The founder of a Chinese cracking forum has warned that game cracking may become an impossible task, thanks to anti-tampering technology Denuvo.
Denuvo is unlike traditional copy protection solutions in that it's an anti-tampering system that is used to protect existing DRM solutions. How it works exactly is still a closely guarded secret by the Austrian company behind the technology, but what it most likely does is to employ code obfuscation to make it hard for crackers to examine and make changes to the code.
With an ever increasing level of encryption, the founder of the Chinese cracking forum, Bird Sister, fears that within two years' time it will become far too difficult to break the copy protection on games, at least in a timely fashion.
Even now, games are proving far too difficult to break to make it worthwhile for pirated game downloaders. Whereas games used to be cracked within a day of release, recent games such as the soccer game FIFA 16 has yet to be cracked despite being released in September. The first month of a game's release is extremely important for game publishers, as this when most of the sales occur. If Denuvo can successfully delay the pirated version's timely release, even if the game will be eventually cracked, then this will give game publishers exactly what they want.
If Bird Sister's prediction proves true, it would seem that Denuvo would be the perfect solution for game publishers, but its use is still not widespread due to several reasons. For one, it's a relatively high cost solution to implement, and there have been unsubstantiated reports of performance problems associated with the use of Denuvo.