Denuvo came as a savior for videogame developers and publishers but in the world of Piracy, no security measure lasts forever. We can confirm that hackers have managed to bypass Denuvo and a recently released Bethesda shooter along with one of Square Enix’s games is now available to pirates.
Denuvo is developed by the Austrian company, Denuvo Software Solutions. The software “continuously encrypts and decrypts itself so that it is impossible to crack.” However, the impossible was made possible by a Bulgarian cracker.
Hackers also claim that by the end of this year they will entirely crack Denuvo. It is to be noted that hackers only managed to run the demo version of Bethesda’s game. Meanwhile, Square Enix’s title is completely open to pirates and available to download.
Piracy is a major issue on PC and it is safe to say there is nothing that can be done to completely put an end to it. But measures can be taken to keep it under control.
Recently, CD Projekt RED used a very interesting and ubique approach to piracy. They didn’t use any protective software. The studio managed to convince people to not pirate The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.
Generally I think with The Witcher 3 (and the was the case with The Witcher 2), we released the game without any copy protection. So on day one, you can buy the game from GOG and give it to a friend, enemy as well. But give it to a friend on a memory stick and it works. And still we sold near to 10 million units across all three platforms. But the piracy factor was irrelevant.
Because we can not force people to buy things, we can only convince them to do it. So we totally believe in the cart not in the stick. Of course, if you have the pirated version you don’t have achievements and updates.
This approach worked for CD RED and they managed to see a decent amount of copies. It looks like more developers need to address piracy directly and work on their content to make sure its user feels obliged to pay for it.
