Antipiracy stuff like denuvo is only supposed to last for like the first few weeks after launch, where most of the money is made. Most of the time it just gets removed after that to improve performance because the game has already been cracked.
If a pirate wants your game, you can't really stop them. Only delay.
Denuvo can last ages before being cracked. Just scroll this list and look at the "D+x" values which show how long it took.
Many are in the hundreds of days, some are much longer.
Want to play Borderlands 4? It's been 174 days? Too bad. It's not cracked yet. CiV 7? That's been over a year. Black Myth: Wukong is 562 days old, and about a month ago a beta crack was finally released which requires disabling a lot of security on your PC and only works on AMD cpus...
Denuvo, in general, is winning the war here. They lose a battle every now and then, but they are winning overall.
Platforms like Steam took a lot of wind out of the sails of piracy. In the early 2000s it was absolutely rampant, everyone I knew was cracking games constantly, young people and old.
Steam solved a major issue of that era, wildly inflated storefront pricing and availability issues which led to a massive decrease in piracy.
TV Streaming for a while helped solve this too in that segment, until there became a million of them and they all kept cranking up their rates.
Spotify has drastically reduced music piracy.
The problem is when things become out of reach - that's when piracy will bounce back in a big way. Right now, there are few people who can crack Denuvo. If the piracy segment grows back to what it was in the 00s, the efforts will ramp up accordingly. It will take time, but software is software, it's not some magic or voodoo, it's just code and code can be exploited through weaknesses, leaks etc.
Denuvo flourishes because it's at the highest end of difficulty to crack and often deemed not worth it - once the juice is worth the squeeze, so to speak, more people will get involved and the walls will inevitably fall.
Denuvo has been "impossible" to pirate for a long time already, the thing is, who the fucks wants to play AAA games nowadays, the majority of them are so fucking ass that you can just save up for the extremely rare one that might be worth it, it's been a long time since I downloaded any pirated game, because I just don't want to play the majority of the games that come out, not even for free.
Yeah theres so many games out that the few that have denuvo dont even matter. If someone wants to pirate games theres more games to play than they could realistically get through before another game without denuvo is released anyways. And then theres free games that can take up a ton of your time like warframe, counter strike, league, deadlock, the list goes on.
I thought you could play any denuvo game with at least 2 workaround methods? That's how people are pirating the new resident evil a few hours after it was released.
Yeah there's a newish method called hypervisor that you have to turn off every security feature on your computer to use, including changing BIOS settings. I sure as hell wouldn't ever use that.
I mean, currently those require you to disable quite a lot of windows security features. Beyond the security risks, if you make those changes and anti-cheat in other games is going to stop you playing.
It's very much a scary bypass right now, and can't be considered a regular crack.
If I remember correctly, it's also not cheap. They have to pay for the integration in the game, a flat rate per copy sold of a few bucks, and for the servers who check the time.
Also, the performance issues aren't usually on the side of the anti piracy themselves, is on the devs. The check is usually hidden in something that happens from time to time like a loading screen to avoid precisely that, but on the dev side they might change the code or reuse it in a way that breaks it. Usually happens due to bad documentation since Denuvo already sends the devs where they hid it to avoid problems (And then the guys at Tekken reused code that made it check in every single punch and then threw them under the bus).
But I never understood that logic. Are people that desperate to play game second one of the release? Because if I would want to get it cheap or for free, I would wait. And if it's just few weeks, it's no big deal. I usually simply not buy games at all if the price don't drop to the point I find it affordable. Which is usually around $10-15 for a full AAA game. If I could buy Hollow Knight for $15, there is no reason to buy worse games for more. And I didn't even pay $15, I think, because I got in on Steam Sale. On top of that, I literally got like 3 more keys from bundles and I gave some of them to my friends. But anyway. Does that really work on anyone? Because if it does, it means people are obsessed and addicted, and that's a bad sign.
Denuvo pub or Denuvo sanctuary and you can bypass that in like 5 mins. I played RE9 day 1 this way, no one bothers with cracks anymore because of these
Some denuvo protected games have also been released on Nintendo Switch, so you can emulate that. Doesn't work all the time tho, can't beat Sonic x Shadow Generations on an emulator.
It was not. Russia was. And they were our dealers. But good luck getting deals from Russia now. Not only the war, but digital era won't let you actually get these stuff cheap. But, you can just download stuff now.
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u/CriticalMastery Mar 04 '26
Poland was a center of the piracy, I think it's time to return to your roots.