Bypassing Denuvo in Hogwarts Legacy
momo5502.com
momo5502.com
Currently not a single Denuvo game released during 2024 has been cracked, and more games released during 2023 remain uncracked than those that were. It's actually pretty effective unlike most other PC DRM schemes.
I wonder why this happens? Does Denuvo cost a lot of ongoing subscription money for a developer or something? I’ve noticed this happens a decent amount.
Maybe the devs of the game you mentioned decided that after the initial spike had passed, and they are in a long tail period, it is cheaper to remove Denuvo.
Or they just used Denuvo to protect the game during early time when most sales happen and they removed it because they want better performance and also they want people to be able to play the game 20, 50, 100, and 1000 years from now.
In the case of Lies of P though, the developers accidentally included a debug build .exe without Denuvo in an update, only afterwards was it actually removed entirely because there was no point in including it anymore.
[0] https://www.techpowerup.com/275158/denuvo-drm-pricing-struct...
https://irdeto.com/denuvo/nintendo-switch-emulator-protectio...
There is precedent for that kind of thing, Wii emulation matured early enough that a handful of retail games had code specifically intended to frustrate running them in Dolphin. They abused some details of the real Wiis L1/L2 cache which aren't simulated by Dolphin, and couldn't be without adding an unreasonable amount of overhead.
https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2017/02/01/dolphin-progress-rep...
You’re limited to 3 or 5 activations per day.
The guy in the video makes the point that: Game is released --> paying users suffer the lower perf caused by DRM while pirates crack it --> pirates succeed, company removes DRM, paying users benefit from improved perf ^^
I wonder how much that has to do with the actual technical merits of this DRM scheme compared to older DRM schems. Piracy as a service problem has mostly been solved on PC by now, so there's not a lot of incentive to crack games anymore.
Most of what Denuvo does has been done by other DRM schemes before, VMProtect has been used by DRM schemes before Denuvo. It just seems that Denuvo is more aggressive with online verification than previous schemes.
I don't think most of the pirates actually care that much about whether people download their releases. They just want the credit within the scene of cracking something that's hard to crack or leaking something before street date. For-profit pirates would be an exception to this but I doubt they're very prevalent because most people are pirating to avoid paying.
Denuvo is also an exception to piracy as a service problem being solved because it is widely hated even by non-pirates. If pirates rendered it ineffective, companies would not be using it for their games but preventing piracy is worth the backlash as far as they're concerned.
they don't care about who downloads what, but you'd better believe that the market hype drives the attention and sets the rewarded merit for accomplishing the crack.
Maybe in an abstract Reddit community kind of way. For paying end users I doubt Denuvo comes up much. It works behind the scenes and is pretty reliable.
Unless their games run slowly, or they can't install a mod/fan patch, or they want to play offline, or they hate having some third party snooping around on their devices and collecting their data.
The reason is simple: i want to have access to the games i bought regardless of Steam and when i buy a game there i also make a separate offline copy for my own archival. Denuvo - or any DRM really - makes that impossible. Fortunately most games (like pretty much all indie games, which are what i mainly buy these days) have no DRM at all on Steam and the few that do make enough of stink for me to know and avoid them.
So yeah, Denuvo is reliable for making me ignore a game (until it is removed at least - amusingly enough that'd often be after a bunch of patches have been released and the game had a bunch sales/price drops)
I'd probably buy a game with Denuvo if i REALLY wanted to play it (e.g. i bought Prey 2017 despite Denuvo) but i'd do that only after the price has dropped to "sandwich levels" (e.g. i bought Prey 2017 at a handful of dollars). Note that i also put money where my mouth is and when a major game that i want to play is released on GOG (which has DRM-free games) i do buy it full price or close to full price.
Could you let me know which curator it is? I'm also actively avoiding any game that uses Denuvo, so I'd certainly find such a curator useful.
Denuvo has often been the cause of these issues and less technical players will usually direct their annoyance at the game publisher (which is ultimately the right place) but they won't know to attribute it more directly to Denuvo itself.
That some platforms more aggressively inform you about these facts is very appreciated. Same applies to some rootkit anti-cheat software.
There sure is a lot of very ineffective/broken non-Denuvo DRM out there, but companies continue to include that too. I doubt it's being done to stop piracy (even if only temporarily), but I wouldn't doubt that they think they're getting their money's worth. https://www.techdirt.com/2024/01/19/ubisoft-says-it-out-loud...
Keep in mind that FPS drops are only one issue with Denuvo's performance. Another common one (which i think is more common in recent releases, judging from comments i've seen) is frame pracing/stuttering/etc - people very often mention in Reddit threads about Denuvo's removal from a game that the update that removed Denuvo fixed these for them (of course it could also be some other change the game had, but this has been the case with more than one game and games receive other patches before removing Denuvo, so i have a hard time accepting all are coincidences).
A slow/lengthy call every few seconds wont affect your average framerate (which is what often developers check for performance measurement) but it will affect your frame pacing and give a stuttery feel. Most people tend to call this a "performance issue" (regardless if it is due to performance or not).
Note though that in a case where they could test both versions, they did find Denuvo to both have lesser performance and affect frame pacing[1] (though that is for a 2yo game, things might be better more recently).
You can argue that a good developer will configure Denuvo to only "compile" functions where those side effects doesn't matter (like after loading screens, during cutscenes, when the game is paused, etc). However, I've seen so many stupid mistakes in this industry that I would never trust the experience and skill of said developers, unless I can asses it myself by working on a daily basis with them.
[0] https://www.pcgamer.com/bethesda-accidentally-left-a-denuvo-...
I'll need a source for that.
https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/List_of_games_using_Always...
If you see the top of the table it says "Specifically games no longer listed as being available for sale through any means.".
It doesn't mean you can't play the game if you already acquired it...
I have Steam games that aren't sold anywhere anymore but I can still install and play them just fine.
These may not be games you'd want to play but the important message is that it's concerning that the biggest publishers (Ubisoft, EA etc.) can release stuff that will randomly die at some point in the future for no good reason and that they won't even release a patch or server software so you can play the product you paid them for.
And Denuvo will be why I pirate it, should I get tired of waiting for the vendor to remove that crap.
Is the game installed encrypted? What encryption schema allows you to decrypt the same set of data using multiple different keys in this way?
If the game isn't installed encrypted it seems easiest just to not allow it to encrypt itself before running.
All I'm going to say is that the benchmarks you see online are for pirated versions of the game where the binary isn't the same as the official patched product, and that has various implications beyond our product or Denuvo.
I think Denuvo is going to have that effect regardless of the performance impact.
> All I'm going to say is that the benchmarks you see online are for pirated versions of the game where the binary isn't the same as the official patched product, and that has various implications beyond our product or Denuvo.
Wait, are you suggesting that pirated versions might run better than the official ones, regardless of their DRM?
Sure, but as always it's a business decision - is the impact of Denuvo on the number of copies sold big enough to offset the fact that Denuvo does actually work and stops some games from being pirated for weeks if not months after launch? I don't know, I never had any view into that data, but I assume it must be the case or otherwise no one would use it.
>>Wait, are you suggesting that pirated versions might run better than the official ones, regardless of their DRM?
No, I'm not suggesting anything. I'm just saying that it's not directly comparable, for instance because the binary will be treated differently by graphics drivers, for better or worse. Also you don't know exactly which version was being compared by who and when and how.
Obviously, you don't have to believe me that Ubisoft engineers have spent significant amount of time testing this in all kinds of configurations - I have no way to prove that, especially since I don't work there anymore.
It seems you did not actually read what I wrote. I put anymore in caps for a reason.
I never said any recent AC title or any newer Denuvo version suffers from any FPS issues. The loading of games (startup only I think, not level loading) is in fact still very much impacted, especially in the first run.
So all what you wrote is pretty pointless. Denuvo in the past in fact slowed down FPS of games early on as it was making calls the slowed down FPS on every single frame. People did the testing of games after they got cracked, and the cracked versions ran faster.
And.....did you read what I wrote? I brought up AC specifically because people online have been saying that the cracked version is faster, which I know we have tested at Ubisoft alongside with engineers from Denuvo and found it not to be true. You can of course choose to not believe me, it's the internet after all.
If you say "well I didn't mean AC" then cool, but I had no possible way of knowing what you mean, or what your cut off point is, "anymore" is not a very definitive point in time.
> If you say "well I didn't mean AC" then cool, but I had no possible way of knowing what you mean, or what your cut off point is, "anymore" is not a very definitive point in time.
So because I not specifically mention any title, you just make it about yourself and what you are to have worked on ... that is an incredible cheap and dishonest excuse. "Oh you not specific X enough so I just assume you mean Y." Silly.
> You can of course choose to not believe me, it's the internet after all.
See, and STILL you assume or are so desperate that I suddenly choose not to believe you after I told you never I was obviously talking about old versions that were proven to have an FPS impact. Childish.
If I wanted to argue against that I would mock you for working with en engineer from Denuvo on it, hardly and bias there ;)
End if the day face is Denovo still sucks ass, even if you can not measure any FPS loss anymore, dev remove it after cracks/leaks or even just time passed for a reason that is not just money, its insane bloated shitty VM layer that slows down the games' startup, bloats the games executables up to insane sizes. Legit consumers hate it and want it gone.
And I am aware that certain idiots on Reddit and YouTube post fake videos of more up-to-date titles claiming huge FPS loses, and they continue to claim even recent versions of Denovo eats FPS because they just want it to be true so bad, or they actually compare different versions for games where It's not about the removed D but about the updated game. I never made any indication that I am like that, in fact I made it very clear that I am not. If you actually read what I wrote, it makes your answer even worse. You are just desperate. Go on Reddit r/crackwatch or something like that you will find plenty of people you can fight with, they won't take you working with an Denuvo dev on figuring out supposed facts serious either ;)
You've taken it waaaaaay too personally. No one is attacking you, your statement, it wasn't even meant to be a rebuttal of what you said, I literally just wanted to share a story from my experience.
>>Childish
Now that's uncalled for.