Multiple Titles Using Denuvo Cracked On Release Day As Other Titles Planning To Use It Bail On It Completely

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the don't-denuvo dept

If you’ve followed our series of posts about Denuvo, the DRM once claimed to be the end of video game piracy, you may have thought we had reached the end of its saga a couple of weeks ago when Denuvo-“protected” title Total War: Warhammer 2 was cracked and defeated within a day of its release. After all, once a game has been cracked in a time increment that can be measured in hours, you likely thought that was the finish line of Denuvo’s lifespan.

You were wrong. In the past week or so, multiple games that used Denuvo have been cracked on the same day as their release, with most of them being AAA titles from big publishers.

This week’s release of South Park: The Fractured but Whole is the latest to see its protections broken less than 24 hours after its release, but it’s not alone. Middle Earth: Shadow of War was broken within a day last week, and last month saw cracks for Total War: Warhammer 2 and FIFA 18the very same day as their public release.

Those nearly instant Denuvo cracks follow summer releases like Sonic Mania, Tekken 7, and Prey, all of which saw DRM protection cracked within four to nine days of release. But even that small difference in the “uncracked” protection window can be important for game publishers, who usually see a large proportion of their legitimate sales in those first few days of availability.

With that window shrunk down to roughly zero days of protection for what is now multiple games coming out in a similar time period, it sure seems like the cracking groups have been able to replicate their successes in cracking this DRM with enough speed to make it wholly irrelevant. One imagines the folks behind Denuvo are at this point quite worried. And they should be, because even games that used Denuvo in their early-release versions are beginning to just drop it from their games as useless.

Then there’s The Evil Within 2, which reportedly used Denuvo in prerelease review copies but then launched without that protection last week, effectively ceding the game to immediate potential piracy.

Now, the Ars post goes on to state that there have been rumors of a 5th release of Denuvo, with an update that the company hopes will once again render the DRM software something other than completely obsolete. But with publishers now dropping the software from their releases, even when they had fully planned on using Denuvo from the pre-release stage, you have to wonder just how much confidence any game publisher is going to have in release number 5.

Given the precipitous fall Denuvo has had over its first four releases, any confidence on display by the publishers or Denuvo itself would certainly raise my eyebrows.

Filed Under: cracks, denuvo, drm, games