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this post was submitted on 24 Jan 2024
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Not necessarily. All DRM punishes paying customers, but some also punishes pirates. Very few games with Denuvo ever get cracked, instead the publisher removes it after a while because Denuvo charges a license fee as long as its in your game. E.g. the Hatsune Miku game on steam hasn't been cracked in the two years it's been out. So there's an argument for using it, even if it's a flawed one.
But these games already went without DRM for years. They're long since cracked. The only purpose this DRM serves is to make it harder for paying customers to use mods. Not pirates, they can keep using the same mods they've always used. This is literally for the purpose of degrading the experience of paying customers. That's what they mean by "only punishes paying customers".
I was under the impression that all the major Denuvo games got cracked within the year they launched if not the first couple weeks? Maybe there wasn't the right attention for that game?
Do you know of a place that tracks that kinda thing? I'm pretty curious now about the statistics of release to cracked.
There is basically only one or two people involved with any sort of denuvo cracking, someone named Empress and another I can't remember.
Ugh, fucking Empress. What a transphobic piece of shit that one is.
That name just sounds narcissistic
There's an r/crackwatch, with a pinned list of Denuvo games.
For example, in 2021, only 7 games released with Denuvo were cracked (out of an approximate 30). In 2022, only one. There was only one cracker in the world who was any good at breaking Denuvo, and Denuvo hired them, so it almost never happens anymore.
~~(Be careful when reading the crackwatch updates, because they mark 'denovo removed' the same colour as 'denuvo cracked', you have to read the notes)~~ My mistake, they stopped doing this a little while ago.
Hogwarts legacy came out last year with dunovo and Empress cracked it in something like a few weeks. Whoever made that list just stopped updating it.
One success does not put the lie to the idea that there are few successes.
The most recent update to the list was literally less than 1 hour ago. Of the 229 games that have been released with Denuvo since 2020, <30 of them have been cracked. 119 of them had the Denuvo eventually removed by the publisher.
Empress was essentially the only person who cracked Denuvo with any regularity, and even they only succeeded at a few games, and only extremely popular ones (because they worked off a donation scheme). I use the past tense, because Empress works for Denuvo now.
Wait, what's the dif between denuvo removed and cracked?
"Denuvo removed" means, like I said before, the publisher stopped paying the denuvo license and voluntarily removed it from the game themselves.
Well, when the game is essentially running in a virtual machine with an address translation layer that scrambles the backing memory every few minutes you're lucky the game even runs. Good luck trying to decipher that hell. A few guys have done it, I remember the one dude ranting on Twitter about trying to crack Borderland's 3 back around launch.
And then the follow up which was that Denuvo was basically adding a ~30fps overhead to the game and everyone was initially blaming the devs for releasing unoptimized garbage.
Gabe had it right, piracy is a service problem. And my motto has always been if the game has some garbage like Denuvo, then you couldn't even pay me to take a copy. Not worth the headache.
I'm very surprised when I read an announcement that id software were removing denuvo from doom eternal. The game was running very well on weak hardware I never suspected it has denuvo at all. After denuvo removal, I tried running the game again and didn't notice any difference in performance. Maybe id software is an exception here and they worked some magic with their denuvo integration.
Doom Eternal actually released without Denuvo by accident, they quickly patched it in but the unprotected exe was already available for all so if you played it on day 1 you actually played it without Denuvo.
I didn't play it day one though because I'm, uhm, a patient gamer.
It's cause Vulkan is so optimized. You can run the game with Ray tracing and still get like 200fps
One major strength Denuvo has is actually it's legal team, they have gotten a lot of cracking groups to stop working on it with legal threats. Empress is the exception because she is in Russia and absolutely batshit insane. The software itself is hard to crack but not overly so, it's mostly done by bypassing and masking the executable as having a legit license and thus allowing it to launch.
I still very much remember a very very early denuvo that broke my fucking CD burner. Since then I've avoided them like the plague and check every game before I buy it.
I know that it has gotten better and "only" costs performance nowadays, but the hate I have for that company is still there.
We're talking about a rhythm game with a smaller audience then, say, Binding of Isaac. I'm guessing yeah, it might not be a prime target for cracking.
I guess you'd start with a dupe check or pre db site to see what known Denuvo games have a cracked version, and when it came out. Example: https://predb.me/
The Dead Space remake hasn't been cracked for example. And there'd be a lot of interest i guess
Not anymore, Hogwarts Legacy was just cracked, almost a year after release, but EMPRESS is only one person, there are several games releasing with denuvo every year, my friend is still waiting for a crack to Stranded Alien Dawn but since it's a smaller game it's not even on their radar.
Most denuvo games you are seeing on sites, if you go to the crackwatch twitter account, you'll see it's just the devs themselves removing denuvo since they probably didn't want to renew the contract for a game that already sold for an entire year.
Hogwarts Legacy was cracked ages ago. It was cracked in under a month.
Then I was fooled by a new repack, doesn't change the fact that the other recent denuvo games are still uncracked like Dead Space Remake, Resident Evil 4, Star Ocean Second Story R, Wild Hearts, Hi-Fi Rush, etc, it's over, they won.
Nah, they haven't won. All they've done is make people wait till they're cracked, which they will be. Most people aren't going to buy the games just because they're not immediately cracked, they'll just wait.
Worth noting that RE:4 was cracked day of release.
Doomerism is bad in all forms, do not give up
Hogwarts Legacy was cracked in less than 2 weeks after launch iirc. Public release of the crack was a few days later.
Hogwarts legacy was cracked in under a week...
it's true that empress is unreliable and basically the only source of cracks, but when she does do it, it doesn't take long.