User talk:Killerklown

Hi, I saw that you have also contributed to the GamePass list, but it is still incomplete because there are games that don't have pages. I'm a beginner and I only know how to make basic edits, if you could create pages for these games below I would be grateful.

Botany Manor, Dordogne, Football Manager 2024, From Space, Go Mecha Ball, Merge And Blade, Return to Grace, SpiderHeck, Spirittea, The Bookwalker:Thief Tales, Thirsty Suitors and While the Iron's Hot.

https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/w/index.php?title=Doom_Eternal&diff=prev&oldid=1445457

Is there somewhere in the PCGWiki guides that provides guidelines for this? It seems to me that any time DRM is removed, that is inarguably a benefit to everyone, so the "advantage" tag makes complete sense.

It doesn't count as a positive or negative at all.

I'm aware that's how it has been labeled. What I'm asking about is why doesn't it count as a positive? Removal of DRM is a benefit for all owners of the game, is it not?

People tend to overuse “positive” and “negative” key points too much, even for things that don’t need it. DRM coverage has historically only been covered as negative bullets when they actually directly prevents playing the game for most or all users —- typically as a warning on top detailing that the DRM does not work on newer versions of Windows, along with relevant information about how to fix it (we have automated handling for these scenarios).

Past that, both the presence and subsequent removal of a standard DRM is neutral since it similarly won’t impact or be noticeable to most users —- we only cover its presence and removal primarily for historical purposes essentially. The knowledge that a part of the DRM was historically removed at one point is ultimately irrelevant to most of players.

A good rule of thumb to ask is “is the bullet I am writing right now really important enough to distract/prevent readers from skimming the article?” Negative and positive bullet points are for important highlights, while informative bullet points are for “background information” that most readers can skip/scroll past.

> Negative and positive bullet points are for important highlights, while informative bullet points are for “background information” that most readers can skip/scroll past.

That makes sense I suppose. Thanks for the explanation. I would briefly quibble with this point though:

> Past that, both the presence and subsequent removal of a standard DRM is neutral since it similarly won’t impact or be noticeable to most users —- we only cover its presence and removal primarily for historical purposes essentially. The knowledge that a part of the DRM was historically removed at one point is ultimately irrelevant to most of players.

I think that even though removal of DRM is *unnoticed* by most players, it is not irrelevant to anyone, as it restores a portion of control of the game to all those that own and/or play it, which assists both in their ability to play the game in the future, as well as for secondary tasks like applying mods and community patches.

I understand that's a minor point though, just wanted to put it out there in case this topic is put up for broader discussion in the future.

That’s why we cover it to begin with, after all. The use of the {{Removed DRM}} to indicate a removed DRM component is specifically to historically cover the information for those interested in it.

- - -

Beyond that, the removal of *Denvuo alone* does not in reality make a game DRM-free, and can actually incur an additional impact on some players or games. Take binary modifications for example (4GB/LAA patch, ultra-widescreen/resolution fixes, etc), these are all possible on a Denuvo protected title because that protection does not obfuscate the binary layout of the executable nor cares about minor edits that don’t touch upon Denuvo components (aka the actual DRM of the game that Denuvo protects).

However what *does* obfuscate the whole executable and prevent such basic modifications? Well, Stem DRM in its default configuration… Some games have actually, as a result of Denuvo’s removal, transitioned from Steam DRM’s lower “compatibility mode” (which does not obfuscate the game executable) to its normal configuration and is now affected by the obfuscating. As a result, basic binary modifications and fixed that used to be possible now isn’t without the player actually removing that part of the Steam DRM.

So in those cases we went from an easily binary modifiable game that didn’t need any tampering with the DRM to one that requires a specialized “unwrap DRM” tool just to apply some basic changes… And the only reason those games were easily moddable to begin with is in reality that Denuvo requires Steam DRM’s obfuscation to not be present for it to even be applied to the game executable, so it’s an actual real case where the *use* of Denuvo benefited modders while it’s lack of use negatively impacted modders…

And again, even if Denuvo is removed the game still makes use of Steam DRM, so why celebrate a half-measure as “positive” when it has both upsides and downsides attached to it, and still doesn’t actually make the game DRM-free?

/rant

Sorry for the lengthy post, but it just made me remember why I dislike Steam DRM and its default configuration so much. It continues to impact PCGW as a repository of fixes far more than any other modern DRM since its default configuration obfuscated the executable in thousands upon thousands of games and makes even basic stuff like the 4GB/LAA patch break 32-bit titles that desperately needs it.

That's the first I've heard of the described problem with Steam's DRM. Is there a list of affected games somewhere, or maybe can you remember a couple of examples?

I've searched online but can't find any info on this issue at all, other than an editorial on "HP Tech Takes" that contains blatant falsehoods ("If a platform like Steam delists a game, you can no longer play it, since you only owned the license and not the game itself. That license is voided once the game is delisted by either Steam or the game publisher.")

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).