I noticed a lot of game repacks provide the installation files, but then require you to get a "free activation" to actually play the game.

What exactly is going on here under the hood and why can't the crack provider supply a traditional crack or keygen?

EDIT: This seems to be specific to Denuvo games. I'm going down the rabbit hole and people are forced to queue up for what I'm assuming is the equivalent of a serial key? that ties directly to their steam account....which seems like a great way to get your steam account banned.

Requirements to download the discord server's proprietary game launcher and bypass all security features on your PC.

Seems insanely sketchy and overcomplicated. Am I completely misunderstanding this?

I'm assuming just they don't have access or want to take a side, or reliability for it. IE the groups making the cracks don't want the added legal risks of providing the actual game files themselves. So if joe makes the crack but doesn't want to risk sending the software, then that means it's up to someone else to provide the software without the crack.

Smells like shit my dude.

It absolutely does and I'm not remotely interested in trying, but I'm also curious. There's large communities and major repackers involved.

I'm hoping somebody from this community has an experience with that community they can share.

If you're looking at a group that is requiring their launcher, don't walk away, run. There are groups doing this that are legit (or as legit as piracy gets) and the only thing you download from them is a txt with a token inside. It's not bound to your Steam account and yes, it's specific to games with the dreaded malware baked in. The system these people are using is to simply trick the Denuvo into thinking you're supposed to have the game.

This, but also remember that never touching games with that sort of crap, on principle, is an option as well.

Always. Fuck Denuvo.

Removing/disabling DRM should never require online activation. Delete and block whichever sites are spreading this.

From your description, 99% certainty this is a scam that installs some kind of malware along with whatever unlocks the ... crack.

Could make you part of a botnet, could be a rootkit, could scan for ids and PID and steal your identity, hijack your accounts, could install a BTC miner, etc etc.

You're right, there is no reason whatsoever to need a crack to connect to anything else.

Maybe for DRM spoofing purposes it might involve a step where you set up a kind of local fake approximation of a DRM server to do a fake authentication to, something like that, or persistently running a spoofed fake authentication server, but there's 0 reason for that to not be entirely local and self contained.

Functionally, this is a cracker org doing their own DRM, by hijacking an actual DRM.

Which... is astoundingly ironic, but I've seen similar shit amongst various cheat engine / hack developer groups, scam crypto games, various GTAV/RDR2 modding communities, etc.

If you did even just join the Discord server, nuke that that Discord account asap.

Replicating the comment by lynx-yuiitsu:

When a game is purchased by someone, it generates a key (token) for the game to launch.
Crack games are basically either removal of the token or altering of the token.
Offline Activation is sharing that "token" to others to play.
You just download the raw game files - Clean Steam Files (CSF) but you game doesn't launch so you just copy-paste the token in your game files to successfully launch the game.
Now the discord server is basically a server having token of the certain games which are shared to everyone.

So yeah, seems less like a crack and more like a Game/Account sharing scheme, meh.

I’m going down the rabbit hole and people are forced to queue up for what I’m assuming is the equivalent of a serial key?

Not quite. A serial key is permanent, it lasts forever, although some software did try to use online and update services to identify bad serials this was trivial to block, because it's essentially trying to backpedal a valid key into an invalid one. It only needs to be valid once, then you make sure to block anything that invalidates it afterwards (usually blocking the update servers at the DNS level), job done.

That's different from a token. Tokens use something along the lines of at least rolling-code type security, similar to how your car keys or garage door opener keep generating new codes so someone with a scanner can't just record the code it uses once and then have that be copied and replayed over and over again indefinitely. The trick with a token like this is that you need to keep updating it or it becomes invalid after some timeframe or number of uses. Hence the online activation. That's required to get your next token or set of tokens.

Okay. That clears up quite a bit.

Is this what you're talking about that discord server that provides offline activation but you must not update your windows and dodi repacked the game files but linked to their discord? I completely forgot about them cause it's ridiculous to queue for offline token activation. I think I'd rather risk using hypervisor than begging in a discord.