Denuvo Analysis
163 comments
·June 9, 2025farmdve
null
musjleman
> As Windows matures, behaviour can change, breaking certain stuff.
How do you expect the aforementioned tech to break the games it's on? If anything it "breaking" will just make the anti-tamper feature ineffective.
farmdve
The anti-tamper codes, if any tampering is detected will crash on undefined/unallocated regions. Meaning that if Windows ever were to overwrite that region for whatever reason, will trigger the crash.
Such was the case for SecuROM in early days. It featured the CRC checks mentioned, if any single byte was changed, including an INT (breakpoint) instruction, it would crash. Here it's unlikely that it wont crash. Rendering the game inoperable.
musjleman
> The anti-tamper codes, if any tampering is detected will crash on undefined/unallocated regions.
That's basically the whole point of any anti-tamper product. I just think you picked a terrible example of a feature that could break due to OS changes specifically.
> Meaning that if Windows ever were to overwrite that region for whatever reason, will trigger the crash.
We're talking about random stack memory inside of a virtual machine that likely doesn't call any external code whatsoever. There should be no real way for Microsoft to accidentally corrupt this memory.
ainiriand
I imagine that if some Denuvo servers enter legacy status at some point they'll be removed entirely.
sbarre
Yeah it's not uncommon to see Denuvo patched out of a game title once the initial sales window has passed..
I wonder if that's because they want to avoid these kinds of future incompatiblities with the underlying OS as it evolves.
yukIttEft
Had also a look at Denuvo a while ago. Used LLVM to remove the x86 obfuscation and broke it down to VM-Opcodes. Atleast back then, Denuvo seemd to translate gamecode into a stackmachine.
This is how a VM push looks like:
temp[0]=add(mem[e268], fffffffffffffff8)
mem[temp[0]]]=mem[e560]
mem[e268]=temp[0]
But i quickly lost interest when it became MBA galore:
temp[7]=sub(add(add(and(mem[ebe8], b2f7), 3fd8), xor(lshr(mem[ebe8], 1), 2684)), lshr(add(mem[ebe8], b2f8), 1))
temp[d]=or(sub(sub(4ad, temp[7]), xor(and(shl(temp[7], 1), 95c), 95c)), 8000)
temp[e]=lshr(temp[d], 1)
temp[11]=lshr(add(temp[d], 8001), 1)
mem[ebe8]=sub(xor(xor(temp[e], 3fff), temp[11]), shl(and(and(temp[e], 3fff), temp[11]), 1))
BTW: anyone aware of LLVM optimizer passimplementations that can deal with MBAs ?
jor-el
You can take a look at SiMBA++ -> https://github.com/pgarba/SiMBA-
It is a C++ implementation of SiMBA [1] - a tool to handle linear MBAs, made available by Denuvo itself. Denuvo have another tool - Gamba for handling some variety of non-linear MBAs. And then further improvisation by another researcher - MSiMBA [3].
SiMBA++ since written in C++, it is fast and it integrates well into the LLVM passes to automatically identify the MBAs and replace them in the LLVM IR with simplified expressions. So no additional work required.
Shameless plug - me and my colleague (author of SiMBA++) recently gave a talk about using LLVM for deobfuscation of WASM, where we talk about MBAs, SiMBA++ etc. The idea is not limited to WASM, it is language agnostic once you have a binary lifted to LLVM IR. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKRdOcuXbYI
[1] SiMBA - https://github.com/DenuvoSoftwareSolutions/SiMBA [2] Gamba - https://github.com/DenuvoSoftwareSolutions/GAMBA [3] MSiMBA - https://github.com/mazeworks-security/MSiMBA
nekitamo
Xyntia was also just released to deal with MBA obfuscation, but I haven't had the chance to try it:
jcranmer
> BTW: anyone aware of LLVM optimizer passimplementations that can deal with MBAs ?
Your best bet is InstCombine, but likely most of the MBA patterns aren't going to be InstCombine patterns because who writes that kind of code?
In principle, you might see if you can tickle Alive2 (which can map LLVM IR to SMT logic) to see if you can get a peephole optimizer that's querying an SMT solver. But I'm not aware of anyone who's built a pass like that yet, and it's definitely not a regular pass in the compiler.
yukIttEft
Wasn't aware of Alive2. Thx, I'll have look.
I had some success with https://github.com/mrphrazer/msynth But its hard to glue this to LLVM.
rjh29
It is clearly effective. Go to a PC game piracy site and most games will be available, but anything covered by Denuvo is unavailable even years later. Either nobody is willing to crack it (unlikely) or Denuvo have done an exceptional job.
bri3d
The most important thing about Denuvo is that it's on a subscription license to the game publishers, so it's almost always removed after some length of time. This is critical in understanding why it isn't cracked as often, because they've shifted the economics to "spend 3 months tediously removing obfuscation methods or wait 1 year and the game is unprotected anyway."
> anything covered by Denuvo is unavailable even years later
I don't think this is true in the general case.
> Either nobody is willing to crack it (unlikely)
That's exactly what's going on - it's a matter of time-benefit, not "possible." What's groundbreaking with Denuvo isn't that the overall technique is incomprehensible but rather that it's insanely tedious to remove and very difficult to automate. They haven't made some groundbreaking theoretical technique, they've applied so many "standard" ways to obfuscate a binary that it becomes more annoying than it's worth to remove.
bee_rider
Is this, uh… actually a good outcome? If games make most of their money in the first couple months anyway (I’m not sure about this claim but it seems intuitively possible, at least for AAA), then getting anti-piracy for that timeframe seems like a high priority.
Then, the subscription can be allowed to lapse… and the game can be preserved, at least to the extent to which it can run without servers. If we have any belief in the “games as art” idea, this seems like a good result for preserving art.
cthor
It's a pretty good outcome, yeah. Kind of makes one wonder why copyright needs to be 70 years + life, when the overwhelming majority of sales are in the first year...
nemomarx
It works out pretty well as long as publishers follow that step yeah. it would be nicest to open source the game after it's life span maybe
12_throw_away
I mean, I'm pretty happy with the arrangement. People who buy day-1 bugfests for full price have to deal with awful DRM. But if you wait a year or two, then the most egregious bugs get fixed, it goes on sale, and the intrusive DRM is gone.
Of course, this means that casuals like me get a much better experience than their core, dedicated, day-1 customers ... but really, that sort of contempt for your core audience is a foundational principle of AAA these days.
KennyBlanken
> The most important thing about Denuvo is that it's on a subscription license to the game publishers, so it's almost always removed after some length of time.
No, the most important thing about Denuvo is that PC gamers are forced to upgrade their hardware because Denuvo is such a performance hog. All you have to do is wait until Denuvo is stripped and the game will run much faster.
Frankly, it wouldn't surprise me if there's a conspiracy between Denuvo and Intel/AMD/NVIDIA where Denuvo goes out of their way to hurt performance on a really popular title, thus forcing people to upgrade.
Idiot writers at gaming websites claim a new patch to a game that's been out for a while has "optimizations" and lauds the developers for slaving away to make an already-finished game faster. The reality is that they just stripped out Denuvo.
mnau
I am more likely to believe someone who bypassed Denuvo.
> One can see that Denuvo does indeed intervene from time to time, but what one can clearly see: It doesn’t do that very often, definitely not every frame.
> It’s only once every few seconds. Even less, sometimes it doesn’t do anything.
> To me personally, it tells that Denuvo executes checks so infrequently, that the likelyhood of it causing major performance issues seems rather low.
https://momo5502.com/posts/2024-03-31-bypassing-denuvo-in-ho...
Tadpole9181
I agree that I've seen anecdotal evidence that Denovu slows down some games considerably. That said, a conspiracy between every major hardware manufacturer and Denovu is certainly a bridge too far. It's far more reasonable, especially after reading this article, that there's a significant cost to all this encryption and wrapping and redirection if it's not applied carefully and enters a hot path.
qualeed
>anything covered by Denuvo is unavailable even years later.
That sounds like a marketing claim. There's a bunch of denuvo-protected games that have been cracked. As far as I am aware, although I am not completely up to date, there are more denuvo-protected games that have been cracked than not.
For awhile I feel like there were monthly headlines along the lines of "Denuvo cracked within hours of game release" (e.g. https://www.techspot.com/news/71543-denuvo-protected-games-n...).
(I agree that Denuvo is generally effective for its goals, especially at game launch when it is most valuable. It's just not infallible, by any stretch.)
guizadillas
Well you need to update, there no one right now actually cracking denuvo
Most "cracked" denuvo games are games cracked AFTER denuvo was removed by the publisher in an update (usually 6 months after release)
Just look at the Yakuza/Like a Dragon games
qualeed
>there no one right now actually cracking denuvo
The claim was that games protected by denuvo are uncracked years later.
What is happening right now is important and interesting, too, but not the claim the person I replied to made.
"anything covered by Denuvo is unavailable even years later" just isn't true. And that's what I was replying to.
SSLy
by my best count there are ~80 uncracked and ~190 cracked denuvo games. Demo bypassess etc count as uncracked. Further ~130 games had Denuvo removed after release.
mardifoufs
I thought EMPRESS (the only one that was able to consistently put out cracks and only for some games) retired. So there's literally no one who's cracking any recent games, which is all that matters for publishers.
qualeed
>no one who's cracking any recent games, which is all that matters for publishers.
Sure!
That wasn't the claim made by the person I replied to. They said "anything covered by Denuvo is unavailable even years later." which isn't true. That's what my comment is about.
MallocVoidstar
The vast majority of Denuvo games are no longer cracked. There's a list of cracked/uncracked Denuvo games here: https://old.reddit.com/r/CrackWatch/comments/p9ak4n/crack_wa...
I think some of the recent 'cracks' were mostly errors by the developers, allowing the demo of a game to load the full data files or shipping an unprotected EXE on accident somewhere (sometimes they leave a debug EXE lying around).
sph
There are cracked Denuvo games, and no anti-piracy scheme is unbreakable, ever.
If it can run on your PC when copy-protected, it means at some point the CPU executed the right instructions, so a crack is always possible to create. It's just a matter of how much effort and time is it to reverse-engineer it. You cannot copy-protect software indefinitely.
I remember feeling cool as fuck as a teenager because I cracked GTA 3 by dumping the live memory of the binary post decryption. Of course it's been 25 years, so the status quo has improved by a lot and god knows how many man-years and kWh are wasted on copy protection.
gpderetta
Technically some CPUs support secure enclaves that should support end to end encryption which should be robust short of lifting the encryption keys from the die. In practice things like SGX have been full of holes.
hansvm
Even assuming those are flawless, lifting keys is still O(n) in the key size, and the battle is just increasing the constant factor enough to make it unattractive. The problem is that lifting keys is attractive for reasons much more valuable than game cracking, so after a few years they should always be assumed compromised.
jampa
I think it is a combination of both. From what I heard, Denuvo hires many people from "the scene," and when someone cracks it, they pursue them aggressively.
Denuvo is also not a massive target because there are too many games nowadays to care about a specific one. The exception was when "Hogwarts Legacy" was released with Denuvo, and people went crazy for a crack which was delivered just 13 days later.
mathverse
Denuvo does not need to hire from the scene. The scene is not some magical place full of uber leet crackers. People doing denuvo have the same or better skills.
rappatic
Denuvo definitely does attempt to hire from the scene. It's less that they necessarily need those specific peoples' skills, but rather because there are so few people who can crack Denuvo, so hiring a single such person dramatically reduces the number of people out there cracking your games. The most famous example being Empress, who was the only person in the world cracking Denuvo for a few years. I'm sure Denuvo would have loved to hire her, if only to stop her from releasing cracks.
clayhacks
There’s definitely been plenty of denuvo games cracked, but I’d say most games that haven’t been cracked have denuvo. I think it also depends on the version of denuvo. Newer versions seem pretty well protected
0cf8612b2e1e
Could some of that be the decreasing share of single player games? Multiplayer, always online games are a moving target vs an offline game you only need to crack once. Everything “needs” to be online, user experience be damned.
Thaxll
The goal is to get your game protected at release because this where most of the money is made.
b8
Empress has cracked Denuvo protected games within a few days of launch, so not its not stopping everyone [0]. After one person bypasses it then others do from the inspiration they got from the OG. There's a formal theory for it, but I can't recall it currently.
2c2c2c
years ago, a friend of mine built something functionally equivalent to Denuvo in his spare time over the span of a few years. I think his original idea was "DRM for the little guy", recognizing that indie games probably lose massive revenue from initial release piracy.
He had no idea how to sell it. After it sitting around for awhile, I tried pitching the technology to few friends in VC, who had absolutely no idea what I was talking about.
It bothered me for a long time to see such a culmination of talent and effort get 0 reward for it. I've wondered if such technology would be interesting to some large publisher to just buy outright, bringing their anti-piracy in-house rather than relying on Denuvo. Any ideas/help appreciated :)
HighGoldstein
> recognizing that indie games probably lose massive revenue from initial release piracy.
This seems like an odd claim _especially_ for indie games. Indie games tend to already have trouble attracting buyers, it feels like anyone considering pirating it would just move on if they couldn't do so.
AngryData
Plus having a pirate version is essentially advertising for them if their product is good. Many indie title success stories I think is thanks to pirates trying them out for free and then telling everyone "Wow I just played this awesome indie title that you never would have heard of because its an indie title with little to no marketing and it is really good!" which lead to people looking at it and talking about it and getting more sales. I myself have bought numerous titles that I never would have bought based on the steam shop page. This is especially true for building, survival, or physics based games, which are pumped out en-mass, but take real talent and vision to do well enough to be worth the time and money to buy and play. Just a few games off the top of my head that I own but never would have otherwise bought without first pirating and playing them include, Project Zomboid, World of Goo, Besieged, Neo Scavenger, Oxygen Not Included, Banished. And even some pretty large titles like Crusader Kings I would never have considered buying without playing it first, and now it is one of my favorite games. Factorio would be the same thing if they didn't have a old version as a demo to play.
b8
A indie game dev phoned home how many players were playing his game that pirated it and he addresses your claim too in the article he posted about it[0]>
0. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/so-52-45-of-people-pl...
mjevans
They'd play it for free* but how many would pay? Would that number go down if DRM were involved?
Personally, Steam's about where I draw the line. They've given me enough value as an ecosystem and their native 'DRM' doesn't seem that obtrusive, so they've got a lot of my money over the years.
I've regretted every single time I happened to buy a game, which turned out to have other DRM or any form of 'anti cheat' client side. They just never work in the long run.
ThatMedicIsASpy
I played both Oris for 1€ on gamepass only to buy it when it's in a steam sale (~11€ for both iirc). I have free games from epic only to buy them on Steam for 5€. I have no problem pirating games. The last big title was Cyberpunk. It runs like shit on my end but once I buy a GPU I'll buy Cyberpunk. Until then I can wait.
I pirated GTA5 to test it on my machine back in the days. Textures popped in seconds later because the HDD was way too slow to handle the game. I prefer pirating a game over dealing with refunds. I have it for free from Epic. Would I buy it now? No. I don't like the game at all after playing for 4 hours.
What is my favorite single player game? Cyberpunk. Do I share that information? Yes.
npteljes
I really enjoyed this article, thanks for sharing!
It's a shame that OP didn't add a tracker to the pirate plea button. I would wager that he made practically zero sales from it - looking at how well donations seem to work in software development in general. I think that this is why microtransactions work well. They give away a nerfed version of the game for free, and after the player formed an attachment to it, the game can be upgraded for a price. In a way, this is a much more human design, than forking up the entire cost in advance.
2c2c2c
Can't say I was sold with the target market mostly because the sales problem becomes orders of magnitude harder
My thought regarding indie games were successful ones though. Something like Celeste or Balatro.
ronsor
I pay for games because it's convenient. Most DRM is decidedly inconvenient for me, especially Denuvo-tier DRM. The end result is that if there's DRM, I'm more likely to pirate it or not play it if there's no crack.
andrewmcwatters
Many years ago I was publishing work independently with a few other colleagues, and yes, piracy was a big deal. It was flattering, because you knew the demand was there, but maybe the audience couldn't or wasn't willing to pay for the product, but you don't want to see your work obtained for free when you're charging for it.
officeplant
>DRM for the little guy
The main problem with this is that some of us who buy indie games specifically buy them because they are available on DRM free platforms like Itch.io and GoG.
Adding DRM is just going to stop me from ever wanting to purchase the game. Its the same problem with Steam sucking up indie devs who started to only release on Steam. Will never purchase their game on a platform where I can't keep my own offline backup for when the service eventually fails.
mort96
It's nice to see such effort into user-hostile technology go unrewarded. When your product is, "what if we made everything we touch a bit worse?", you deserve to get 0 reward. It's sad to see that things like Denuvo haven't met the same fate as your friend's software.
2c2c2c
I love that the only example of inconvenience presented in this thread is that a person might open the wrong game while on a steam deck while possibly not having internet while on a plane. The agony!
I was right there with you with this opinion back in the day. Distribution was terrible, people didn't have near 24-7 access to internet. The times have changed. You're also not 11 years old anymore. You can afford to pay your peers in your industry.
cainxinth
Lets see Empress's analysis
Culonavirus
Heh... Now that would be the fastest flag in the history of this site.
efilife
why?
ReptileMan
She is as unstable as she is talented.
mschuster91
Empress made a name for themselves not just with cracking Denuvo but for going on full blown transphobic rants in their NFOs such as in the Hogwarts Legacy crack [1].
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Asmongold/comments/119x8ht/heres_em...
shmerl
Vote with your wallet and don't buy games with this junk.
npteljes
I factor it in as risk, and decide according to that. No chance in hell that I won't buy a game I'm interested in, just because it has this crap. But I do make a mental note that it can break if I have internet or whatever.
shmerl
I simply won't buy it. Let them release the game on GOG or other DRM-free store, then I'll buy it if I like it.
npteljes
I can see that. I just scrolled through a large denuvo list on pcgamingwiki, and honestly, not much temptation there for me, even though I really like gaming. Of all these games, I only played Persona 5 (and loved it), and I only want to play some more Atlus games.
Do you also abstain from other DRMs as well, or just some in particular? They can be quite nasty, and mobile games are also pretty horrible for privacy as well. As a compromise for myself, I use a separate Windows for gaming, and I have almost no real data on that partition.
LightHugger
Worth noting that denuvo causes a lot of hitching, massive load time increases and overall performance problems. Denuvo marketing dept likes to say this isn't true but you only have to look at the before/after on games with and without it, monster hunter world was a very stark example. I have no doubt denuvo is also massively contributing to the performance problems on Monster Hunter Wilds as well.
GuB-42
I think Denuvo impact on performance is as much exaggerated by gamers as it is downplayed by Denuvo.
I didn't play MH:World on PC but from what I have seen MH:Wilds suffers from piss-poor optimization that is unrelated to the (two!) DRM they have put in. It may be Denuvo, but from what I've seen, it is just the usual laziness that is prevalent in most AAA games today. Instead of spending the performance budget where it matters by having programmers collaborate with artists, they just throw everything at the engine which ends up overwhelmed and in turn throws everything to DLSS and framegen resulting in an ugly mess (but a raytraced ugly mess!) if you don't have the latest overpriced hardware.
And it may be the same problem with Denuvo. Denuvo doesn't have to cause massive performance problems, but developers have to implement it correctly, using license checks sparingly, and certainly not in performance-critical code.
Also note that when the publisher removes Denuvo, it may also come with other performance optimizations, not everything comes from the removal of Denuvo.
accelbred
MH World didn't have Denuvo on release, but it was added with the expansion. It was thus easy to tell.
LightHugger
I don't think is exaggerated by gamers, if anything it's widely understated. The issue is that denuvo affects the 1% lows and latency much more than the average FPS. But the 1% lows and latency have an outsized effect on player experience, average framerate can be the same but if 1% lows and latency are miserable then you are playing a completely different game.
You are not wrong about the additional failure of AAA to keep their games optimized but the ways denuvo affects performance are particularly insidious.
billmcneale
> Worth noting that denuvo causes a lot of hitching, massive load time increases and overall performance problems.
There is pretty much zero evidence that this is true and some credible evidence that it is untrue.
For example, plenty of games have had Denuvo removed after a few months by the publisher and showed zero improvement in performance.
This fake narrative is being pushed by software pirates bitter that Denuvo is being so effective at preventing them from stealing games.
shmerl
Of course. DRM can never improve user experience, it's an anti-user feature by definition.
Tadpole9181
Not going to take sides on the particular debate, but one could certainly argue that DRM is just a double-edge blade.
The world is less fun with less art and games. And those require money to be made. The cost of securing that or making legitimate purchases cheaper (broadening the legal market) may be the initial online requirement and potential performance impacts.
Again, I'm not saying Denuvo is or is not a net in one way or the other. Just that there is room for gray.
billmcneale
> it's an anti-user feature by definition.
That's an extremely naive take that shows some stark ignorance of the tech and market forces at work.
From a tech standpoint, Denuvo negatively impacting performance has been debunked many times over (see my previous post about that).
On the economical side, you need to realize that whenever you are playing and enjoying a game, it's most likely due to the fact that the previous games sold by that developer have been successful in making money, which was most likely made possible by Denuvo.
In other words, making piracy harder allows the next generation of games to be created.
flerchin
I'm confused by calling the identifying information "stolen constants" or "stolen instructions". I don't understand why it's considered stolen. Do we mean "intercepted"?
mpeg
It's a very common term in reverse engineering, and low level programming in general. In VMs you usually say "stolen" to refer to bytes/instructions/constants that have been taken from the original binary and put somewhere else (whether obfuscated or not, whether still in the local binary or in a server like with denuvo)
nneonneo
The “stolen” constants/instructions are bits of code that were in the original (VM-obfuscated) binary. These constants/instructions are deleted from the binary and provided by the server in an obfuscated form. Effectively, the binary you get when buying the game is incomplete: you get a dynamic, encrypted, system-dependent patch from the server that supplies the missing pieces (the “stolen” pieces).
mdaniel
I haven't pirated games since I was in highshool, but this nonsense has resulted in the worst UX for games I have paid for - with no recourse on my part. I guess it's like Cloudflare: some people have to suffer because other people don't behave nicely
alias_neo
I also haven't pirated games since I was a child, but I run Linux, and I game on Linux, whether desktop or on my ROG Ally (Bazzite).
The experience for me, when I buy a game, is that I either don't buy one with DRM, or, I buy one that _might_ work, and then I spend a little while trying to get the right version of Proton that runs correctly, and get banned / blocked temporarily for switching my machine identifiers or something too much.
It really is a sick joke that the experience for gaming, music and video is all far, far better for those who _don't_ pay than for those who do.
Kokouane
> It really is a sick joke that the experience for gaming, music and video is all far, far better for those who _don't_ pay than for those who do.
Denuvo is effective enough that if a game has it, it is almost impossible to pirate. So in most cases, it is either pay or do not play the game at all.
There was one key player who knew how to crack Denuvo DRM. They went by the name Empress but haven't cracked anything in the past year, and also mentally deranged, often including very transphobic rants in the NFO file of the torrents they release.
alias_neo
> it is either pay or do not play the game at all
That's still a net win for the pirate I'd argue; for them it's zero steps to "don't play the game at all", for someone like myself it's pay->waste time trying to get it run and fail->refund/no-refund.
onli
Just in case that's helpful, there is a Steam curator that marks games protected with Denuvo, to make that fact more visible before you buy them. https://store.steampowered.com/curator/26095454-Denuvo-Watch...
josu
>some people have to suffer because other people don't behave nicely
It's self fulfilling though. Some people won't behave nicely if a game comes with Denuvo.
izzydata
What part of the experience suffers from Denuvo? I've had games with Denuvo and then had Denuvo removed and at least in my limited personal experience there has been no discernible difference.
I can understand the argument against DRM in general and owning things you buy, but that seems like a different problem.
RedCardRef
izzydata
Interesting. For how effective Denuvo is the impact is negligible. Less than 1% average framerate and seconds of loading time.
The disk space usage is weird, but 100mb to 300mb executables is irrelevant in the age of terabyte drives and 50gb game installs.
Nice to confirm that there was no way I was ever going to notice its impact.
StefanBatory
Also unrelated, but seeing "A 2nd Year Computer Science Student" in the blog name was both breathtaking in a positive way, but also hurts a little. Kudos to the author, seriously.
mpeg
Students are the only people with the patience for deep RE, I spent hours and hours in my teens unpacking binaries that used similar VMs and got pretty decent at it.
Nowadays, there is no way I could do it, I tried to get back into hackthebox recently and the new RE challenges make my brain hurt.
tristor
Very interesting analysis and as someone who practiced reversing/cracking in my youth, it helps me to understand why Denuvo is so effective. I have, for awhile, had a policy that I will not buy any game with Denuvo, and I continue to stand by that policy. I only play games w/ Steam on Linux (Steam Deck or Framework 13 laptop) and Denuvo makes this impossible, so it's a hard no from me. But I respect the engineering they invested into this DRM.
akimbostrawman
Denuvo DRM works on linux however it does require an internet connection and you can get banned for +24 hours if you play on more than 3-5 devices a day (a proton prefix also counts as 1 device).
mort96
Yeah I remember trying to debug some issue I had with DOOM Eternal (I think) and then randomly getting the message that I can't play for 24 hours because I'm an evil criminal. Not a great customer experience.
xienze
> I only play games w/ Steam on Linux (Steam Deck or Framework 13 laptop) and Denuvo makes this impossible
Are you sure about that? I have a ROG Ally running Bazzite and I have played several games on this page[0] that use Denuvo.
0: https://store.steampowered.com/curator/26095454-Denuvo-Watch...
andoando
I mean why shouldn't game developers protect their game from piracy?
kbolino
The best protection from piracy has always been making the product available at a reasonable price in a convenient fashion. This is echoed by Gabe Newell, founder of Valve, the makers of Steam, who said: "piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem...." I think the actual operation of Steam has shown that pricing matters too, since it is well known for its unusually generous sales compared to other (legitimate) digital stores. The point is that if you meet the customer where they're at, as frictionlessly as possible, you will outcompete the pirates.
DRM's primary purpose is to force consumers into an ultimatum: accept our inflated pricing and enforced inconveniences, or get nothing at all. For some products, this is part of their brand identity, since they bill themselves as "premium" or "AAA". For others, it's enforcement of their monopoly control (e.g., sports broadcasting). In all cases, it's treating the consumer like a disposable and squeezable commodity, which isn't necessarily inaccurate for some products and their target audiences, but certainly isn't the only way to do business.
andoando
1. There is certainly a large number of people who will pirate whether the game is $60 or $5. If you made pirating easier and consequence free, itd be a donation model. Gabe Newells statement speaks more to doing the best under bad circumstances, than openly espousing piracy (make games cheap enough that paying is worth the convenience of going through hoops to pirate it). If he was fully sincere in that statement he ought to allow all their steam store to be downloaded for free.
If you cut down the difficulty of cracking a game, and generally made it easier to pirate, wed just have a nice cracked Steam store anyone can download any play anything they want, do you really think thats going to help the market?
2. Characterizing the buying and selling of a goods, a non essential like a video games no less, as an "ultimatium" is ridiculous. By pirating youre just subsidizing the cost of the game onto people who paid for the game legitimately.
You developed the game, you have the right to charge whatever you want for it.
Perhaps there are arguments to be made since copies of digital goods are essentially free, but this isnt it
yjftsjthsd-h
Because it punishes legitimate users
justsomehnguy
The pesky pirates don't have a problem running the game.
The legitimate buyers do have.
Who you want to annoy more - the people who gives you money or the people you never heard and you would never hear about?
larodi
ph34r!
op is top
hoseja
Buy from GoG and indies
Don't play AAA slop
What isn't mentioned in the article is why UD2 is chosen. It is a relic from the SecuROM days, in fact, one of the developers on SecuROM is the one who also works or worked at Denuvo.
I would imagine many things from the SecuROM era live on in Denuvo.
But if you read the article you will realize that certain games will not work in the future due to Denuvo.
"This destroyed any exception-based hooking since majority of the time an exception is triggered, Windows will write an EXCEPTION_RECORD high up in unused stack space. You can probably see where this is going. Now, whenever the CPUID is hooked via an exception, that important value will become overwritten with an EXCEPTION_RECORD, causing undefined behaviour later on. I believe this can be bypassed if you attach a debugger to the process and set certain flags when it comes to exception handling, but the method of patching every hardware check is still cumbersome due to randomness anyway."
As Windows matures, behaviour can change, breaking certain stuff.