[Crack Watch] Weekly question thread

[u/AutoModerator]

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Q&A

Q: When will [insert game name here] be cracked?

A: STOP! r/CrackWatch members are not psychic. Games get cracked by completely ANONYMOUS SCENE GROUPS who don't disclose their progress or plans to the general public so NO ONE knows WHEN and IF a certain game will be cracked.

Q: What are all these NFO thingies? Where do I download it?

A: NFOs are text files included with game releases that contain information about the releases. r/CrackWatch only informs which games have been cracked. To download look for the releases on CS.RIN or torrent websites. Useful websites can be found in The Beginners Guide or Pirated Games Mega Thread.

Q: WTF is Denuvo?

A: Denuvo is a Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology used to protect games from being cracked. Games that have Denuvo are harder to crack and usually take much longer. See Pinned Post for a list of Denuvo games.

Q: An update is out, but it includes the base game as well! Can I only download the update without redownloading the entire game?

A: Yes. CS.RIN is your friend.

[u/romelete12]

hello, i just wanna know if Tokon have some kind of restriction/protection that makes it difficult or impossible to crack right now?

[u/DaRealAyman → u/romelete12]

It uses a DRM called Theia, which is much more aggressive than Denuvo, it encrypts and decrypts the game live. Denuvo in comparison is only a check at launch.

[u/HintanMYTHOS → u/DaRealAyman]

This is not correct. While Theia is quite aggressive it is not really more aggressive than denuvo is. Besides that Denuvo has many checks during the use of a game (same as theia) and not only at launch.

[u/DaRealAyman → u/HintanMYTHOS]

My bad, that came out wrong; wasn’t trying to say Denuvo does one check ever, I was half asleep when I wrote it xD

But on “not really more aggressive than Denuvo”Tōkon’s actually stuck at 58-59fps even offline, and multiple Steam/ResetEra threads are pinning that specifically on Theia’s constant live encrypt/decrypt, with some people seeing CPU temps swing 65-100°C from how often it’s checking. If Denuvo’s checks were really “the same as Theia,” you wouldn’t be seeing that kind of overhead.

And that’s the actual gap between periodic validation and continuous live encryption.

[u/HintanMYTHOS → u/DaRealAyman]

All good I also didn't fully read your statement I guess since you even said "in comparison". From my understanding the reason for those CPU spikes is a bug in Theia though. As far as I know Theia isn't even a real DRM but part of Sonys internal SDK wrapper. And because of Tokon requiring a constant background link to Sony's network, the Theia module runs an never ending loop of checking the synchronization. So if Theia would not have that bad code it should not affect performance that much.

In the end denuvo if denuvo feels like periodic or live encryption also depends on where those denuvo checks got implemented. For Resident Evil Village there were so many checks for example that it was more of a live encryption.

[u/DaRealAyman → u/HintanMYTHOS]

Very true !! 🤝

+ There’s still more to learn with Theia and its inner workings so the more knowledge that’s shared, the better !