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”.
Very few games with Denuvo ever get cracked
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.
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.
Denuvo was basically adding a ~30fps overhead
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.
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.
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.
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/
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.
