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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Established law says that every publication of a work involving a copyrighted character creates a new version of that character whose copyright extends for the full period starting from the publication of that work. This came up when someone wrote a story about Sherlock Holmes, who was out of copyright, and they were sued, successfully, on the theory that they had used aspects of Sherlock Holmes' personality that were developed in stories still under copyright.
Sam Logan had some fun with the concept here: https://www.samandfuzzy.com/3429
> After nearly 100 years of acting, what's your favorite of your roles?
> Steamboat Willie.
> Really? Not any of your other--
> We don't talk about my other roles. They're a burden. A liability, used to control me. I have left them behind, so that I may be free.
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.
> 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...
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.)
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).
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
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.
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.
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.
To me, Xbox is that video-game you get when you ask for a Playstation and your parents don't understand video-games. Their versioning scheme even helps make sure the parents fail to purchase the latest generation.
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.
For example, physical FPS exploits include devices that sit in the HDMI/DP chain with a USB output and emulate a keyboard and mouse.