RIP Denuvo: Resident Evil 7 Cracked In Five Days
from the on-to-the-next-one dept
The Denuvo saga has been impressive on a couple of levels. The DRM software's public cycle was notable first in that game-cracking groups, notorious for their confidence in their own abilities, initially sounded the alarm over Denuvo's status as an anti-piracy unicorn that would never be broken and would lead to the end of software piracy. That happened in January of 2016. By August, Denuvo was being broken by other cracking groups. By the time winter rolled around, game developers, including developers of AAA titles, were pushing out quiet updates to games to remove Denuvo from their software entirely. Denuvo's makers, meanwhile, spun this as a success story, suggesting that developers were chiefly using Denuvo to protect games during the initial release cycle and then removing it afterwards.
But that thin thread of relevancy appears to have snapped, relegating Denuvo to the same scrap pile as every other form of DRM ever tried, now that a cracking group has successfully cracked a Denuvo-protected game in five days' time.
Yesterday, just five days after its January 24th retail date, Resident Evil 7: Biohazard was cracked by CPY. The self-proclaimed Italian group placed RE7 on a so-called top site, with the ‘piracy pyramid‘ doing the rest of the work by cascading it to torrent sites in a matter of minutes. Currently, tens of thousands of pirates are grabbing the 23GB download.
So, that protected release window has shrunk to just under a week. Whatever the cost to implement Denuvo in a game, those five days can't make it worth the price of admission.
Now, some will point out, as does the TorrentFreak post, that there are still un-cracked Denuvo-protected games on the market. And that's absolutely true. But also true is that the trend for the efficacy of Denuvo DRM only travels in one direction and not a good one for those looking to the software as a way to end the scourge of video game piracy. When we begin measuring the effectiveness of DRM in days, or even when we do so in weeks, it's clear the only logical action for developers that used it is to rage-quit the DRM entirely and move on.
Particularly when that same DRM, so ineffective at stopping piracy, proves to be impressively effective at pissing off real customers.
Some fans have complained that Denuvo is unwieldy and annoying. It forces games to be dependent on third-party activation servers and makes certain types of modding impossible. Publishers use the program regardless, in hopes of boosting game sales by rendering piracy more difficult.
And now that it's no longer serving that purpose, it's time it was dropped from use. The good news for those of us who want to see a thriving games market is that Resident Evil 7, because the reviews have been quite positive, is selling quite well. Even with it having been cracked in five days' time. Because piracy isn't a barrier to success, nevermind one worth annoying legitimate customers over.
Filed Under: denuvo, drm, resident evil 7
