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Topic on User talk:Killerklown

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Any article on PCGW that mentions "Steamless" (the third-party tool to remove the obfuscation) is affected by that obfuscation, but there's also a lot of ultra-widescreen patchers that embeds or instructs their user to use Steamless on them. In fact, the reason we added an exception to PCGW's wiki policy regarding bypassing copyright protection for Steamless was because we started getting requests or questions from mod creators on how to document or detail their various mods that relied on Steamless to even be able to modify the game executable.

There is no real list of affected games other than assuming that all games protected by Steam DRM make use of it by default. Most developers use Valve's Automated Steam DRM wrapper service to protect their game with a normal wrap (most protection) which applies the obfuscation to the executable.

Third-party DRM solutions such as Denuvo needs the executable unwrapped, not obfuscated, to apply their own wrap/protection on it, so what game devs that use Denuvo does is first run their compiled executable through the automated Steam DRM wrapper service but in the "compatibility" mode (which disables the obfuscation) and then they send that Steam DRM wrapped executable to Denuvo's automated service which wraps it up in Denuvo's anti-tamper protection as well. And since Denuvo doesn't obfuscate the binary layout of the executable, we as end users actually (hilariously...) end up "benefitting" from it in the form of an easier-to-mod executable...

This is an issue that will eventually raise its head more and more as the years go by.

We've started to see it more in recent years in particular for Steam DRM protected 32-bit games that by default cannot handle more than 2 GB of RAM. Those often needs to be patched to enable 3 GB RAM usage by the process, as a result of modern 4K (and future) high-res displays.

Once 8K and such becomes the norm and players needs to start modding their older games to force them into rendering at 8K, we will probably see the relevance grow for 64-bit games as well that needs their executable to be deobfuscated for easier binary mods to be applied, if the mod isn't applied in another alternate method (e.g. DLL injection).