Game Industry Asks U.S. to Flag Denuvo Cracker ‘voices38’ as Notorious Piracy Threat
https://torrentfreak.com/game-industry-asks-u-s-to-flag-denuvo-cracker-voices38-as-notorious-piracy-threat/1.0k
u/ClacksInTheSky 2d ago
Their business model has been, for years, that they're uncrackable.
Then it was it delayed and slowed cracking until after the majority of sales were made.
Now they're getting cracked before release they're crying to the government to protect their business model.
... Instead of finding a way to thwart their opponents
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u/Un13roken 2d ago
There's nothing to thwart. If cyberpunk has proven anything. It's that even though screwed the pooch with the launch, and released their game without DRM. They still managed to rack up insane sales numbers and converted it into a massive success.
DRM was optional. And yet they still succeeded. The entire denuvo thing is mostly for the suits to feel good about their lack of understanding of the gaming industry.
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u/ITCrandomperson 2d ago
The problem with Denuvo (well, always online or kernel level DRM in general really) is that it straight up gives the pirates a better product.
Why should Joe Shmoe purchase Persona 3 Reload, to give an example, legitimately when the legitimate product fucks up performance and requires an internet connection while the pirate lets you play offline with less problems?
Denuvo is the embodiment of the "service problem" from that Gabe Newell quote people like to throw around.
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u/SartenSinAceite 2d ago
I'm always reminded of the game Rise & Fall and how it was uncrackable for over a decade, which made me worry it would become lost media
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u/BellacosePlayer 3h ago
Denuvo is the embodiment of the "service problem" from that Gabe Newell quote people like to throw around.
Normally I hate how overused that quote is because its been bastardized to mean "piracy is always the company's fault", but it absolutely is in this case.
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u/TehOwn 2d ago
It proves they're desperate. They can't fix it. And it'll only get harder for them, as people are now empowered by AI tools.
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u/djseifer 2d ago
I'm guessing the people with the knowledge and technical skill to update Denuvo to counter whatever voices38 is doing were let go long ago and whatever cheap replacement they replaced them with aren't up to snuff.
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u/MaybeNext-Monday 2d ago
Bingo. They've seen the decompilation tech. They know their business model is fucked.
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u/Chewbacca_The_Wookie 2d ago
We should obviously go back to booklets and secret decoders and code words built into the dialogue where if you don't get the correct codeword it bricks your game like the good old days. /s
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u/435rouhnj234_209u 2d ago
Right. Like whether you're for or against piracy, what's the point of going after Denuvo crackers specifically? Might as well just cut the middleman out and put more money and energy into catching the people cracking games straight up.
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u/WriterV 2d ago edited 2d ago
Typed all this up for another commenter that had since deleted it. But if anyone wants to know who the "Game Industry" in the title is referring to:
The Entertainment Software Association, which is a trade association for the gaming industry and has a suspiciously similar logo to the European Space Agency.
Most of the big names in the gaming industry are a part of it [according to Wikipedia anyway]
Was one of those things the industry came up with after the general controversies of violence in video games led to gamedev companies being terrified of coming under government regulation. So they began to try and regulate themselves and advocate [lobby] the government for better legislature surrounding games.
These are the same people that used to organise E3, but since gave up on that. They were also the ones that formed the ESRB. One of their focuses is combating copyright infringement and threats to IP holders, and it seems this is how they act on that.
EDIT: Adding a very important note that the ESA is not some solitary powerful group. They are the voice of the AAA gaming industry, and exist almost entirely because of them. AAA publishers consist of their biggest members, and even assist in their fundraising efforts.
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u/TehOwn 2d ago edited 2d ago
They've also been actively opposing video game preservation and used outright lies and deceit to derail the Stop Killing Games movement and poison the well between SKG and policymakers.
ESA Vice President Jennifer Gibbons outright said that "private Minecraft servers are illegal".
Here's the clip. She chimes in at the end. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgmtdeBIZ2s
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u/Pman1324 2d ago edited 2d ago
And then the EU goes and drops a nuclear bomb that is the proposed Keep Kids Safe act or something. (WHICH BY THE WAY IS NOT TO PROTECT KIDS BUT TO INCORPORATE MORE SURVEILLANCE)
It would effectively make any and all internet-facing connection, whether it be to another user or even just the game itself connecting to update services for example illegal UNLESS there was very expensive ID verification processes.
So not only does it nuke privately hosted P2P connections, it nukes any developer that cannot afford to add the ID verification process to their game.
AAAAAND ITS RETROACTIVE! So anything before and after its implementation is illegal effective immediately.
Not to mention, because the EU is a significant market, it eould most likely result in the entire thing becoming a GLOBAL LEGISLATION BY PROXY
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u/WriterV 2d ago
Thank you, yeah it's important to note that the ESA acts as the voice for [mostly] the AAA side of the gaming industry. So this is the opinion of these companies.
And yeah, it's dumb. But y'know, money.
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u/TehOwn 2d ago
I highly doubt any actual AAA developers have anything to do with the ESA, at least as it is today. It's all the suits and people who've never actually made a game in their life.
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u/WriterV 2d ago
The ESA is literally primarily funded by its membership dues, of which the major AAA publishers are key members. https://www.theesa.com/our-members/ Check the list of companies here, and the "Member benefits" which includes things like:
- Shape policy priorities: Influence policies and regulations for our industry at all levels of government.
- Protect your company’s creative works and innovations: Receive IP protection services.
They also do their annual fundraising event Nite to Unite: https://www.theesa.com/foundation/nite-to-unite/ Check the event sponsors for this as well.
The AAA side of the industry is more than actively involved with the ESA. Without their support, the ESA would not exist [though the government would step in as soon as it notices and will start regulating on their own. Whether that is good or bad depends on the administration and their policies.]
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u/TehOwn 2d ago
Publishers are NOT developers. I'm talking about actual people. Not mindless brands.
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u/WriterV 2d ago
That's... that's what I'm talking about too. I've always been supportive of the devs from all gaming companies.
The problem is that ultimately it's up to the senior staff and the publishing departments on what actually happens with these devs. Their decisions impact the industry as a whole, which is what this entire conversation is about. And that's why I'm mentioning that the ESA is very much a voice of these companies.
I wish it was the devs who were the voices of these companies on a political scale, but this isn't the case right now.
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u/SneakyBadAss 2d ago
They are also the ones peddling the nonsense "studies" (paid surveys) against gaming popularity between sexes and ages that shows up from time to time.
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u/Bu11etToothBdon 2d ago
It's hard to feel sympathy for an industry that will tell you you don't actually own what you bought from them.
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u/Xireka- 2d ago
How about they stop implementing denuvo on everything, much easier solution for everyone
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u/Scrubs137 2d ago
The only way to stop companies using this Denuvo drek is to support drm free stores like GOG
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u/Akkalevil 2d ago
I only bought DD2 when they ditched Denuvo.
In fact I never buy a game with Denuvo or other intrusive DRM.I'm doing my part !
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u/SalamanderSu 2d ago
Fight poverty Fight injustice Fight racism Fight inequality
Nah lets fight piracy.
The world is completely off base.
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u/TehOwn 2d ago
They can't even agree to fight genocide.
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u/Customer_Number_Plz 2d ago
What about just a little bit of genocide? That's ok isn't it? /S
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u/ImpulsE69 2d ago
That's just dumb. CEO's need yachts (plural)
And I get the supporting the devs part. But let's not pretend that the big game companies give 2 shits about their devs.
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u/Wizdad-1000 2d ago
Well that makes sense, yacht’s depreciate faster than anything else they buy. Gotta have multiples. 🤪
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u/xGHOSTRAGEx 2d ago
They specifically focus to fight all the people that fight those things you mentioned
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u/BFBeast666 2d ago
Meanwhile, Take-2 is selling $400 "collector's editions" for GTA VI without including the game. Who's the bigger criminal here?
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u/ZaphodBeeblebrox4011 2d ago
I immediately googled this because I thought you must be exaggerating.
You were not.
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u/I_Heart_Sleeping_ 2d ago edited 2d ago
Nah I’m good. If they want this stuff worked out they should pull themselves up by their bootstraps and do it themself instead of asking for free work from consumers. The ESA and all the companies within it can do the work themselves if they want.
Why the fuck would anyone want to help a corporation make life harder for themselves.
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u/SheepyTheSheepy 1d ago
Dang, but AI companies can scrape the shit out of the internet and use their "generated content" for profit but this guy is the bad guy.
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u/Sudden_Cartoonist539 2d ago
It is crazy how NA is becoming more and more like a crony captalism. Why companies get to have bailouts but individuals can get fucked when they owe the bank 1000 dollars or one late payment gets you on that high interest rate for almost 5+ years.
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u/Wizecracker117 2d ago
It's been this way since the railroads were put down.
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u/amaROenuZ 2d ago
Its been this way since the inception of the colonies. Business ventures chartered by the crown to its favorites.
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u/Sudden_Cartoonist539 2d ago
That is not true, it changed between 1900s-1970s then now it is turning back to before 1900s.
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u/HelSpites 2d ago edited 2d ago
There's no such thing as "crony capitalism". This is just the natural end point of capitalism. As soon as you give individuals the ability to control the means of production, they'll start using it to concentrate wealth into fewer and fewer hands, and they'll use that wealth to rewrite whatever rules they need to make sure that the wealth keeps going to them at the expense of the rest of the world. That's how the system always worked and always will work.
In this case, this company can't compete. They don't know how to make a better product so they'll use their wealth to ensure that the person competing with them is thrown in jail, because why the fuck wouldn't they? They have the money, they have the resources. The legal system has been built to give them exactly what they want 100% of the time because that's just how capitalism naturally shapes the legal system.
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u/Wayofchinchilla 2d ago
Exactly the issue here is it these companies have gotten so big that they no longer have to compete against one another for us so what do they do? They compete against us there is an answer to this but in the current political climate of the United States and the people in charge they absolutely wouldn't use it it's called antitrust. You smash a company into pieces in order for it to try to grow as large though so it was it now has to compete against pieces of itself so naturally we're the ones that benefit as the consumer should.
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u/KoopaTheQuicc 1d ago
Problem is capitalism laughs in the face of antitrust. Ask Larry Ellison.
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u/Wayofchinchilla 1d ago
It's a shame he never met Teddy Roosevelt fun fact Teddy Roosevelt once beat up a police chief who was trying to bribe him. I don't think he would give a fuck about some billionaire
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u/KoopaTheQuicc 1d ago
Just because there were good times doesn't mean the problematic system won't always bring you here in the end.
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u/Wayofchinchilla 1d ago
No it shows that there's a remedy to this a remedy we refuse to use when Dems get in in 28 they need to absolutely bring down the antitrust hammer
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u/KoopaTheQuicc 1d ago
We aren't refusing. The wealthy elite that bought our politicians and hired lobbyists to write our laws for us are. Money = power under capitalism and capitalists will always use their wealth and power to aquire more. Look around you.
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u/Sudden_Cartoonist539 2d ago
That is not true. Many economists argue that a government should actually work to stop turning to a crony captalism. But today we see the opposite which is crony captalism ofcourse sped up by things like Citizens united. The fathers of Captalism would argue we are actually oligarchy really not Captalism. Pure Capatalism is Free market with zero favortism and actually working on dismantling such insitutions to ensure the market stays free.
It is cheaper for a company to pay 5 millions to lobby for a tax subsidy than 500 million to actually invent a better product. That is what we see here, a company refuses to spend money to create a better product so they lobby the government because its cheaper. THIS IS NOT CAPTALISM, only karl marx communists argue that usually, because they oppose privatization overall and see it as a threat.
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u/HelSpites 2d ago
This is like trying to argue that malignant cancer should just stop being malignant, the body just has to regulate it better.
My dude, favoritism is naturally built into the system! The more money and capital an owner or a corporation has, the more influence they can have and these problems are exacerbated in a purely capitalistic system. The an-cap dream of a pure free market is an abject nightmare.
While we're at it, Karl Marx is one of the most vindicated men in history. Damn near everything he warned would happen has. The private ownership of the means of production inevitably leads to this and will always lead to this. I've said it before and I'll say it again, there's no such thing as "crony capitalism", that's cope. There is only capitalism.
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u/ProbeerNB 2d ago
Right?! Ofcourse the system called capitalism doesn't favor (people with) capital. /s
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u/AdequatlyAdequate 2d ago
he also (roughly) talked about capitalist doing this and coming up with increaingly compley and absurd „theories“ for how capitalism is sustainable til the end of history
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u/Sudden_Cartoonist539 1d ago
Why have chemo you will die anyway...
Why have law people will always commit illegal crimes...It is not about eliminating something, it is about damage-control.
Yes, we can't stop favoritism, but we can control how far it can go. Favoritism reaching the point that Governments bend the law and regulations because "they are too big to fail", that is a problem, a huge problem, I think even a societal threat.
Karl Marx is maybe right about many things, but he was an extremist, just like the capitalist extremist. I don't know why people only argue theological extremism and not ideological extremism anymore.
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u/Acecn 2d ago
If people like you stopped lobbying to give bureaucrats yet more and more levers to influence the economy and pick winners and losers, there wouldn't be any point for firms to influence the government. You watch corrupt bureaucrats use the political system to favor the powerful, and your solution is to give more power to the bureaucrats. It would be laughable if I didn't have to share a country with you.
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u/KoopaTheQuicc 1d ago
How do you think the levers and those people pulling them were implemented and selected for power in the first place?
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u/muricanviking 2d ago
Idk, capitalism seems like it’s good on paper but every country that tries it devolves into this, just not sure it’s compatible with human nature
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u/Kirzoneli 2d ago
Doesn't work long term unless you hit some sort of reset, which just sets it up for the next capitalist winners.
Take out survival needs from the market, leave all that entertainment and junk food on your own dime.
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u/loppsided 2d ago
You had me until you said they can’t compete.
How exactly do game developers compete with “free”?
Downvote if you want, but I’m looking for honest answers that are both a solution and keep developers pushing the envelope of making new, amazing experiences.
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u/xantec15 2d ago
Remember when Napster put the music industry out of business? Or when torrents killed the movie industry? Those were dark days. Oh, wait, that never happened.
Most people who are able are willing to spend money on what they find value in, even if a free option is available.
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u/HelSpites 2d ago edited 2d ago
Considering denuvo's business model I thought that'd be obvious? Denuvo isn't selling games so what it means for them to compete is not the same as what it means for the developers or publishers. They "compete" against crackers by improving their system's security while reducing the performance impact so that the people pirating the game aren't getting an objectively better experience.
It's really simple, if you want to compete you make your shit better, but thanks to capitalism being what it is, people with enough money have another much easier venue, they can just have the people they're competing with be thrown in jail.
As for the developers, the solution to piracy is really simple, just make a good game that people want to play, advertise it so that people know it exists and that's it. If you want to go the extra mile, do what the do what the darkwood developers did; they put out their own torrent for the game stating that they understand that not everyone can afford or wants to pay for their game, so they'd rather people have access to a clean, virus free torrent of it and they hope that if people like the game they'll eventually go back and pay for it. That shit earned them a ton of good will and got them sales that they otherwise wouldn't have gotten since, as has been shown time and again, piracy doesn't actually decrease game sales. People who pirate your games were unlikely to buy it for one reason or another in the first place.
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u/Rugged_as_fuck 2d ago
Denuvo is a shit product, and if the product was not so shit there may not be as much of an effort to break it and remove it from the software it is supposed to protect. Or, they could make it even more secure, making cracking it even harder than it already is, which would also (at least from Denuvo's point of view) make it a better product.
Or they can do none of those things and try to eliminate the threat.
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u/OkChocolate3501 2d ago
Isn't denuvo the best anti cracking software that exists right now?
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u/Rugged_as_fuck 2d ago
It is, the performance trade off is the actual problem with it.
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u/OkChocolate3501 2d ago
I suspect that there's no way around that performance hit. If you wanna support the studios buy the game and torrent the cracked copy if you want less performance hit(if it's an offline title).
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u/Rugged_as_fuck 2d ago
I can't be assed bothering with cracks and torrents, if I want to play a game I buy it. I get why people do it, but my sailing days are behind me.
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u/AbhishekThulasi 2d ago
Denuvo is a genius engineering marvel that just has a performance tradeoff. The way it works under the hood is just so clever. Waiting for the next gen anti cracker now that AI has gotten good.
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u/XxD3bsh 2d ago
Taking down one cracker won't change much. Someone else steps in, and meanwhile paying players are the ones stuck with the DRM
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u/balllzak 2d ago
There is literally only one cracker doing new denuvo releases. Stopping them would probably do something.
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u/Forymanarysanar 2d ago
There's still hypervisor though
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u/MrMichaelElectric 2d ago
Which people who are actually smart about how they use their PC won't touch. The only people I have seen willing to use the hypervisor crack are either technologically dumb or weirdly desperate.
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u/Forymanarysanar 2d ago
You believe that you are smart and patient but in reality you just have not even a slightest idea about topic you're trying to talk about and about how operating systems and PCs work in general at all.
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u/Leidrin 2d ago
It is crazy to me that in 2026 companies are still spending millions (sometimes tens or hundreds of millions on a game) only to put on their dunce cap and pay denuvo to enshittify their game even though it WILL be cracked immediately.
I have friends who pirate specifically to duck denuvo. It's cancer.
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u/Derpykins666 2d ago
They really have to get over the fact that in most cases, people pirating stuff is not a 'lost sale' and equate that as lost money. The reality is that person couldn't afford the game or was never going to buy it anyway, so these protections do more harm for the people who actually put up their money. When the pirated version of a game runs better then the official product we have problems.
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u/Linmizhang 2d ago
Or in some cases, people who have money but will choose to pirate instead of buy because the DRM has 10% lower performance.
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u/Squirrelking666 2d ago edited 2d ago
It also discounts the obsessive datahoarders/ "archivists" that are never going to actually do anything with the file other than keep it on a hard drive until they either get bored or an intervention.
(edited a typo)
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u/UnlikelyPerogi 2d ago
You put archivists in quotes but this is actually a hugely important thing. Theres thousands of hours of tv shows that would be lost for all time if some old lady didint obsessively tape everything on tv in her little apartment in the 80s. Thats a real story. I think a lot of elvira episodes only exist because of bootleg vhs tapes.
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u/Squirrelking666 1d ago
I'm not talking about those people though, I'm talking about the ones that use it as an excuse.
I explained it in another comment but the tree got deleted, it's the tiresome folk you find on r/piracy that conveniently only "archive" stuff that they want to watch/read/play.
Of course there are another two types:
The "number go brrr" datahoarders that only use it as a dick measuring exercise and would drop it as soon as something more interesting comes along. Still useful as long as sharing but not reliable.
The dedicated archivists who store stuff properly. Unfortunately, that archive only has as much life as the person running it unless they have specific instructions that it gets passed to another archivist. Long-term it's still not a good bet. No surviving relatives are interested in keeping a rack of drives even as cold storage. You only have to read the many, many "instructions in case of death" topics in r/homelab to see the majority are under no illusions of their family doing anything other than plugging the ISP router back in and turning it all off.
That's why I said to just donate to the Internet Archive if you want proper long-term preservation. Of course we shouldn't have all our eggs in one basket but you need proper organisation to guarantee any sort of long term viability that an individual just cannot offer.
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u/Xhosant 13h ago
Your logic doesn't track. If they intend to keep the data and do nothing with it, as you said initially, then they can't be using the data-keeping as an excuse to pirate software for use. The two are mutually exclusive.
And a lot of lost media become lost in a timespan shorter than a personal collection's lifespan. As soon as the medium gets rare, it is likely to be seeked out by someone more organized, like the Internet Archive (which of course kicks ass and you should donate to), at which point the amateur archivist that decided to provide storage at a time when it wasn't reasonable for the internet archive to do it becomes a useful part of the ecosystem.
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u/Derpykins666 2d ago
Yeah, that's absolutely true too. Some people just like to have things and they aren't really thinking about the legality of it or were never doing anything nefarious, they just like to collect things or preserve them.
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u/psychoPiper 2d ago
What kind of backwards world have we ended up in where preservation is illegal. I hate this
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u/liquidpoopcorn 1d ago
I’m seeing it similar to making my own movie backups. But largely lean towards piracy (and tools used for such) cause at times in nice to have a drm free version of these games, especially for backups.
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u/TheRealPitabred 2d ago
Or even they bought the game but the DRM makes it unplayable. I've been in that situation.
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u/IQueliciuous 2d ago
This.
I prefer paying for games but if your game has one of the following:
-Always online DRM or Periodic check ins.
-Third party launcher
-Third party account requirement
-invasive anticheat
Then your game deserves to get pirated and for you to go bankrupt.
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u/LBPPlayer7 1d ago
imo 3rd party account requirements for games with online cross-play are fine to ensure conflicts don't occur
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u/RealSamF18 1d ago
I said it before and I’ll say it again: the only people negatively impacted by DRMs are the people who legally purchase a game / movie / song.
Everyone who pirates gets a DRM version.0
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u/Mork_Da_Ork 2d ago
If that was true then drm would not exist. These big companies are notorious for gauging the market for every penny they can, but people think they mysteriously just choose to take a loss on expensive third party drm? That's crazy. If it wasn't protecting sales, it wouldn't be getting used. What do you think their sales pitch is? "We will charge you hundreds of thousands of dollars and all this service does is reduce your sales and annoy people"?
There's obviously data points proving to these companies that the drm helps.
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u/luxar94 2d ago
This kinda begs to question, if piracy is such a huge problem that they have to waste millions, how come high profile games like Baldur's Gate 3, The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 can release DRM-free on PC without any issues, I've never seen anyone from CDPR or Larian complain at all about piracy being an problem.
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u/tarranoth 1d ago
Bit of a non-sequitur, a C-level executive who believes that DRM is necessary would say they could have made even more money with DRM enabled during the release window.
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u/Kage_noir 2d ago
Let them defend multi billion dollar corporations. I use steam because it allowed me to afford games so I don’t have to pirate and risk virus, malware and ransomware. Some people will pirate just because and they were never customers. Others do it because prices are too high
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u/ChibiNya 2d ago
They spend a lot of money on DRM but I I've pirated many games in the past and you can always get anything single player within 2 weeks of the release. They're buying that much at best... Which is an important window, of course, but the people who really want to play day1 already have the preorder anyways
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u/GodzillaUK 2d ago
Nah, I know voices38 and we had coffee when the cracking happened. They're innocent.
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u/SoulslikeEnjoyer387 2d ago
Video game piracy doesn't hurt company profits. This has been studied and explained multiple times.
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u/ankerous 2d ago
Publishers never seem to understand that the average pirate who pirates their game were probably never going to buy it anyway, regardless of drm. Thinking of every download as a lost sale has always been foolish.
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u/JimBrown75 2d ago
Dreamcast would like a word with you
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u/SoulslikeEnjoyer387 2d ago
Probably didn't help them but let's not act like the Dreamcast didn't have a ton of other problems lol. Even without piracy that system was screwed.
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u/asher030 2d ago
Can we flag Denuvo as piracy threat and get them shut tf down then? Hate that damned software on my single player games wrecking performance...
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u/x33storm 2d ago
Usually Dunovo just punishes paying gamers with bad performance and invasive software.
Pirates get better performance without the hassle.
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u/fyn_world 2d ago
Dude, they couldn't stop piracy before, there is NO fucking way of stoping it now with the coding capabilities of the current AI models.
They've played themselves
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u/Powerful-Tie7370 2d ago
The only party that deserves to get sued here is Denuvo for selling a service that straight up does not work.
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u/Turnabo 1d ago edited 1d ago
I'm curious to know. Is Denuvo a free service to game dev or a monthly paid subscription fees or 1 time payment? If it is paid does the company take the hit to their revenue OR transfer it to customer by charging higher price? Why are game dev using using Denuvo instead of develop their own?
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u/MulleDK19 1d ago
Devs pay $100,000 ($10,000 for Indies) for Denuvo, per game, for 1 month of guaranteed protection. A crack in the first month will trigger a refund.
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u/KittenDecomposer96 2d ago
Maybe stop putting Denuvo in games and making them harder to run. All games that got cracked by voices38 run better than the official version.
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u/cincymatt 2d ago
Article was a great resource for finding cracked games and handhelds. I didn’t even know people out here selling superfakes.
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u/Federal_Setting_7454 2d ago
Dutch company owned by Austrian company owned by South African company, known for stealing its protection from Russias VMPSoft, asks the US to stop it losing money.
Okay o buddy o pal
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u/skydave1012 2d ago
If buying isn't owning. Piracy isn't stealing.
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u/glarius_is_glorious 2d ago
And yet piracy was at its absolute most rampant when discs were the only form of distribution.
Dude just fucking steal quietly instead of annoying us with Robin hood bullshit.
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u/whenyoudieisaybye 2d ago
They should aim at Denuvo Company instead, why tf should I have worse performance in games I paid for just because they care too much about those who don’t pay for games?
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u/clc88 2d ago
Why don't they just sue ai? Ai is the reason their games4is getting cracked and if voices does get unmasked, it will be another Sony situation where people will see this as a challenge.
I mean Sony sued Geohotz but it didn't stop other people hacking Sony devices (last I checked an Ai uploaded all ps5 games and is available to all who has a hacked ps5 to download).
If anything, the problem isn't voices or geohotz.. It's Ai.
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u/notthatguypal6900 2d ago
The best thing you can do is not buy games with Denuvo in it. Simple.
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u/CurrentRisk 1d ago
Immensely true. I burned my hand twice and never again. Bought persona 5 Royal and persona 3 reload for the Steam Deck. At some point there was an internet outage and guess? Could not play for several days. No internet, no gaming. I know it is nothing new but it sure is BS.
Genuinely want to play Metaphor but decided not to purchase it because of Denuvo. Will just… wait it out until something happens.
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u/EvoEpitaph 2d ago edited 2d ago
Funny thing is, even if they win, they're going to find themseves in an era of substantially reduced game sales anyway since hardware is becoming too expensive and discretionary spending is down due to the shitty global economy.
I wonder what the next excuse will be...
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u/baddazoner 2d ago
The industry will just push to have everything in the cloud so piracy will be impossible as you'll never have the files
Its already gotten to the point everything is close to or over a thousand dollars for hardware so streaming from a powerful pc on a subscription is not as far fetched as it once was
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u/Temporary-Concept-81 1d ago
They definitely want it to go in that direction.
I don't think they'll succeed with people today who own game libraries and would tell them to pound sand.
If they get kids though, and make it so the kid never owns anything, you might nab the next generations on lock.
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u/The_Great_Ravioli 2d ago
So your telling me this is the guy I need to find if I need some free games?
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u/FuggyGlasses 2d ago
Between March and August 2026 alone, ESA detected 15,484,145 users in peer-to-peer swarms for games repacked by FitGirl, with an estimated lost value of $1,083,735,308.55,” the submission notes.
A footnote explains that this figure is based on a retail price of $69.99 for every user ESA spotted in a swarm.
Sure jan. 🥲😭🤣🤣
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u/Sitri_eu 2d ago
This is a dead attempt. With how AI is already reverse-engineering games and every regular person can make "Super Elden Duty Bros. Melee" in 5 minutes, Denuvo will probably not hold up for a minute.
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2d ago
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u/Im-Bad-At-PRS 2d ago
If you read the article it tells you. What is with people not wanting to read more than the headline?
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u/FaroTech400K 2d ago
You literally just have to read the article click on it
You will learn something
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u/Kinax-Vyxtion 2d ago
When you're born to fight piracy, but you fail, then you decide to sue them.
Well, I guess that's the classic method.
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u/nexus11355 2d ago
Ah yes, ask the US, they're famous for getting people to stop doing things. Just look at prohibition and the war on drugs.
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u/SupertoastGT 2d ago
May Denuvo burn for all eternity. I won't buy any game that uses it. One of the reasons I have consoles.
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u/Cornflakes_91 2d ago
to have more controls and less freedom?
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u/Madzookeeper 2d ago
Because then you aren't compromising your computer with that trash.
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u/Cornflakes_91 2d ago
yeah instead you have way tougher bonds by default.
denuvo can be cracked out, but you can't crack out the bonds of the console.
or add mods :)
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u/Madzookeeper 2d ago
Suppose it ultimately depends on what you actually want, and that isn't the same for everyone. I have a console and a decent laptop, and I play different things on different platforms because of it.
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u/SupertoastGT 2d ago
Not if you don't know how to crack safely. I've never done it. You'll get tons of malware and possibly get into trouble for doing illegal things. Then there's the issue of getting the newest patches, playing online or getting banned. It's a mountain of crap I just don't want to deal with. On console, singleplayer games just work offline as they should. Capcom games and such I will always choose consoles for. F*** Denuvo and any online-only DRM like it.
I support the devs I enjoy and don't have to do anything illegal. Plus Denuvo crackers keep getting arrested right? How long will it still even be crackable? To my knowledge, I've never broken the law all my life. I don't know this stuff.
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u/CurrentRisk 1d ago
One of the reasons I have consoles.
I can’t figure out whether you are sarcastic and joking or straight up serious, lol.
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u/Downtown_Eye5736 2d ago
This is a losing battle, the only real option they have to stop piracy is to go streaming only.
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u/ClacksInTheSky 2d ago
Gaming would die overnight and become a total joke if they did that
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u/Possibly_Naked_Now 2d ago
Naw, piracy is a service problem. Steam proves that. Over and over again.
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u/Downtown_Eye5736 2d ago
How does Steam prove that? And what is the "service problem"?
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u/Possibly_Naked_Now 2d ago
If it's more convenient to pirate something, it will be pirated.
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u/SlowDragonfruit9718 2d ago
Not really. It's easy for valve to say that when 99.9 percent of their profit comes from jacking 30 percent of dev's profits and kids stealing their parent's credit cards to buy loot boxes or whatever. Not saying piracy is a huge factor for big gaming companies but valve isn't affected by piracy because they basically don't make games anymore.
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u/kingrynex 2d ago
The 30% is a standard distributor charge that is added on typically to all products. It is not "jacking" profit from a developer.
Valve provides a pretty decent delivery service in its platform, all things considered.
But you're probably a bot account that's going to tell me I'm wrong considering you're a 1 year with comments and posts hidden.
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u/Possibly_Naked_Now 2d ago
Need to end private profiles.
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u/kingrynex 2d ago
Honestly I get why people choose to stick on the privacy setting them, no one likes their post history being used on them... But then you can just jump in Google and user search people anyway, so it's totally pointless.
Absolutely positive this user is a bot, just based on what I can find. Now I'm just testing out obvious identifiers.
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u/OskaMeijer 2d ago
As far as I am concerned if an account is just parroting common rhetoric they got from a source with no actual thought of their own behind it that account is a bot regardless of them being biological or digital. The behavior is more important than the mechanism.
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u/kingrynex 2d ago
So that is one of the biggest tells, and usually I've been very skeptical of accounts that do exactly that, while also being the top of the comment block for a thread. The moment you call them out, you typically immediately get an insult of some kind, usually something benign. The biggest tell-tale is usually the 1year, high karma, private accounts with no history to see and a TON of contributions (grouped post/comments). Searching for them on google and looking at threads, usually the posts are just really REALLY generic posts that don't offer anything, and usually has other bots posting in them too.
I know it's very skeptical/conspiracy/pepe silva stuff, but you can rat these fuckers out fast. I've also always had a feeling that if I called someone a bot and they weren't, they'd just block me outright.
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u/OskaMeijer 2d ago
You are really spot on, just a bit on your last part. I have been called a bot a few times and I usually just find it humourous. The other day someone called me a bot and someone else replied to them essentially "Their comment was either anti-capitalist or anti-fascist. Why would you think that is a bot, who would be paying for it?" Which doesn't really track because a foreign actor sowing division might do such a thing but it still made me laugh.
That being said, yea 1 year old accounts with high karma and hidden history is what I find the majority of time I see an account with bot like behavior, that or brand new accounts with hidden history.
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u/Possibly_Naked_Now 2d ago
I assume any account with a hidden profile is a bot. Honestly, if they want to leave hidden profiles on. I should be able to just block hidden profiles.
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u/GestureArtist 2d ago
It’s coming very soon. Now that home computers are going away for good. All those data centers need to make a return on their investments.
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u/ExO_o 2d ago
gamers should ask the U.S. to flag denuvo as a threat to the game industry
would be so nice to get rid of this plague once and for all