Game crackers have finally had success with the latest version of the Denuvo, the anti-tampering technology that has been helping to protect AAA titles such as 'Football Manager 2018' and 'Star Wars Battlefront 2' from piracy.
Unlike traditional anti-piracy DRM, Denuvo prevents hackers from tampering with the game code to remove the game's existing copy protection. A cat and mouse game has been going on between game crackers and Denuvo, in which both sides have had their victories.
After the last few versions of Denuvo were easily cracked, sometimes within hours of release, the latest version, version 4.8, has remained strong, allowing games such as 'Assassin's Creed: Origins' to be protected months after release.
But just this week, a cracking group calling themselves "CPY" has claimed a Denuvo 4.8 scalp in the form of 'Sonic Forces'. But instead of being a clean crack that removes Denuvo protection, the method used by CPY has allowed Denuvo to be bypassed completely.
In the workaround, Denuvo will still run in the background, but it has been disabled to the point that it no longer does its main job - to prevent pirated copies of the game from being played.
A complaint about Denuvo's tendency to run in the background is that some gamers are reporting performance issues, that they believe are linked to the anti-tampering technology. This workaround by CPY looks unlikely to alleviate these concerns.
In unrelated news, the company behind Denuvo, also called Denuvo, has been acquired by global anti-piracy outfit Irdeto. The day to day operations of Denuvo is not expected to change following the takeover.
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