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.
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.
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.
It's a pretty good outcome, yeah. Kind of makes one wonder why copyright needs to be 70 years + life, when the overwhelming majority of sales are in the first year...
You make a good point, but there's a lot of money in sequels and IP.
Trademark, not Copyright.
No, the IP is protected by copyright, not by trademark.
The stories are copyrighted, but the characters inside are also trademarked. You can go distribute Steamboat Willie without consequences, but Mickey is still Disney IP.
And what stops you from making new content with Mickey Mouse in it is the set of copyrights Disney holds on Mickey Mouse. The trademark does nothing.
Established law says that every publication of a work involving a copyrighted character creates a new version of that character whose copyright extends for the full period starting from the publication of that work. This came up when someone wrote a story about Sherlock Holmes, who was out of copyright, and they were sued, successfully, on the theory that they had used aspects of Sherlock Holmes' personality that were developed in stories still under copyright.
Sam Logan had some fun with the concept here: https://www.samandfuzzy.com/3429
> After nearly 100 years of acting, what's your favorite of your roles?
> Steamboat Willie.
> Really? Not any of your other--
> We don't talk about my other roles. They're a burden. A liability, used to control me. I have left them behind, so that I may be free.
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
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...
As someone who regularly used to visit the ship and heavy rain websites for video games, I actually feel the modern usage of Denuvo—protect sales for the first bit, and then remove it for the long tail—is a decent middle ground between EA-style DRM that locks down a game and its servers for ever, versus having a game completely blown open the first day, and a new-ish studio losing a considerable amount of genuinely-deserved revenue the first few days after release because they had no DRM on.
Nobody needs video games. It’s ok if you can’t play video games.
I'm not seeing the connection here. By the same logic, nobody needs software, it's ok if you can't use software, thus proprietary software is not unethical?
By that logic nobody needs game developers and it's OK if we remove any laws (e.g. copyright) that protect them.
I don’t see how you arrived at that conclusion. People pirate games as if they’re entitled to play them without paying. If someone can’t afford the game they want, too bad. There were plenty of games I could not afford as a kid, so I did other things.
I mean, I'm pretty happy with the arrangement. People who buy day-1 bugfests for full price have to deal with awful DRM. But if you wait a year or two, then the most egregious bugs get fixed, it goes on sale, and the intrusive DRM is gone.
Of course, this means that casuals like me get a much better experience than their core, dedicated, day-1 customers ... but really, that sort of contempt for your core audience is a foundational principle of AAA these days.
> 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.
No, the most important thing about Denuvo is that PC gamers are forced to upgrade their hardware because Denuvo is such a performance hog. All you have to do is wait until Denuvo is stripped and the game will run much faster.
Frankly, it wouldn't surprise me if there's a conspiracy between Denuvo and Intel/AMD/NVIDIA where Denuvo goes out of their way to hurt performance on a really popular title, thus forcing people to upgrade.
Idiot writers at gaming websites claim a new patch to a game that's been out for a while has "optimizations" and lauds the developers for slaving away to make an already-finished game faster. The reality is that they just stripped out Denuvo.
I agree that I've seen anecdotal evidence that Denovu slows down some games considerably. That said, a conspiracy between every major hardware manufacturer and Denovu is certainly a bridge too far. It's far more reasonable, especially after reading this article, that there's a significant cost to all this encryption and wrapping and redirection if it's not applied carefully and enters a hot path.
I am more likely to believe someone who bypassed Denuvo.
> One can see that Denuvo does indeed intervene from time to time, but what one can clearly see: It doesn’t do that very often, definitely not every frame.
> It’s only once every few seconds. Even less, sometimes it doesn’t do anything.
> To me personally, it tells that Denuvo executes checks so infrequently, that the likelyhood of it causing major performance issues seems rather low.
https://momo5502.com/posts/2024-03-31-bypassing-denuvo-in-ho...
>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-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.)
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_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).
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
>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.
One example is anno 1800. Games where the profit model is continually selling dlc (as opposed to making most of their money on day 1) will likely continue to pay for denuvo.
I thought EMPRESS (the only one that was able to consistently put out cracks and only for some games) retired. So there's literally no one who's cracking any recent games, which is all that matters for publishers.
>no one who's cracking any recent games, which is all that matters for publishers.
Sure!
That wasn't the claim made by the person I replied to. They said "anything covered by Denuvo is unavailable even years later." which isn't true. That's what my comment is about.
by my best count there are ~80 uncracked and ~190 cracked denuvo games. Demo bypassess etc count as uncracked. Further ~130 games had Denuvo removed after release.
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.
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.
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.
X-box is unbreakable.
So was the PS3, until it wasn’t.
but afaik, we still don't have a break on xbox one released 2013 - 12 years later.
I love this presentation by a Microsoft person on the security aspects of the Xbox One: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7VwtOrwceo
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.
there has been one recently that led to the dumping of games on xbox one and série and the beginning of emulation projects
The two main things that people jailbreak consoles for are dumping games to emulate on PC and running homebrew. Microsoft explicitly supports the latter use case with Dev mode and for all but a couple games (only Halo 5 nowadays?) explicitly supports the former use case by releasing their games on Steam and skipping the emulation bits. So there is little interest in hacking the Xbox consoles now. Yet I think someone still has managed in the past year to get decrypted game dumps from both XOne and Series X.
people lost interest in hacking the xbox after dev mode was introduced to run custom apps
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
The goal is to get your game protected at release because this where most of the money is made.
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.
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.
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.
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.