crack nor the logic behind making it easier to crack over time. DRM always comes down to a decryption key or a Boolean value. Once they figure out how to obtain the decryption key or which Boolean to flip, the game runs.
The most difficult games to crack literally hid DRM checks in map levels. If they don't find and modify them all, the game will crash when it hits one. That makes cracking the game very resource intensive.
Heck, in the early day of Steam, the cracks for games just modified the offline games list of the Steam client itself. So you started Steam, put it in offline mode, and ran the crack and it would add the game as playable under your account. Obviously you'd also have to put the game files in the right place for Steam to access them. You could play the game as long as you didn't switch back to online mode, at which point your game list would sync with Steam and the cracked game would disappear from your game list. But Valve caught on pretty quick to that and started handing out account bans to people that would consistently have games in their offline cache game list that they weren't supposed to have.
You will find that 60% (at least) of the game sold is the first 30 days. They may get half that again by the 6 month mark. After that it is slow and steady, except for sale specials.
90% of these other companies don't even interest me with what they produce, lol. DRM has nothing to do with it for me, they can all suck it :D
I'm still not convinced Valero is going to last longer than a few days after crackers take a look at it. Valero basically just put an invite out there for warez groups to tear in to it. They be like: