denuvo – Techdirt (original) (raw)

Denuvo Returns To Block Some Nintedo Switch Games From PC Emulation

from the it's-baaaack dept

Denuvo is back! While the company only got a single mention in 8 months thus far in 2022, the once-vaunted antipiracy DRM company made quite the splash in the years prior. If you don’t want to go through tens and tens of posts about Denuvo, I can give you a quick breakdown. Denuvo DRM was once touted as a tool that would bring about “the end of video game piracy,” which then was defeated by cracking groups on the order of months, then weeks, then days, then hours. Publishers began stripping the DRM out of games post release once it had been cracked and the company announced it would be pivoting to anti-cheat technology for online games. Very little noise has been made by or about the company since.

But it’s baaaaack! And it’s back in the dumbest possible form, too, announcing recently that it had partnered with several game publishers to protect Nintendo Switch games from PC emulators.

Denuvo, the company best known for its heavily-criticized PC gaming DRM technology, has set its sights on a new scourge: Nintendo Switch piracy. The software maker announced during GamesCom 2022 on Wednesday that it will begin selling a new product called Nintendo Switch Emulator Protection to prevent Switch games from being pirated on PC.

It doesn’t appear to be partnering with Nintendo on the initiative, which instead seems aimed mostly at third-party publishers of multiplatform games. “As with all other Denuvo solutions, the technology integrates seamlessly into the build toolchain with no impact on the gaming experience. It then allows for the insertion of checks into the code, which blocks gameplay on emulators,” the company wrote in a press release. In the past, however, Denuvo’s “checks” have been accused of making some games run worse.

Yes it certainly has. And Denuvo later confirmed that it was working with publishers and not Nintendo directly, which was a big surprising if only due to Nintendo’s longstanding war against emulation websites.

So how much of a problem is Switch emulation? A _huge problem_… if you think that a group of mostly hobbyists who have legally purchased Switch games are the enemy. The average gamer isn’t going to bother trying to figure out how to configure a Switch emulator on the kind of PC needed to run it to get around buying a console. The average gamer is also not doing all of that and pirating the Switch game/ROM to avoid paying for anything. Some will, but not the majority.

Or, as Denuvo puts it, yes they will and all this hobbyist talk is just an excuse for piracy.

As you know, dumping your bought game for backup purposes is a long-standing argument from pirates that is simply used to justify piracy. The majority of players use emulators with ROMs from pirate sources and are not self-dumped. And if they dump it themselves, they will require a jailbroken console to do that.

Citation needed, obviously. Also, I’d argue that Denuvo is working with game publishers to prevent customers from taking actions with their games that are arguably legal. Which seems pretty shitty and anti-consumer.

I’ll also note that, given the impressive rate and speed of failure by Denuvo in the past, we can probably start a timer to see just how long the company’s anti-emulation DRM lasts before being defeated by cracking groups yet again.

Filed Under: copyright, drm, emulators, piracy, video games
Companies: denuvo, nintendo

Denuvo Games Once Again Broken For Paying Customers Thanks To DRM Mishap

from the whoopsie dept

It’s been a while since we’ve mentioned Denuvo, the once-vaunted anti-piracy video game DRM that subsequently became an industry punchline. Once touted as “uncrackable“, Denuvo went from there to becoming indeed crackable, then crackable shortly after release of games, to then being crackable the same day, to then being cracked in some cases hours after a game’s release. As a result, plenty of publishers have taken to patching Denuvo out of their games, while Denuvo did a mini-pivot to create anti-cheat software for online games. While all that was going on, plenty of paying customers of games protected by Denuvo complained about various issues: authentication issues intermittently preventing the customer from playing the game they bought, performance issues that are linked back to how Denuvo runs and behaves, or Denuvo simply breaking games.

In other words, Denuvo is a case study in real world DRM: no real protection from piracy, but plenty of headaches for paying customers. If that sounds like a recipe for disaster, well, yeah. But, it’s an ongoing disaster, it appears. A whole bunch of PC video games suddenly became unplayable this past week, such as Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy.

The problem seemed to appear after players updated the game, leading some to believe that code may have broken the game. However, as more and more complaints came in, another potential problem was identified. It was so simple as to be almost unthinkable but so devastating that it rendered games completely useless.

Once the same reports of games failing to load came in about several other titles, Twitter lit up about the topic. From there, the internet did its sleuthing thing and the one commonality uncovered was Denuvo DRM software. One Twitter denizen poked around and appears to have figured it out: someone at Denuvo forgot to renew a domain.

“@PlanetZooGame @shadowofwargame your DRM provider has let their domain name lapse, and it’s killed your game startup… along with multiple other games I imagine,” he wrote.

Buckland identified the domain ‘codefusion.technology’ as the culprit and offered a screenshot of its WHOIS records, which clearly shows that the domain expired on September 24, 2021, and had not been renewed. Following the failure to renew, the domain then went into a grace period but when that expired too, it appears to have been removed from DNS records. This meant that the domain would not resolve to an IP address, effectively breaking the system.

Now, that domain has now been renewed, so the problem for those gamers and games is fixed. But that cannot be the end of the story. For starters, TorrentFreak reached out to its regular contacts at Denuvo to get their take on all of this, but got undeliverable bounceback messages. Why that would occur is not currently known, but it’s all just messy. In addition, the lack of communication or accountability from Denuvo or its parent company, Irdeto, is infuriating.

In the meantime, someone has now renewed the codefusion.technology domain, which appears to have solved players’ problems. It’s now set to expire on September 24, 2022, meaning just a single year was added to the bank. Hopefully next year doesn’t bring similar problems.

And by problems we apparently mean paying customers unable to play the games for which they paid, all because someone on Denuvo’s side couldn’t be bothered to keep its own domain up and running.

And that’s the story of DRM. Again, anyone who pirated these games is not having a single problem. Only those that forked over cash to play are impacted. How that isn’t the end of DRM adoption by the gaming companies is completely beyond me.

Filed Under: drm, video games
Companies: denuvo

Denuvo Is Still Claiming It's In The Anti-Piracy Business Even As Games Continue To Strip Out Denuvo Post-Launch

from the useless dept

For a three year period or so, we had a ton of coverage on Denuvo, a DRM platform once touted as undefeatable. That era of invincibility soon crumbled completely, with cracking groups eventually figuring out how to get around the DRM. Cracking times on games went from months, to weeks, to days, to essentially games being cracked at launch. Games started patching Denuvo out of games, which is roughly the equivalent of admitting defeat. In response, Denuvo began claiming that it’s platform was still a success because it could protect some games for some number of hours at the time of launch and the company apparently believed that really should be good enough. The company also announced a pivot to providing anti-cheat software for online games, though publishers began ripping that out of their games at record speed as well.

So, where are we now? Well, the new status quo appears to be this: Denuvo still advertises both its anti-piracy and anti-cheat platforms as successes while games that use the software are still having them peeled out via patches. Notably, Denuvo’s marketing material now reflects the emphasis on the initial release window, where Denvuo claims its platform can protect a game for 14 days after launch, during which publishers earn “59% of their revenue from their new title.”

As with all things Denuvo, this claim should be taken with enormous grains of salt for a variety of reasons. First, that revenue claim seems spurious, given how many games make revenue in how many different ways. Online games make their revenue on an ongoing basis, while single-player only games may make the largest chunk at release. But many single-player games make lots of money on an ongoing basis by embracing their modding community, updating games to keep them relevant to new buyers, releasing DLC, etc. It’s also worth noting that Denuvo has failed spectacularly to protect many, many titles for anything close to 14 days.

But most important to note is that this represents the continued moving of the goalposts by Denuvo. The platform was once touted as “the end of gaming piracy.” Now the focus is on 14 days of protection. Why? Well, the answer is that games long in existence are still patching Denuvo out.

When Monster Hunter: World launched on Steam in 2018 it came with a DRM system to deter pirates by requiring online activation to launch the game. This is often a source of ire for players because of a perception that it causes higher CPU usage and more frequent utilisation of storage devices that could affect gameplay or damages hardware. Denuvo has denied these claims.

Monster Hunter: World’s latest patch has removed around 500MB of files from the game, and the steam page no longer states that MH:W has some form of DRM.

That post, in addition to noting Denuvo’s denial that the DRM has literally any performance impact on a gamer’s machine, also goes on to claim that “it is not uncommon for companies to remove the DRM in a patch once it is no longer necessary.”

That may be true for Denuvo’s anti-piracy platform specifically, but it certainly is not the case for how DRM has been handled generally throughout gaming’s history. In addition, think about what is being said in that claim. A DRM that has at least some utility and no performance impact on gaming machines is stripped by publishers like that of Monster Hunter: World because… why? Just because of public perception on gaming performance? A perception that exists at launch? Why, after a couple of years of the game being sold, would the publisher now even bother to strip out the DRM if it has no actual negative downside?

Well, there are three possible answers. One is that the game publisher knows that, in fact, Denuvo does have an effect on the game’s performance on a buyer’s machine. Another is that the game publisher realizes that the DRM does not in fact have any actual utility. The third option is that the game publisher concludes that both are the case.

Either way, a successful product doesn’t get stripped out of games through patching. Unsuccessful products do that. No matter what Denuvo wants to claim for itself in its marketing material.

Filed Under: denuvo, drm, video games
Companies: denuvo

Denuvo's Anti-Cheat Software Now Getting Ripped From Games At Record Speed Too

from the failing-upward dept

Remember Denuvo? Back in the far simpler times of 2016-2018, which somehow seem light years better than 2020 despite being veritable dumpster fires in and of themselves, we wrote a series of posts about Denuvo’s DRM and how it went from nigh-uncrackable to totally crackable upon games being released with it. Did we take a bit too much pleasure in this precipitous fall? Sure, though our general anti-DRM stance sort of mandated dunking on a company that once touted itself as invincible. Either way, it started to get comical watching publishers release a game with Denuvo, have the game cracked in a matter of days, if not hours, and then release a patch to remove Denuvo entirely from the game.

Due in part to this, Denuvo eventually announced it would be shifting its focus away from producing DRM that didn’t work to making anti-cheat software. So, how is that going? Well, let’s take a look at Doom Eternal, a game which only a week ago added to Denuvo’s anti-cheat software via an update.

Doom Eternal has only had Denuvo anti-cheat software for a week, and already Id Software has agreed to take it out following the backlash from some PC players. The anti-cheat software was added last week in Doom Eternal’s first major post-launch update and was aimed at curbing the use of exploits in its online multiplayer mode, specifically on PC. At the time of the update Id Software also said it would be more aggressive in banning players caught cheating and locking them out of all online content.

There were protests almost immediately. Some players complained that the anti-cheat software was setting off their virus protection programs’ alarm bells. Others took issue with the software requiring kernel-level access to their computers, fearing that it would leave them more vulnerable if the software was later hacked. Although Id Software tried to preemptively assuage players’ fears, saying that Denuvo anti-cheat is only active while the game is on and doesn’t take screenshots or scan file systems, thousands of players still took to review-bombing the game on Steam.

Now, review bombing kind of sucks as a rule, but then so does pushing out software that is as invasive as Denuvo’s anti-cheat software after people had already purchased the game. In fact, given some of the security concerns and holes that Denuvo’s software potentially opens up, one has to wonder seriously about liability here. Either way, you have to work really hard to get a bunch of online gamers for a wildly popular game to not want a tool to stop cheating in that game. And to that extent at least, Denuvo is a success.

For what it’s worth, the folks behind Doom Eternal still want to tackle cheating, but perhaps do so in a way that gives players some more choice.

“As we examine any future of anti-cheat in DOOM Eternal, at a minimum we must consider giving campaign-only players the ability to play without anti-cheat software installed, as well as ensure the overall timing of any anti-cheat integration better aligns with player expectations around clear initiatives—like ranked or competitive play—where demand for anti-cheat is far greater,” Stratton wrote.

Whatever choice is presented, however, it appears that Denuvo will not be an option.

Filed Under: anti-cheat, doom eternal, drm
Companies: denuvo, id software

Denuvo-Protected Just Cause 4 Cracked In A Day, Suffering From Shitty Reviews

from the what-to-blame? dept

Two common topics here at Techdirt are about to converge in what will likely serve as a lovely example of how piracy is often a scapegoat rather than a legitimate business issue. The first topic is Denuvo, the once-unbeatable DRM that has since become a DRM that has been defeated in sub-zero days before game releases. The exception that used to prove the rule that DRM is always defeated has become another example that yet again proves that rule. On the other hand, we’ve also talked at length that the real antidote for piracy is creating a great product and connecting with fans to give them a reason to buy. The flipside of that formula is that no amount of piracy protection is going to result in big sales numbers for a product that sucks.

While that’s typically obvious, we’re all about to watch what happens when a game both has its piracy protection fail completely and is deemed to be a shitty product, with Just Cause 4 having its Denuvo protection defeated a day after launch while the game is suffering from withering reviews.

This long-anticipated AAA action-adventure title is the follow-up to Just Cause 3, which was also protected by Denuvo. That game was released in December 2015 but wasn’t cracked until the end of February 2017.

Compare that with Just Cause 4. The game was released on December 4, 2018 then cracked and leaked online December 5, 2018. Just Cause 3 and Just Cause 4 were both defeated by cracking group CPY, who are clearly getting very familiar with Denuvo’s technology.

Okay, so the game is available on all the regular torrent forums, fully cracked in a day. This again raises the question as to why game publishers even bother with Denuvo any longer. The instances in which Denuvo games are defeated immediately after release are so commonplace at this point that I don’t even bother writing them all up. The assumption at this point should be that Denuvo is useless. Somehow, game publishers don’t appear to be getting the memo.

But Just Cause 4 is also being thoroughly panned by reviews.

While having the game appear online the day after release is bad enough, another problem is raising its head. According to numerous reviewers on Steam, the game is only worthy of a ‘thumbs down’ based on complaints about graphics, gameplay, and numerous other issues.

While these things are often handled via early patches from developers, the negative reviews mean that the average score on Steam is currently just 5/10. That, combined with the availability of a pirated version online, seems like a possible recipe for disaster and something that could raise its head later should sales fail to impress.

And if that in fact happens, we’ll all get a front row seat to watch a game publisher decide exactly how to respond to all of this. On the one hand, the focus could be on the quality of the product, with reasonable communications sent out acknowledging customer concerns and promising to address them with quality patching and updating. On the other hand, the company could simply point to the pirated versions available online and scapegoat piracy as the reason for all that ails the sales numbers.

Given that this is Square we’re talking about, it seems practically inevitable that what we’ll see is the latter. But when you do see that, keep in mind that customers didn’t like this game and reviewed it poorly. And recognize it for what it is: blame-shifting.

Filed Under: cracked, denuvo, drm, just cause 4
Companies: denuvo, irdeto, square enix

Hitman 2's Denuvo Protection Busted 3 Days Before The Game's Launch

from the you-were-saying? dept

So, we were just talking about how Denuvo’s new ownership, Irdeto, was busily making the case via the example of some unnamed AAA sports game that even when Denuvo DRM is cracked in a few days it’s still worth it to protect a game’s initial release window. The comments from Irdeto got so ridiculous that it claimed that even if Denuvo kept titles safe for a few hours, that was still worth it. As specious as this claim might be, it’s also formulated to be hard to argue with. After all, with this low of a bar, all Irdeto’s Denuvo has to do is barely work for any measurable amount of time before the release of game in order for Irdeto to claim victory. So how can it possibly fail?

Well, how about if a game’s Denuvo protection is defeated before the game gets released?

This weekend, the technology suffered yet another disappointing blow. The long-awaiting stealth game Hitman 2 – which comes ‘protected’ by the latest variant of Denuvo (v5.3) – leaked online. Aside from having its protection circumvented, this happened three days before the title’s official launch on November 13. It appears that a relatively new cracking group called FCKDRM (more on them in a moment) obtained a version of Hitman 2 that was only available to those who pre-ordered the game. There are some reports of the crack failing at times on some machines but nevertheless, this leak is important on a number of fronts.

Firstly, the game leaked online three days early, rendering the protection when the game finally comes out much less useful. Secondly, presuming the original copy of the game was obtained on Friday when the pre-order copy was delivered, it took just a single day for the group to crack Denuvo’s latest protection. Considering an announcement made by Denuvo just last week, this is a pretty embarrassing turn of events.

That is putting it mildly. This is the destruction of a nonsense argument Irdeto made for itself to try to pretend that Denuvo was worth any amount of investment by game publishers. For the game to be cracked before official release is nearly the ultimate punchline in all the jokes that have been made at Denuvo’s expense since the once-vaunted DRM became just another DRM failure. For it to happen to a AAA game, with the name of that game very much in the public eye, just days after it cited an anonymous AAA game as the reason Denuvo was necessary, almost seems like this was a setup job.

But it wasn’t. Instead, this is just DRM being DRM, which is to say fallible. And that should be causing other publishers that have used this exact iteration of Denuvo, and have games in early release, to wonder why they bothered.

Given that Denuvo 5.3 was cracked so quickly (some crashing issues aside) it raises questions about other upcoming titles set to use similar technology. They include Battlefield V from EA/DICE, which has its official full release on November 20 but is already available to early access players.

I’ll give Denuvo this much: this is the longest death spiral I’ve ever seen.

Filed Under: drm, hitman, video games
Companies: denuvo, irdeto

Denuvo: Every Download Is A Lost Sale For This Anonymous AAA Title We're Referencing, So Buy Moar Dunuvo!

from the or-don't dept

The saga of antipiracy DRM company Denuvo is a long and tortured one, but the short version of it is that Denuvo was once a DRM thought to be unbeatable but which has since devolved into a DRM that cracking groups often beat on timelines measured in days if not hours. Denuvo pivoted at that point, moving on from boasting at the longevity of its protection to remarking that even this brief protection offered in the release windows of games made it worthwhile. Around the same time, security company Irdeto bought Denuvo and rolled its services into its offering.

And Irdeto apparently wants to keep pushing the line about early release windows, but has managed to do so by simply citing some unnamed AAA sports game that it claims lost millions by being downloaded instead of using Denuvo to protect it for an unspecified amount of time.

In a statement issued by Denuvo owner Irdeto (the latter acquired the former earlier this year), the company states that it tracked pirate downloads of an unnamed ‘AAA’ (big budget, major studio) title during the first few days after its release. Without Denuvo protection it was quickly cracked and made available on P2P networks and from there, pirates did their thing.

“Irdeto tracked the downloads of a major sports title on P2P networks after the title, which did not include anti-tamper protection, was cracked on the same day of its release,” the company says. “During the first two weeks, Irdeto detected 355,664 torrent downloads of the illegal copy of the title. Given the retail price of the game, this puts the total potential loss of revenue from P2P downloads at $21,336,283.”

There are, of course, many issues with this statement. First, citing an unnamed title is a bit odd, since the publisher of that title is quite obviously not a customer of Irdeto’s. Or, at the very least, isn’t a customer for that particular game. Why the need for anonymity, in that case? It would seem only to Irdeto’s benefit to name the title that chose not to be protected by Denuvo. And, if this is all publicly available information, keeping that name secret doesn’t make a great deal of sense.

From there, we can move on to Irdeto choosing to keep the math simple by suggesting that every download is a lost sale, in order to come up with its $21 million dollars lost figure. This line of thinking has been debunked so many times that it’s not truly worth discussing, other than to say that a DRM company citing it as a valid number should tell you everything you need to know about the wider “report.”

And, finally, Irdeto is citing a two week release window important for sales of games as though Denuvo hadn’t been defeated on timelines much, much shorter than that. This isn’t to say that it’s always defeated within two weeks, but that often ends up being the case particularly for AAA titles.

It’s worth noting that while Denuvo games are often cracked very quickly, it’s definitely not uncommon for protection to stand up to the first two weeks of attacks. Denuvo can usually hold off crackers for the first four days, so these figures are obvious marketing tools for a technology that has been somewhat diminished after various cracking groups began taking its challenge personally.

But just in case Denuvo only manages a single day of protection, owner Irdeto suggests that the effort is worth it – even dropping down to the importance of standing firm for an hour.

An hour. An hour. When a DRM company has reached the point of touting that it can protect a game for an entire hour, we’ve jumped the shark. We don’t have much information about the cost of using Denuvo for publishers, since everything I’ve read suggests publishers have to sign restrictive NDAs that prohibit revealing that information, but I’m struggling to understand how making pirates wait an hour for a cracked game can be worth whatever those costs are.

Filed Under: copyright, drm, hype, piracy, video games
Companies: denuvo, irdeto

Denuvo Announces Plan To Fail To Combat Online Game Cheaters After Failing To Stop Piracy With Its DRM

from the fail-train dept

For years now, we have discussed Denuvo’s reputation sliding from being once thought of as the potential ender of video game piracy to just another DRM corpse fit for the funeral pyre. Despite this precipitous fall, we also discussed a few months back that the company had been bought by another security company, Irdeto. While the announcement of the deal was generally bizarre, with Irdeto referring to Denuvo as the “world leader” in gaming security, we mentioned at the time that Irdeto is mostly invested in anti-cheating platforms for online gaming. It seemed likely that Irdeto thought that Denuvo’s tech might somehow fit into that chief offering.

And now, with an announcement from Irdeto, it indeed seems that Denuvo is pivoting to combating online cheating.

Today, Iredeto announced that they’re joining the Esports Integrity Coalition (ESIC). And perhaps more importantly, Denuvo will soon launch its own anti-cheat technology to help solve this problem.

“Denuvo’s Anti-Cheat technology, which is soon to be launched as a full end-to-end solution, will prevent hackers in multiplayer games from manipulating and distorting data and code to gain an advantage over other gamers or bypass in-game micro-transactions,” the company says.

On the one hand, look, cheaters in online games suck out loud. These cheaters break the online gaming experience for all the non-cheaters out there. Perhaps more importantly, anti-cheating software is going to become a very real market ripe to be exploited, given the explosive growth in competitive online eSports and online gaming in general. If any company or group of companies could manage to end this infestation for gamers, they’d deserve a hero’s parade.

On the other hand: this is Denuvo. Few companies have rivaled Denuvo’s boisterous claims and posture coupled with the failure of its product. It would be very easy to change out the references to anti-cheating software in the Irdeto quote above and replace them with references to Denuvo’s DRM and map that onto how Denuvo talked about its DRM product but a few years ago. Same promises, different product. I can only assume that anyone partnering with Irdeto for Denuvo anti-cheating software are basing that decision more on the reputation of Irdeto than Denuvo.

I have no idea if Denuvo will be successful in stamping out online gaming cheating. But, given the company’s history of failure, I know where I’d place my chips if put to a bet.

Filed Under: cheating, drm, piracy, video games
Companies: denuvo, irdeto

Denuvo Martyrs Voksi Using Bulgarian Police In What Will Surely Be The End Of Denuvo's Troubles

from the just-one-guy dept

In our ongoing coverage of Denuvo, the DRM once thought unbeatable that since has been very much beaten in record timelines, one internet handle wove a common weave through most of those stories: Voksi. Voksi, a singular human being, had done much of the work that had brought Denuvo to its knees. In fact, we recently wrote a post about how illuminating it should be when corporate DRM makers with the kind of financial backing of Denuvo could be brought down essentially by one guy with a grudge. The lesson there was if that was the state of things, it was a clear sign that Denuvo’s entire business was on shaky, unsustainable grounds.

Denuvo appears to have taken the opposite lesson instead, believing apparently that this one grudge-haver was something of a single point of failure in the anti-Denuvo realm. To that end, Denuvo has recently, and quite gleefully, announced that it worked with Bulgarian police forces to arrest Voksi and seize his equipment.

Denuvo said that Voksi’s arrest came about through the dual efforts of Denuvo parent company Irdeto and the Bulgarian Cybercrime Unit. “The swift action of the Bulgarian police on this matter shows the power of collaboration between law enforcement and technology providers and that piracy is a serious offence that will be acted upon,” said Irdeto VP of cybersecurity services Mark Mulready.

Denuvo’s statement also included a quote from the Bulgarian Cybercrime Unit, which said: “We can confirm that a 21-year-old man was arrested on Tuesday on suspicion of offenses related to cybercrime and that computing equipment was confiscated. Our investigations are ongoing.”

Voksi himself announced his arrest on Reddit.

In a post today on CrackWatch, a subreddit dedicated to removing DRM and other copy protection software from games, Voksi explained the sudden outage of the website of his hacker group, REVOLT. Yesterday, he got arrested, and the police raided his house.

“It finally happened,” Voksi wrote. “I can’t say it wasn’t expected. Denuvo filed a case against me to the Bulgarian authorities. Police came yesterday and took the server PC and my personal PC. I had to go to the police afterwards and explain myself.”

It seems likely that the folks in Denuvos executive offices are popping champaigne bottles. They shouldn’t be. Sure, the company certainly can go after this one lone hacker with a grudge against its software. The real question is whether this will solve Denuvo’s problems. It won’t. Not by a long shot.

The reason for that is first and foremost that Voksi has been quite good at communicating with the public as to his motivations, and their are something akin to internet populism.

Voksi declined to reply when reached for comment by Kotaku, but on Reddit he lamented that this Denuvo-cracking days are almost certainly behind him. “Sadly, I won’t be able to do what I did anymore,” he said. “I did what I did for you guys and of course because bloated software in our games shouldn’t be allowed at all. Maybe someone else can continue my fight.”

If that reads like the statement of a martyr, it’s because that is exactly what Denuvo has created in Voksi. Does anyone really doubt that others will take up his efforts? And in more numbers than when it was just one lone guy with a grudge? Who out there wants to predict that, on the long timeline, the forthcoming headlines will now be all about how Denuvo iterations are secure and impenetrable once more?

In a world where one guy caused all this chaos that led to his arrest, it should be obvious that any such prediction would be laughable. So what has Denuvo achieved in any of this? Anything at all?

Filed Under: arrest, bulgaria, denuvo, drm, video games, voksi
Companies: denuvo

VMProtect Accuses Denuvo Of Using Unlicensed Software In Its Antipiracy DRM

from the irony-thy-name-is-denuvo dept

To date, the most remarkable aspect of the Denuvo story was the very brief stint it had as a successful DRM. Brief is the operative word, of course, as the past six months or so have seen Denuvo’s vaunted status devolve into one more typical of DRM stories, with defeats for the security software coming at rates measured in days and weeks of a game’s release.

But now things have taken a turn towards the ironic. A security software firm called VMProtect, which makes software to protect against reverse engineering and developing cracks of applications, is accusing Denuvo of having used its software without properly licensing it. This is the kind of thing that folks who support DRM tend to call piracy. And, thus, Denuvo may have “pirated” another company’s software to make its anti-piracy DRM.

According to a post on Russian forum RSDN, Denuvo is accused of engaging in a little piracy of its own. The information comes from a user called drVan?, who is a developer at VMProtect Software, a company whose tools protect against reverse engineering and cracking.

“I want to tell you a story about one very clever and greedy Austrian company called Denuvo Software Solutions GmbH,” drVano begins. “A while ago, this company released a protection system of the same name but the most remarkable thing is that they absolutely illegally used our VMProtect software in doing so.”

drVano goes on to detail the story to a degree that seems legitimate. Denuvo had met with VMProtect about using the latter’s software, but had wanted to do so under the common and cheap $500 license offered publicly as a “personal license.” Rolling that software into a distributed DRM obviously fell outside of that sort of personal use license, leading VMProtect to ask for much more in the way of money if Denuvo wanted to move forward. Denvuo declined, but then apparently went ahead an bought a personal license anyway and began rolling out the software in Denuvo DRM. VMProtect revoked the license due to Denuvo’s breach of the license conditions, but Denuvo kept up its distribution anyway.

Which lead VMProtect to go on offense.

VMProtect then took what appears to be a rather unorthodox measure against Denuvo. After cooperation with Sophos, the anti-virus vendor agreed to flag up the offending versions of Denuvo as potential malware. VMProtect says it has also been speaking with Valve about not featuring the work of “scammers” on its platform.

“Through our long-standing partners from Intellect-C, we are starting to prepare an official claim against Denuvo Software Solutions GmbH with the prospect of going to court. This might be a very good lesson for ‘greedy’ developers who do not care about the intellectual property rights of their colleagues in the same trade,” drVano concludes.

The irony here is delicious. The precipitous fall of DRM, once claimed to be the end of software piracy entirely, culminates in what may be piracy on the part of that same company. All while the effectiveness of that DRM has dropped to essentially zero.

If the gaming industry were ever going to learn that DRM is a failed concept, Denuvo ought to be the teacher of that lesson.

Filed Under: denuvo, drm, piracy
Companies: denuvo, grey box, vmprotect