Denuvo DRM has proven to be an impassible thorn in the sides of many PC game pirates over the past few years, but one claims to have defeated the beast.
Denuvo DRM has proven to be an impassible thorn in the sides of many PC game pirates over the past few years, but one claims to have defeated the beast.
If you can't afford games then do try not to steal them, here, how about our favourite free PC games instead?
Denuvo has prevented several major releases, such as Just Cause 3, DOOM, and Rise of the Tomb Raider from becoming widely distributed on torrent sites. In fact, anentire subreddit is devoted to tracking the crack status of Denuvo games and shows no progress has been made in several months.
But now Russian hackers are reporting that serious progress has been made on circumventing the protection software used to verify legitimate game installs and prevent bootlegs from working.
The unknown hacker (some are claiming to be part of the infamous RELOADED group of crackers) has made a video showing the debug process leading to Rise of the Tomb Raider launching successfully, albeit with a framerate hit from running through the debugger's virtual machine.
The source, a Russian forum first reported in this torrentfreak article, is hard to decipher, but members of the cracking subreddit have theorised and explained the process he is taking through the debug software here.
Due to no-one yet claiming responsibility for the video, and no crack appearing on the web, it's hard to know if it really has happened or not.
We reached out to Thomas Goebl, director of sales at Denuvo, who wasn't exactly denying the crack either.
"It’s always hard to comment on something which is not available to the public, as the article says all files currently floating around are fake," Goebl said. "The general positioning of our product is “hard to crack” and not “uncrackable”. For us it is important to secure the initial sales window of games, which worked out well on all the recent titles."
Five months is a long time to wait for a pirate used to getting things without limits, so perhaps he's right there.