There was a long period of time when PC gaming, with the anti-tamper DRM system Denuvo, was the only way to ensure your big new release wouldn’t appear on private piracy trackers within minutes of release. From there, the torrent would quickly make its way to the public trackers, where even the most casual of freeloaders could avail themselves of the bounty without paying a penny.
Everything seemed like a win for publishers, just bring in the Denuvo boys, add their mysterious protection to a game, and your initial sales were safe from Johnny Depp-style privateers.
Not so fast. As with everything, it’s not quite as simple as that. For starters, Denuvo operates via a subscription offer. The longer it is active for a game, the more it costs the publisher – sure, it probably outweighs the potential losses, but that’s not guaranteed if your game sells poorly. This is why, if you track games on Steam, you will often see games listed as having Denuvo at launch, but then after a couple of months of sales, it will quietly be removed. It is historically at that point that the game would be insta-cracked and torrented.
The elephant in a room full of elephants
Many people will advocate for one of two positions when a game includes Denuvo. The first is that it massively affects performance, drops frame rates, and installs things on your PC without your permission and penalises you for actually buying the games, whereas if you get a version without Denuvo, the pirates get a better experience.
The second position is that all of this is nonsense, and it doesn’t affect anything. Research, as research often does, has concluded that both are true, depending on where the research originated from, of course.
While not having experienced it myself, I know people who would fight to the death on the side that Denuvo affects their gameplay, so I am inclined to believe them, although the exact circumstances remain a mystery.
Regardless, Denuvo is widely regarded by gamers to be poison, administered by desperate capitalists to protect their often-huge bottom lines. While development teams are laid off, faceless corpos make cash-money decisions in the background that affect the people who are paying for the games.
They rob from the rich and give to the poor – who is voices38?
And then the uncrackable was seemingly cracked. As with many things, sometimes the fact that something says it is undefeatable simply means more people are determined to beat it. And so, this year, the attention turned to Denuvo.
Initially, workarounds started to arrive, known as Hypervisor exploits, allowing you to play these Denuvo-riddled games, with a caveat. To bypass Denuvo’s protection methods, you had to disable your Windows security features. So, you want me to download something from the internet and disable all my PC’s security features to play it? I see you evil empires!
So to play the big Denuvo-protected games on Day 1 you had to take a risk. A potential big risk. Some did, some didn’t, but the door had been left ajar, and the horse was putting its new shoes on and getting ready to bolt.
Presumably from the Hypervisor exploits, a cracker known only as voices38 suddenly started to release previously Denuvo-protected games one after another. Starting with older games that still bore the system, they started to be released with ‘traditional’ cracks. The list grew and grew, and suddenly newer games such as Black Myth Wukong were wide open and downloadable.
On the various piracy subreddits, voices38 began to be lauded as some kind of hero or God – there to bring down the evil corporations. You take our physical media away, and we will have your games for free – it’s never quite like that, but the us v them narrative is strong in this one.
voices38 was seemingly acting with impunity now. Cracking whatever they wanted in something that, well, can’t have gone down well in Denuvo’s boardroom. After all, they sell a subscription-based product, and if this Johnny-come-lately was just going to bypass it anyway, well, why does anybody need you?
And so the lawsuit has finally arrived.
Go to jail – go directly to jail… er who are you?
This week, Denuvo GmbH filed an action at the US District Court for the Northern District of California, accusing voices38 of bypassing the Anti-Tamper on 26 games – in reality, it’s now a lot more, but we all know how quickly lawyers work when they are getting paid by the hour.
Lawyers argue that this is a violation of the DMCA (ooh, that’s definitely my favourite bit of legislation ever, honest) anti-circumvention provision.
“Defendant is a computer hacker who is focused on reverse engineering, hacking, or ‘cracking’ video games employing Denuvo’s Anti-Tamper product,” Denuvo’s legal team states.
“Defendant has bypassed DRM restrictions in copyrighted works, removing protections that allow copyright owners to restrict who may access their works, and allowing for pirated versions of those copyrighted works,”.
And they would have got away with it if it wasn’t for you pesky kids – except – we haven’t had the big Scooby Doo reveal yet – Zoinks.
Assuming voices38 is not the hacker’s real given name, nobody knows who they are – and so now the big old internet hunt begins.
The interesting thing here is that because Denuvo doesn’t own, or presumably care, about the games that have been cracked, it can’t go after voices38 for any kind of copyright infringement, which is why it’s complaining that its beloved software has been fiddled with, affecting its entire business model. Confusingly, it all comes under Copyright infringement as you can see from the court document above, but Section 1201 is the anti-circumvention part of the DMCA. This is why you should always get a lawyer kids, before you speak to anybody about anything legal, even if you are innocent.
I’ve long regarded the DMCA as a Big Brother-esque, rights-removing stain of a law that easily allows companies the option of spurious legal action on the weakest of grounds, but to be fair to Denuvo here, this isn’t really one of those. Its business reputation is at stake, although it will be difficult to get its uncrackable reputation back after being cracked.
So for now, all the legals have is a Reddit username, a Discord ID and a few vague Steam accounts. Now the larger task will begin of trying to force details from these tech companies to reveal an identity. Fortunately for us, tech companies never just roll over and hand out our details willy-nilly. Oh…
‘All is fine’
So is that the end of voices38 – have they gone underground? Not so much.
The cracker posted ‘All is fine. Everything will continue as normal.’ in a recent response on Reddit.
Things aren’t really fine, but they will be doubtless trying to make sure their Op-sec is tight before things get awkward. American courts love a 1000-year sentence for a minor tech infringement, well, maybe not if you steal every book ever and train your models on them, but well, sometimes they do
Although it is worth pointing out that this is currently a civil lawsuit, not a criminal prosecution. Denuvo is seeking damages and injunctive relief.
There is obvious support for the anti-hero online, however. Indeed, many Reddit accounts are now proclaiming “I am voices38” in a sort of weird Spartacus moment.
Denuvo needs to unmask voices38 as a deterrent if nothing else, but its bigger issue is, action like this invariably brings bigger and better hackers into the arena,
The cat is out of the bag, and it might take more than the Scooby Gang to put it back in.
What is Denuvo? – an easy explainer
Denuvo is a form of digital rights management and anti-tamper technology used by publishers to make PC games harder to pirate. Rather than being a storefront-style DRM system on its own, it is usually layered on top of existing copy protection and works by making parts of a game’s code more difficult to analyse, modify, or crack. From a publisher’s point of view, the attraction is obvious: the first few days and weeks after launch are when a game is most commercially valuable, and delaying a cracked version can potentially protect a chunk of those early sales.
The problem is that Denuvo has become deeply unpopular with a sizeable section of the PC gaming community. Over the years, it has been blamed for longer loading times, stuttering, higher CPU usage, and other performance issues in certain games, although the effect varies significantly from title to title, and poor implementation can be as much a factor as Denuvo itself. There is also a broader ownership and preservation argument.
People dislike the idea of legitimate copies carrying extra protection that can require online checks or create future compatibility concerns, particularly when cracked versions may eventually remove those restrictions altogether. For critics, that creates the awkward situation where paying customers can end up with more hoops to jump through than pirates. Publishers, meanwhile, continue to use Denuvo because even delaying piracy around launch can be commercially valuable, which is why the argument around it has never really gone away.
The post Denuvo strikes back at prominent cracker ‘voices38’, with lawsuit intended to unmask them appeared first on The Escapist.
