Denuvo has been cracked in all single-player games it previously protected

During the time of the Soviet Union, it was an urban legend that during supply shortages, Soviet factories would have no real work, but workers needed to keep up the appearance of working, so they would have one line of workers continuously assembling devices, feeding into another line that would continuously disassemble them, all in a loop where nothing gets produced.

In many ways, it feels like we are seeing this today in the digital world. As a specific example, GTA 5 (singleplayer) is a game that has been pirated for about 10 years now, and has received zero content updates in that time, yet somewhat recently (maybe a few years ago?) they updated the game on Steam to have new DRM that constantly conflicts with the Steam Deck sleep mode and kicks you out of the game at random after waking up, or just won't even let you launch if you're without internet and haven't launched it within a few days. Nothing worthwhile was produced by this endeavor, that's for sure.

I've had to take a moral stance and move to just playing games on Gog that I can buy and own the files for. No I can't play the latest and greatest but it's not the end of the world as I've so many classics to still play and enjoy. I can't support lockdown and DRM anymore. If I buy I want to own, otherwise I've not bought. It is true, if buying isn't owning, then piracy isn't stealing.

I would hope publishers would take note and remove it, having hundreds of megabytes of junk in the executable is just wasteful to put it mildly

Don't forget that the guy behing Denuvo is the same person behind SafeDisc, SecuROM and similar bullshit siblings from the past PC gaming world.

Do the cracks still need you to disable Hyper-V (which leads to disabling WSL and whatever else)?

In addition, I’m not sure why they’re enabling test signing instead of using kdmapper or the like. Sure, anticheats will get way more mad at you having a manual mapped driver, but one imagines rebooting once (after playing your cracked video game) beats rebooting twice (to enable test signing, then after playing the game).

The funny thing is I remember reading about using hypervisor crap to bypass Denuvo in ~2020 (actually the post is from 2019, https://www.unknowncheats.me/forum/2410412-post14.html)

Support GOG, support no DRM.

Wonder what will be the consequences of this. I dislike Denuvo for the performance and stability penalties it gives games, but I do wonder if the "security" it gave publishers wasn't a big part of the reason why we've been getting more and more big name games on PC.

This isn't about being right or wrong but about what the publishers will do when they see their games are again getting cracked day one, and if it'll be a catalyst to again return to getting either less PC releases or at least delayed releases compared to consoles.

I will hope that does not happen.

"Protected" is the wrong word. "Restricted" is much more honest regarding what Denovo does.

Good riddance.

Does anyone have a link to how the crack works? I would love to see something more technical.

I find it ironic people mad at Denuvo and yet play games like Battlefield which enforces kernel level spyware nonetheless haha

Interesting to finally see some action from the mouse again. Was kinda sad to see that Denuvo embodies all the worst of DRM but was so thoroughly metastasized that it was nearly inoperable and they had effectively "won".

Couldn't have happened to a nicer piece of software, etc.

No, it hasn't:

> in late 2025, the MKDev collective and the prolific DenuvOwO came up with a hypervisor-based bypass (HVB) that installs a kernel-level driver to intercept and respond to Denuvo's checks. While that's not an actual crack, it's good enough for piracy work, as the saying goes.

Do any of the legit scene groups sign their binaries? How do you know a release isn’t tainted?

good riddance. crazy to see game developers hemorrhaging money for malware

That's all you need to know about DRM - when "pirates" bypass it, paying users are taking the hit.

And I'm not speaking about cost of implementing a technology to actively make the product worse.

Wow. Great. Congratulations. Achievement earned. You've persisted so long.

Now stop creating new DRMs. You can see what is the outcome. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.

The only thing that made me switch to Netflix from π-rated movies was the accessibility, availability, languages support, speed and quality. The same with games. I buy games from gog mostly because they are missing DRM (and because I'm an old dinosaur so not interested in the bleeding edge new games).

Please focus on the added value. And the wealth will come. Don't pay for denuvo - it's waste of money

Fyi, most of them have not been cracked, but bypassed using a hypervisor that operates in ring-1, so it is certainly a security risk..

Personally I've been voting with my wallet and *never* supporting DRM, so there have been some games where I'm just "Well, I guess I'll never play that game." At least I have an ethical option to play certain games now, I'm just gonna use a seperate blank pc cus these bypasses are novel.

I'm very interested to see how it was cracked, and how the anticheat works.

Great news! I can finally feel comfortable buying games that have Denuvo day 1!

Are Denuvo using games marked on Steam these days?

I've been getting mostly indies so I feel safe, but maybe I should check...

Oh shit. I just realised you could use LLMs to crack these protections. They almost entirely depend on adding bloat to make it hard to crack. That’s over now.

This will be used as reason to introduce remote attestation to games.

Once again I'm at odds with TH reporting. Of course you can spoof a server. That happens all the time, especially with videogames. You may not immediately be able to figure out what the call/response is, but without knowing what the check is, it could just be a simple endpoint that returns "true" on every request. Very speculative to say that whatever they do will be impossible to mimic.

A great use of LLM