News Developer hacks Denuvo DRM after six months of detective work and 2,000 hooks, allows running Hogwarts Legacy on other PCs

[razor512]

I remember an article or blog post long ago relating to denuvo where they advertised how it protects other DRM as well, and demonstrated how it prevents reverse engineering by increasing the number of instructions by multiple orders of magnitude to complete certain tasks, basically extreme obfuscation. One of the demos was it being used on a "hello world' application. Denuvo still does heavy obfuscation to the main executable and various other parts of the game to make it extremely time consuming to decompile and crack.

Beyond that for a test relating to performance, a DRM developer would have a serious conflict of interest since any negative finding will be detrimental to their industry, and thus income. Beyond that, there have been many games in the past where 3rd party groups successfully stripped out the DRM, performance would improve by a decent amount, especially on older CPUs, e.g., users on many older quad core CPUs often saw large performance improvements when it came to load times and performance consistency in CPU limited aspects of games. In regions where people are less likely have the disposable income for full priced games, they will often also have slower CPUs, as it is more common for people to stick with a motherboard and CPU for far longer than people in the US, as well as use cases such as people who turn old office PCs into gaming PCs by adding a faster video card, and more RAM. In those cases, many people will be fine with a 30-40FPS experience as long as a game is not stuttering or hitching, and in those cases where someone may have a borderline good enough CPU and a GPU capable of a 30-40FPS experience, things like DRM can often make the difference between a playable and unplayable game.

PS some games that simply have denuvo bypassed, tend to have little to no performance difference as often most of the CPU intensive work still ends up taking place.

 

[CmdrShepard]

I have never encountered the 5 PC limit while "tinkering with a Steam Deck." I have run into it many times in benchmarking, as it counts a new CPU or GPU as a new PC, which sucks. But if your core counts and GPU remain the same — clock speed changes don't count — you don't get locked out.

On the other hand, recent Windows 11 updates have caused my Mass Effect 3 copy to fail to start. The reason was always that license file machine ID didn't match after update anymore -- if that shows some trend of Windows updates somehow changing system values which DRMs consider constant I suspect we will be seeing more and more issues... and pirates? They won't feel a thing.

Which the article goes on to describe.

Article which has a click-bait title where claim from the title is clarified only near the end of article? Please. Does the phrase "bury the lede" mean anything to you?

 

[JarredWaltonGPU]

On the other hand, recent Windows 11 updates have caused my Mass Effect 3 copy to fail to start. The reason was always that license file machine ID didn't match after update anymore -- if that shows some trend of Windows updates somehow changing system values which DRMs consider constant I suspect we will be seeing more and more issues... and pirates? They won't feel a thing.

Article which has a click-bait title where claim from the title is clarified only near the end of article? Please. Does the phrase "bury the lede" mean anything to you?

Good thing we "buried the lede" on this one, then, as the article did quite nice traffic. Was it "clickbait" because the entire story isn't in the headline? We would disagree. The headline is factual, though of course it doesn't include all the details as that's rather the point of a headline, it's a taste of what's to come.

"Developer hacks Denuvo DRM after six months of detective work and 2,000 hooks, allows running Hogwarts Legacy on other PCs"

The main lede here is that some DRM dev spent six months reverse engineering Denuvo, not whether it was fully cracked or not, as a functional crack was available within days of the game's release. It's also not whether Denuvo is even good or bad — that's a red herring. It's about how much effort it took to reverse engineer a particular DRM — one that not coincidentally has garnered a lot of hate over the years.

You think the most important part that was buried is... what, exactly? That Denuvo sucks, I guess. And I won't even disagree there. DRM mostly punishes legitimate users, assuming the DRM gets cracked (and it almost always does). But even performance without Denuvo wasn't the primary point of the story — that was merely an anecdotal statement from the DRM developer, and can't be construed as proof or lack thereof.

 

[CmdrShepard]

Was it "clickbait" because the entire story isn't in the headline?

No, it's because the title was misleading compared to what was revealed later in the article.

The headline is factual, though of course it doesn't include all the facts as that's rather the point of a clickbait headline.

FTFY.

"Developer hacks Denuvo DRM after six months of detective work and 2,000 hooks, allows running Hogwarts Legacy on other PCs"

The main lede here is that some DRM dev spent six months reverse engineering Denuvo, not whether it was fully cracked or not, as a functional crack was available within days of the game's release.

To me, past tense of hack implies successfully performing said hack. In the context of security someone who has "hacked the security" would never get caught accessing the secured system's data, someone who has "hacked the game" would be able to run it without crashing, etc.

Therefore, leaving out the part where he didn't even finish the hack properly until the end of article, and also not mentioning that the full crack was available long before is a very definition of "burying the lede", not to mention misleading and clickbait-y.

The factual heading could have been for example:

"Developer spends 6 months learning ins and outs of already cracked Denuvo DRM in Hogwarts Legacy, starts it on another PC"

And now everything important is in the heading:

1. How much effort it takes to learn to hack complex DRM
2. That it was just a learning exercise because it was already cracked
3. That he managed to start it (which more adequately shows the goal was not to have it fully playable and that he didn't fully hack it)

An example of this kind of clickbait:

Headline: "Miraculous Fall - Man Survives Rooftop Plunge with Barely a Bruise!"

Today was a lucky day for one Mr. John Smith in Houston, Texas who slipped and fell from a roof. As the gravity hurled him towards the ground his life flashed in front of his eyes -- he was worried he will never see his family and his dog again.

"I closed my eyes and prayed to God to save me" says Mr. Smith visibly shaken as he recalls that fateful moment. God must have heard his prayer, because he landed on the ground in front of his 3 foot doghouse's roof unharmed.

Yeah, that's exactly how I felt when I read the article.