6 ms·

It is clearly effective. Go to a PC game piracy site and most games will be available, but anything covered by Denuvo is unavailable even years later. Either no

by rjh29 1y ago

It is clearly effective. Go to a PC game piracy site and most games will be available, but anything covered by Denuvo is unavailable even years later. Either nobody is willing to crack it (unlikely) or Denuvo have done an exceptional job.

devmor 1y ago
To some degree this is true, but it's cost-benefit analysis rather than being uncrackable. Denuvo is so invasive that software exploits aren't worth the effort (or risk on behalf of the user), and physical exploits are sold instead. For example, physical FPS exploits include devices that sit in the HDMI/DP chain with a USB output and emulate a keyboard and mouse.
clayhacks 1y ago
There’s definitely been plenty of denuvo games cracked, but I’d say most games that haven’t been cracked have denuvo. I think it also depends on the version of denuvo. Newer versions seem pretty well protected
0cf8612b2e1e 1y ago
Could some of that be the decreasing share of single player games? Multiplayer, always online games are a moving target vs an offline game you only need to crack once. Everything “needs” to be online, user experience be damned.
sph 1y ago
There are cracked Denuvo games, and no anti-piracy scheme is unbreakable, ever. If it can run on your PC when copy-protected, it means at some point the CPU executed the right instructions, so a crack is always possible to create. It's just a matter of how much effort and time is it to reverse-engineer it. You cannot copy-protect software indefinitely. I remember feeling cool as fuck as a teenager because I cracked GTA 3 by dumping the live memory of the binary post decryption. Of course it's been 25 years, so the status quo has improved by a lot and god knows how many man-years and kWh are wasted on copy protection.
- gpderetta 1y ago
  Technically some CPUs support secure enclaves that should support end to end encryption which should be robust short of lifting the encryption keys from the die. In practice things like SGX have been full of holes.
  - hansvm 1y ago
    Even assuming those are flawless, lifting keys is still O(n) in the key size, and the battle is just increasing the constant factor enough to make it unattractive. The problem is that lifting keys is attractive for reasons much more valuable than game cracking, so after a few years they should always be assumed compromised.
- dist-epoch 1y ago
  X-box is unbreakable.
  - phantompeace 1y ago
    So was the PS3, until it wasn’t.
    - zeusk 1y ago
      but afaik, we still don't have a break on xbox one released 2013 - 12 years later.
      - OptionOfT 1y ago
        I love this presentation by a Microsoft person on the security aspects of the Xbox One: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7VwtOrwceo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7VwtOrwceo
      - dyingkneepad 1y ago
        Perhaps it's just that xbox is irrelevant, when you have PC and Playstation? To me, Xbox is that video-game you get when you ask for a Playstation and your parents don't understand video-games. Their versioning scheme even helps make sure the parents fail to purchase the latest generation.
jampa 1y ago
I think it is a combination of both. From what I heard, Denuvo hires many people from "the scene," and when someone cracks it, they pursue them aggressively. Denuvo is also not a massive target because there are too many games nowadays to care about a specific one. The exception was when "Hogwarts Legacy" was released with Denuvo, and people went crazy for a crack which was delivered just 13 days later.
- mathverse 1y ago
  Denuvo does not need to hire from the scene. The scene is not some magical place full of uber leet crackers. People doing denuvo have the same or better skills.
  - rappatic 1y ago
    Denuvo definitely does attempt to hire from the scene. It's less that they necessarily need those specific peoples' skills, but rather because there are so few people who can crack Denuvo, so hiring a single such person dramatically reduces the number of people out there cracking your games. The most famous example being Empress, who was the only person in the world cracking Denuvo for a few years. I'm sure Denuvo would have loved to hire her, if only to stop her from releasing cracks.
    - spookie 1y ago
      Well, you're assuming "she" is a single soul ;)
qualeed 1y ago
>anything covered by Denuvo is unavailable even years later. That sounds like a marketing claim. There's a bunch of denuvo-protected games that have been cracked. As far as I am aware, although I am not completely up to date, there are more denuvo-protected games that have been cracked than not. For awhile I feel like there were monthly headlines along the lines of "Denuvo cracked within hours of game release" (e.g. https://www.techspot.com/news/71543-denuvo-protected-games-now-cracked-only-hours-after.html https://www.techspot.com/news/71543-denuvo-protected-games-n...). (I agree that Denuvo is generally effective for its goals, especially at game launch when it is most valuable. It's just not infallible, by any stretch.)
- MallocVoidstar 1y ago
  The vast majority of Denuvo games are no longer cracked. There's a list of cracked/uncracked Denuvo games here: https://old.reddit.com/r/CrackWatch/comments/p9ak4n/crack_watch_games/ https://old.reddit.com/r/CrackWatch/comments/p9ak4n/crack_wa... I think some of the recent 'cracks' were mostly errors by the developers, allowing the demo of a game to load the full data files or shipping an unprotected EXE on accident somewhere (sometimes they leave a debug EXE lying around).
- guizadillas 1y ago
  Well you need to update, there no one right now actually cracking denuvo Most "cracked" denuvo games are games cracked AFTER denuvo was removed by the publisher in an update (usually 6 months after release) Just look at the Yakuza/Like a Dragon games
  - qualeed 1y ago
    >there no one right now actually cracking denuvo The claim was that games protected by denuvo are uncracked years later. What is happening right now is important and interesting, too, but not the claim the person I replied to made. "anything covered by Denuvo is unavailable even years later" just isn't true. And that's what I was replying to.
    - 1y ago
bri3d 1y ago
The most important thing about Denuvo is that it's on a subscription license to the game publishers, so it's almost always removed after some length of time. This is critical in understanding why it isn't cracked as often, because they've shifted the economics to "spend 3 months tediously removing obfuscation methods or wait 1 year and the game is unprotected anyway." > anything covered by Denuvo is unavailable even years later I don't think this is true in the general case. > Either nobody is willing to crack it (unlikely) That's exactly what's going on - it's a matter of time-benefit, not "possible." What's groundbreaking with Denuvo isn't that the overall technique is incomprehensible but rather that it's insanely tedious to remove and very difficult to automate. They haven't made some groundbreaking theoretical technique, they've applied so many "standard" ways to obfuscate a binary that it becomes more annoying than it's worth to remove.
- bee_rider 1y ago
  Is this, uh… actually a good outcome? If games make most of their money in the first couple months anyway (I’m not sure about this claim but it seems intuitively possible, at least for AAA), then getting anti-piracy for that timeframe seems like a high priority. Then, the subscription can be allowed to lapse… and the game can be preserved, at least to the extent to which it can run without servers. If we have any belief in the “games as art” idea, this seems like a good result for preserving art.
  - nemomarx 1y ago
    It works out pretty well as long as publishers follow that step yeah. it would be nicest to open source the game after it's life span maybe
    - phoronixrly 1y ago
      It would be nicest not to use unethical software (Denuvo or any other DRM) and distribute the game source with the binaries since the initial release. I can't believe that this needs to be repeated and that our understanding of open source has been perverted to 'is it on Github, and do the devs/community work for free so we can take advantage from them?' and that it's ok for games to be proprietary software...
Thaxll 1y ago
The goal is to get your game protected at release because this where most of the money is made.
perching_aix 1y ago
Successfully got me out of gaming as a kid a decade ago when it started being implemented everywhere. Not exactly the business idea they had behind it I don't think. Now I just play F2P gachas and check in on Game Pass every now and then, so no conversion ever since either.
- YurgenJurgensen 1y ago
  DRM getting you out of PC gaming only to switch to gacha and subscription services seems like quitting smoking to free up more money for your heroin habit.
  - perching_aix 1y ago
    Kind of my point, yes, although only just kind of.
b8 1y ago
Empress has cracked Denuvo protected games within a few days of launch, so not its not stopping everyone [0]. After one person bypasses it then others do from the inspiration they got from the OG. There's a formal theory for it, but I can't recall it currently. 0. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empress_(cracker) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empress_(cracker)

by rjh29 1y ago

devmor 1y ago

To some degree this is true, but it's cost-benefit analysis rather than being uncrackable. Denuvo is so invasive that software exploits aren't worth the effort (or risk on behalf of the user), and physical exploits are sold instead. For example, physical FPS exploits include devices that sit in the HDMI/DP chain with a USB output and emulate a keyboard and mouse.

clayhacks 1y ago

There’s definitely been plenty of denuvo games cracked, but I’d say most games that haven’t been cracked have denuvo. I think it also depends on the version of denuvo. Newer versions seem pretty well protected

0cf8612b2e1e 1y ago

Could some of that be the decreasing share of single player games? Multiplayer, always online games are a moving target vs an offline game you only need to crack once. Everything “needs” to be online, user experience be damned.

sph 1y ago

There are cracked Denuvo games, and no anti-piracy scheme is unbreakable, ever. If it can run on your PC when copy-protected, it means at some point the CPU executed the right instructions, so a crack is always possible to create. It's just a matter of how much effort and time is it to reverse-engineer it. You cannot copy-protect software indefinitely. I remember feeling cool as fuck as a teenager because I cracked GTA 3 by dumping the live memory of the binary post decryption. Of course it's been 25 years, so the status quo has improved by a lot and god knows how many man-years and kWh are wasted on copy protection.

gpderetta 1y ago
Technically some CPUs support secure enclaves that should support end to end encryption which should be robust short of lifting the encryption keys from the die. In practice things like SGX have been full of holes.
- hansvm 1y ago
  Even assuming those are flawless, lifting keys is still O(n) in the key size, and the battle is just increasing the constant factor enough to make it unattractive. The problem is that lifting keys is attractive for reasons much more valuable than game cracking, so after a few years they should always be assumed compromised.
dist-epoch 1y ago
X-box is unbreakable.
- phantompeace 1y ago
  So was the PS3, until it wasn’t.
  - zeusk 1y ago
    but afaik, we still don't have a break on xbox one released 2013 - 12 years later.
    - OptionOfT 1y ago
      I love this presentation by a Microsoft person on the security aspects of the Xbox One: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7VwtOrwceo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7VwtOrwceo
    - dyingkneepad 1y ago
      Perhaps it's just that xbox is irrelevant, when you have PC and Playstation? To me, Xbox is that video-game you get when you ask for a Playstation and your parents don't understand video-games. Their versioning scheme even helps make sure the parents fail to purchase the latest generation.

jampa 1y ago

I think it is a combination of both. From what I heard, Denuvo hires many people from "the scene," and when someone cracks it, they pursue them aggressively. Denuvo is also not a massive target because there are too many games nowadays to care about a specific one. The exception was when "Hogwarts Legacy" was released with Denuvo, and people went crazy for a crack which was delivered just 13 days later.

mathverse 1y ago
Denuvo does not need to hire from the scene. The scene is not some magical place full of uber leet crackers. People doing denuvo have the same or better skills.
- rappatic 1y ago
  Denuvo definitely does attempt to hire from the scene. It's less that they necessarily need those specific peoples' skills, but rather because there are so few people who can crack Denuvo, so hiring a single such person dramatically reduces the number of people out there cracking your games. The most famous example being Empress, who was the only person in the world cracking Denuvo for a few years. I'm sure Denuvo would have loved to hire her, if only to stop her from releasing cracks.
  - spookie 1y ago
    Well, you're assuming "she" is a single soul ;)

qualeed 1y ago

>anything covered by Denuvo is unavailable even years later. That sounds like a marketing claim. There's a bunch of denuvo-protected games that have been cracked. As far as I am aware, although I am not completely up to date, there are more denuvo-protected games that have been cracked than not. For awhile I feel like there were monthly headlines along the lines of "Denuvo cracked within hours of game release" (e.g. https://www.techspot.com/news/71543-denuvo-protected-games-now-cracked-only-hours-after.html https://www.techspot.com/news/71543-denuvo-protected-games-n...). (I agree that Denuvo is generally effective for its goals, especially at game launch when it is most valuable. It's just not infallible, by any stretch.)

MallocVoidstar 1y ago
The vast majority of Denuvo games are no longer cracked. There's a list of cracked/uncracked Denuvo games here: https://old.reddit.com/r/CrackWatch/comments/p9ak4n/crack_watch_games/ https://old.reddit.com/r/CrackWatch/comments/p9ak4n/crack_wa... I think some of the recent 'cracks' were mostly errors by the developers, allowing the demo of a game to load the full data files or shipping an unprotected EXE on accident somewhere (sometimes they leave a debug EXE lying around).
guizadillas 1y ago
Well you need to update, there no one right now actually cracking denuvo Most "cracked" denuvo games are games cracked AFTER denuvo was removed by the publisher in an update (usually 6 months after release) Just look at the Yakuza/Like a Dragon games
- qualeed 1y ago
  >there no one right now actually cracking denuvo The claim was that games protected by denuvo are uncracked years later. What is happening right now is important and interesting, too, but not the claim the person I replied to made. "anything covered by Denuvo is unavailable even years later" just isn't true. And that's what I was replying to.
  - 1y ago

bri3d 1y ago

The most important thing about Denuvo is that it's on a subscription license to the game publishers, so it's almost always removed after some length of time. This is critical in understanding why it isn't cracked as often, because they've shifted the economics to "spend 3 months tediously removing obfuscation methods or wait 1 year and the game is unprotected anyway." > anything covered by Denuvo is unavailable even years later I don't think this is true in the general case. > Either nobody is willing to crack it (unlikely) That's exactly what's going on - it's a matter of time-benefit, not "possible." What's groundbreaking with Denuvo isn't that the overall technique is incomprehensible but rather that it's insanely tedious to remove and very difficult to automate. They haven't made some groundbreaking theoretical technique, they've applied so many "standard" ways to obfuscate a binary that it becomes more annoying than it's worth to remove.

bee_rider 1y ago
Is this, uh… actually a good outcome? If games make most of their money in the first couple months anyway (I’m not sure about this claim but it seems intuitively possible, at least for AAA), then getting anti-piracy for that timeframe seems like a high priority. Then, the subscription can be allowed to lapse… and the game can be preserved, at least to the extent to which it can run without servers. If we have any belief in the “games as art” idea, this seems like a good result for preserving art.
- nemomarx 1y ago
  It works out pretty well as long as publishers follow that step yeah. it would be nicest to open source the game after it's life span maybe
  - phoronixrly 1y ago
    It would be nicest not to use unethical software (Denuvo or any other DRM) and distribute the game source with the binaries since the initial release. I can't believe that this needs to be repeated and that our understanding of open source has been perverted to 'is it on Github, and do the devs/community work for free so we can take advantage from them?' and that it's ok for games to be proprietary software...

Thaxll 1y ago

The goal is to get your game protected at release because this where most of the money is made.

perching_aix 1y ago

Successfully got me out of gaming as a kid a decade ago when it started being implemented everywhere. Not exactly the business idea they had behind it I don't think. Now I just play F2P gachas and check in on Game Pass every now and then, so no conversion ever since either.

YurgenJurgensen 1y ago
DRM getting you out of PC gaming only to switch to gacha and subscription services seems like quitting smoking to free up more money for your heroin habit.
- perching_aix 1y ago
  Kind of my point, yes, although only just kind of.

b8 1y ago

Empress has cracked Denuvo protected games within a few days of launch, so not its not stopping everyone [0]. After one person bypasses it then others do from the inspiration they got from the OG. There's a formal theory for it, but I can't recall it currently. 0. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empress_(cracker) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empress_(cracker)