Denuvo is billed as the video game industry’s “best in class” DRM, charging games publishers a premium to prevent people from playing their games without paying for them. In years gone by, Denuvo DRM would remain intact for as long as a month before cracks were widely disseminated.
But the latest crop of Denuvo-restricted games were all publicly cracked within 24 hours.
It’s almost as though hiding secrets in code you give to your adversary was a fool’s errand.
If Denuvo can no longer provide even a single full day of protection from cracks, though, that protection is going to look a lot less valuable to publishers. But that doesn’t mean Denuvo will stay effectively useless forever. The company has updated its DRM protection methods with a number of “variants” since its rollout in 2014, and chatter in the cracking community indicates a revamped “version 5” will launch any day now. That might give publishers a little more breathing room where their games can exist uncracked and force the crackers back to the drawing board for another round of the never-ending DRM battle.
Denuvo’s DRM now being cracked within hours of release
[Kyle Orland/Ars Technica]