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Denuvo has been cracked in all single-player games it previously protected
- Neywiny 6mo agoOnce again I'm at odds with TH reporting. Of course you can spoof a server. That happens all the time, especially with videogames. You may not immediately be able to figure out what the call/response is, but without knowing what the check is, it could just be a simple endpoint that returns "true" on every request. Very speculative to say that whatever they do will be impossible to mimic.
- Kirby64 5mo ago> You may not immediately be able to figure out what the call/response is, but without knowing what the check is, it could just be a simple endpoint that returns "true" on every request. Very speculative to say that whatever they do will be impossible to mimic. It’s trivially easy to use a signed response that is encoding some part of the metadata of your system in the signature to make it impossible to emulate the server. Don’t think the Denuvo devs would be stupid enough to provide a “return true” request for a server call. Can the underlying function that checks if the server call is correct be bypassed? Sure, but that’s much harder.
- jospeh554 5mo agoCryptography goes BRRRRR, with a proper implementation of cryptography you'd need to do things like patch out the keys in memory in order to "spoof" messages.
- pen1slicker 5mo ago[dead]
- nottorp 6mo agoAre Denuvo using games marked on Steam these days? I've been getting mostly indies so I feel safe, but maybe I should check...
- chocochunks 6mo agoYes they are. On the store page.
- jamesfinlayson 6mo agosteamdb.info should have the info too I think?
- ChoGGi 5mo agoThere's a yellow? box just above payment options that informs you of DRM.
- nottorp 5mo agoOh right, it's still there. Nothing on my wish list has it :) I had to go to the store page for NBAsomething to see it.
- sitzkrieg 6mo agogood riddance. crazy to see game developers hemorrhaging money for malware
- Daedren 6mo agoWonder what will be the consequences of this. I dislike Denuvo for the performance and stability penalties it gives games, but I do wonder if the "security" it gave publishers wasn't a big part of the reason why we've been getting more and more big name games on PC. This isn't about being right or wrong but about what the publishers will do when they see their games are again getting cracked day one, and if it'll be a catalyst to again return to getting either less PC releases or at least delayed releases compared to consoles. I will hope that does not happen.
- cyanydeez 6mo agoi think your underwstimating the anticheat value that still exists. many of the online games are trash when theres not strict cheat control.
- johng 5mo agoThis. There are a lot of online games I loved playing but the cheating got so bad it made it impossible to play. MW1, MW2, Battlefield, CS, etc... you could see the wallhacks and aimbots taking over every lobby. I eventually stopped playing. I tried using Consoles for online gaming after that but never really got into using joysticks.... still prefer mouse and keyboard. Now I play limited games where the cheating isn't quite that rampant.
- jospeh554 5mo agoIm not a big gamer, but playing GTA Online, and getting taken out as soon as you spawn. Or items just spawning in front of you, like ramps. REALLY ruins the experience
- ChoGGi 5mo agoOr everyone in the lobby getting nuked over and over. Or trying to do heists and having a cheater in every session. I'd like to play the game again but it's just not fun.
- 5mo ago
- Altern4tiveAcc 6mo ago"Protected" is the wrong word. "Restricted" is much more honest regarding what Denovo does. Good riddance.
- sombragris 5mo ago> "Restricted" is much more honest regarding what Denovo does. I'd suggest "encumbered" or even "infected".
- ticulatedspline 6mo agoInteresting to finally see some action from the mouse again. Was kinda sad to see that Denuvo embodies all the worst of DRM but was so thoroughly metastasized that it was nearly inoperable and they had effectively "won".
- manytimesaway 5mo agoDon't forget that the guy behing Denuvo is the same person behind SafeDisc, SecuROM and similar bullshit siblings from the past PC gaming world.
- MrBuddyCasino 5mo ago[flagged]
- bigbinary 5mo agoSurely, this has nothing to do with the fact that live service and subscription games generate more revenue, whether or not piracy is involved.
- MrBuddyCasino 5mo agoTo give you an idea of the scale of the problem: Greenheart Games famously released a "cracked" version of their own game (Game Dev Tycoon) onto torrent sites on launch day. In this version, the player's in-game studio eventually goes bankrupt because "pirates" steal their games. The Data: Within 24 hours, 93.6% of players were playing the pirated version. The Consequence: The developer's blog post highlighted the irony of pirates posting on forums complaining that the "in-game piracy" was unfair and "ruining" their fun. The experiment proved that even at a low price point ($8), a massive majority of the PC audience will choose "free" regardless of the developer's size or struggle. https://web.archive.org/web/20161118042043/http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/04/game-dev-tycoon-developers-give-pirates-a-taste-of-their-own-medicine/ https://web.archive.org/web/20161118042043/http://arstechnic... https://web.archive.org/web/20131214165241/http://aussie-gamer.com/news/australian-game-developer-trolls-internet-pirates/ https://web.archive.org/web/20131214165241/http://aussie-gam... P.S.: It bears repeating that the game cost only 8 dollars.
- kakacik 5mo agoThats playing with statistics and you know it. Why such game? If they would release only the paid game, there wouldn't be 93% + 7% of the gamers playing, far from it. Cost is almost irrelevant to pirates, either its free or its not, like it or not. There is mix of folks who do it for the lulz, some do it to have higher performance gaming without denuvo taking resources and computing power, and some are outright poor. Even 8-usd-is-too-much poor. I've lived like that. Don't judge too easily. Don't do stupid mistakes and count those as otherwise-paying-gamers. Thats PR for denuvo and similar, not a fair discussion.
- ktallett 5mo agoI've had to take a moral stance and move to just playing games on Gog that I can buy and own the files for. No I can't play the latest and greatest but it's not the end of the world as I've so many classics to still play and enjoy. I can't support lockdown and DRM anymore. If I buy I want to own, otherwise I've not bought. It is true, if buying isn't owning, then piracy isn't stealing.
- rpdillon 5mo agoRight where I've landed as well. I just won't buy titles with Denuvo DRM, ever, no matter how much I want the game. Was pleasantly surprised to find Doom Eternal is now on GOG a couple of days ago. If you're willing to wait, some AAA titles show up that previously had draconian DRM.
- mjevans 5mo agoI'm willing to buy on Steam, however not with intrusive DRM. Nor with 3rd party store requirements (like EA games on Steam). E.G. I'd like to own a copy of the modern Persona games. I'm in no particular rush. If the studios want my money when they're on sale for like 50% off launch price, gain some profit per sale and additional sales by axing the useless DRM.
- EspadaV9 5mo agoExactly the same. I haven't played an Persona game but hear it come up on some podcasts and wanted to try it out. In fact, P5R is on sale right now for 80% off and would happily pay the A$20 for it, but it still includes Denuvo.
- Ferret7446 5mo agoGenerally any game you can buy on GoG is also DRM free on Steam. I mention since many people have the incorrect notion that all Steam games have DRM
- pdpi 5mo agoThere's still a difference — GOG provides you with downloadable installers you can archive, Steam doesn't.
- h4kunamata 5mo agoI find it ironic people mad at Denuvo and yet play games like Battlefield which enforces kernel level spyware nonetheless haha
- c0balt 5mo agoThe main difference that Denuvo does nothing to improve the experience of the end user. I don't like Anti-Cheat solutions with elevated privileges but they have (at least for some time) reduced the number of Cheaters in games like Valorant or BF, for most users this is at least a somewhat understandable tradeoff. Denuvo on the other hand is DRM and a pure tradeoff in favor of the publisher at the cost of the consumed.
- akimbostrawman 5mo agoThere is a user argument for anti cheat as a user = less cheater. There is no user argument for DRM, if anything there are many against it = higher game price/less money for the actual game and devs, indirect funding of DRM software, worse performance, higher system requirements, worse preservation, worse privacy, longer loading times, online requirements, worse usability, machine activation restriction, bugs...
- kenhwang 5mo agoKernel level anti-cheat also doesn't introduce a giant performance penalty like Denuvo-style DRM. People just want to play their games without it still stuttering on top of the line hardware.
- khaelenmore 5mo agoThat's all you need to know about DRM - when "pirates" bypass it, paying users are taking the hit. And I'm not speaking about cost of implementing a technology to actively make the product worse.
- ranger_danger 5mo agoNo, it hasn't: > in late 2025, the MKDev collective and the prolific DenuvOwO came up with a hypervisor-based bypass (HVB) that installs a kernel-level driver to intercept and respond to Denuvo's checks. While that's not an actual crack, it's good enough for piracy work, as the saying goes.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- lossolo 5mo agoThis. It's bypassed, not cracked. All the games released need HVB to work. They use legit Denuvo licenses from other systems.
- branon 5mo agoYeah, the headline is sensational and the body of the article doesn't do enough to distinguish between the bypass and a real crack. They only resemble one another only in the most shortsighted of ways. One big difference is that the bypass method _requires_ Microsoft Windows in order to function. You cannot use the bypass on Linux. I don't have a Windows install anywhere, so if I want to play the game I have to either purchase it, or wait for a crack that will remove Denuvo from the executable. I get this probably doesn't matter to most people because they're on Windows anyway and will happily disable whatever security is required to access free games, but it's disappointing to have the technical distinctions and broader implications glossed over.
- m3kw9 5mo agoA great use of LLM
- lousken 5mo agoI would hope publishers would take note and remove it, having hundreds of megabytes of junk in the executable is just wasteful to put it mildly
- Kuraj 5mo agoThe bigger problem with Denuvo is that it appears to significantly impact game performance as well
- delecti 5mo agoIt can, but that seems to be more related to poor implementations by the game devs, and not inherent to it. There are plenty of examples of games with Denuvo that still run fine (give or take your opinion on whether the presence of DRM is inherently "impacted performance").
- Ferret7446 5mo agoIf many of your users misuse your tool, that's a design problem not user error
- embedding-shape 5mo agoYeah, goddamn hammers needs to be way softer, do you know how many thumbs worldwide have been hurt by them? Clearly the fault of the hammer.
- trympet 5mo agoDo any of the legit scene groups sign their binaries? How do you know a release isn’t tainted?
- r00t- 5mo agoIt's not a scene release. You know a release isn't tainted when you grab it from the source...
- gruez 5mo agoThat's the whole problem. There's no way to verify the authenticity of a release aside from "getting it from a trusted source" or whatever, whereas digital signatures would easily solve this issue.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- aeyes 5mo agoInfo from veeery long ago because I have been out of this stuff for over a decade: The release will have an .sfv file with a CRC32 checksum for each rar file. The FTP server checks them after the upload completes. Back in the day glftpd with zipscript was a very popular tool to manage an FTP site. This Readme sums it up well: https://github.com/pzs-ng/pzs-ng https://github.com/pzs-ng/pzs-ng The sfv can be tampered with but the propagation of releases to FTPs happens very fast, within minutes. It would take you longer to meaningfully alter it than it takes the racers to distribute the original files. And once the release is completely uploaded you can't modify the files anymore. If the release is bad, for example if it doesn't work at all or if it contains a virus, then it simply gets nuked. This propagates within minutes.
- int0x29 5mo agoRelying on CRC32 for integrity under hostile circumstances feels deeply flawed.
- huflungdung 5mo ago
- everyone 5mo agoFyi, most of them have not been cracked, but bypassed using a hypervisor that operates in ring-1, so it is certainly a security risk.. Personally I've been voting with my wallet and *never* supporting DRM, so there have been some games where I'm just "Well, I guess I'll never play that game." At least I have an ethical option to play certain games now, I'm just gonna use a seperate blank pc cus these bypasses are novel.
- Jtarii 5mo agoCracking refers to all methods of circumventing copy protection. Bypassing is just another way of cracking something.
- everyone 5mo agoEhhh, afaik thats not the case in the community. These hypervisor bypasses are considered a different category. Like look at any scene page, they will 100% say Hypervisor or HV for these.
- Jtarii 5mo agoThey are referred to as Hypervisor cracks.
- TiredOfLife 5mo agoLast scene release with Denuvo crack was like 6 years ago.
- lemoncookiechip 5mo agoSupport GOG, support no DRM.
- wilg 5mo agoWhat games that are on GOG without DRM have DRM on, say, Steam? (Many Steam games have no DRM.)
- Uvix 5mo agoIt's impossible to know which Steam games are DRM-free since Steam games without DRM are not marked in the store. They have to all be assumed to have DRM.
- phatfish 5mo agoWell, all Steam games have Steam DRM? The Steam store will tell you if there is additional DRM on top of Steam, at least it has in the past. To the parents question, it is better to use GOG if you care about DRM. Sometimes the Steam version is qualitatively better because the publisher/dev has supported the Steam version with more updates. Often the updates do turn up on GOG, but it's possible there is a delay.
- quantumleaper 5mo agoDRM is an optional Steamworks feature, the developer can opt out by simply not using it. https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/drm https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/drm
- Lalabadie 5mo agoSteam flags kernel-level DRM in a game's store page. Denuvo is identifiable (and named!) this way. Recent example: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3357650/PRAGMATA/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/3357650/PRAGMATA/
- 5mo ago
- deno 5mo agoThis will be used as reason to introduce remote attestation to games.
- Gigachad 5mo agoThat already is how it works. Denuvo can not authenticate your game without internet access.
- no_time 5mo agowell, right now Denuvo "remote attests" in a Play Integrity "MEETS_BASIC_INTEGRITY" sense that it has no hardware backing and relies on checking your runtime enviroment for signs of tampering manually and obfuscating said checks. The endgame is certainly flexing the machinery that is being built up over the last 20 years and spawning a SEV-SNP container on your machine that cannot be debugged, inspected and modified in any way. I don't think this is possible as of writing though.
- deno 5mo agoSEV-SNP would actually be a very good outcome. But the Intel equivalent does not exist on desktop SKUs. Meanwhile there's a campaign to make sure every "P"C has a TPM module.
- not_a9 5mo agoDo the cracks still need you to disable Hyper-V (which leads to disabling WSL and whatever else)? In addition, I’m not sure why they’re enabling test signing instead of using kdmapper or the like. Sure, anticheats will get way more mad at you having a manual mapped driver, but one imagines rebooting once (after playing your cracked video game) beats rebooting twice (to enable test signing, then after playing the game). The funny thing is I remember reading about using hypervisor crap to bypass Denuvo in ~2020 (actually the post is from 2019, https://www.unknowncheats.me/forum/2410412-post14.html https://www.unknowncheats.me/forum/2410412-post14.html)
- Lucasoato 5mo ago“A friend of mine” told me that disabling hyper V and all that stuff is needed to play Crimson Desert cracked version.
- a2128 5mo agoDuring the time of the Soviet Union, it was an urban legend that during supply shortages, Soviet factories would have no real work, but workers needed to keep up the appearance of working, so they would have one line of workers continuously assembling devices, feeding into another line that would continuously disassemble them, all in a loop where nothing gets produced. In many ways, it feels like we are seeing this today in the digital world. As a specific example, GTA 5 (singleplayer) is a game that has been pirated for about 10 years now, and has received zero content updates in that time, yet somewhat recently (maybe a few years ago?) they updated the game on Steam to have new DRM that constantly conflicts with the Steam Deck sleep mode and kicks you out of the game at random after waking up, or just won't even let you launch if you're without internet and haven't launched it within a few days. Nothing worthwhile was produced by this endeavor, that's for sure.
- b65e8bee43c2ed0 5mo agothe management must've forgot they literally gave gta 5 away on epic store like 5 years ago, lol.
- matheusmoreira 5mo ago> they updated the game on Steam to have new DRM that constantly conflicts with the Steam Deck sleep mode and kicks you out of the game at random after waking up, or just won't even let you launch if you're without internet and haven't launched it within a few days Meanwhile the "pirates" enjoy a superior experience. They don't have to put up with this nonsense. They can use the devices they want. They can install the games on as many machines as they want. They can play the games offline. Their games are faster because there's no obfuscated nonsense code running. They don't have to suffer idiotic invasive kernel mode DRM nonsense on their computers, software whose only difference from literal malware is legal boilerplate in a document that nobody reads but that everybody theoretically accepted when they fast forwarded through the installation screens furiously clicking next so they could play the game they paid for. Makes me feel like a total moron for buying games every single time.
- bombcar 5mo agoI've heard that story (or a similar one) about Boeing on a cost-plus contract in the War; one group of employees would dump screws together, and the night shift would sort them apart.
- odie5533 5mo agoGreat news! I can finally feel comfortable buying games that have Denuvo day 1!
- selectodude 5mo agoTough to decide who I trust less, denuvo or a ring-0 hypervisor I downloaded off BitTorrent.
- throwawayk7h 5mo agoI'm very interested to see how it was cracked, and how the anticheat works.
- __alexander 5mo agoDoes anyone have a link to how the crack works? I would love to see something more technical.
- zImPatrick 5mo agoI only know of the one text file MKDEV added to their Persona bypass: https://pastebin.com/hps67mkh https://pastebin.com/hps67mkh
- p0w3n3d 5mo agoWow. Great. Congratulations. Achievement earned. You've persisted so long. Now stop creating new DRMs. You can see what is the outcome. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. The only thing that made me switch to Netflix from π-rated movies was the accessibility, availability, languages support, speed and quality. The same with games. I buy games from gog mostly because they are missing DRM (and because I'm an old dinosaur so not interested in the bleeding edge new games). Please focus on the added value. And the wealth will come. Don't pay for denuvo - it's waste of money
- swiftcoder 5mo agoCouldn't have happened to a nicer piece of software, etc.
- MagicMoonlight 5mo agoOh shit. I just realised you could use LLMs to crack these protections. They almost entirely depend on adding bloat to make it hard to crack. That’s over now.
- AnnaKoro453 5mo ago[dead]
- UmaParu 5mo ago[dead]