Hacker manages to bypass DRM in several Denuvo games including Doom

Hacker ‘Voksi’ has posted a workaround online for six different recent games that use the well-known ‘anti-tampering technology’ Denuvo. It is known for being very difficult to crack, but at least temporarily a victory over the software has been achieved.

To date, Voksi has posted workarounds for Doom, Rise of The Tomb Raider, Just Cause 3, Inside, ABZÛ, and Total War: Warhammer. This is emphatically not a crack. If so, that would mean Voksi was able to remove Denuvo completely. Instead, it works as a workaround: the hacker’s files work with spoofed app manifests that trick Steam into thinking that the user simply has a Steam license for the game in question. They come from a hacker’s server. Users must therefore simply log in to Steam to eventually get the game working. This is done for obvious reasons with newly created accounts.

The workarounds will most likely not work forever. Its success depends on Voksi’s own server continuing to work, Denuvo still not getting it after a possible future update, and Steam continuing to mistake the fake manifests as legitimate. The moment one of these links of the workaround changes or fails completely, the games will probably no longer be playable. The ‘advantage’ of this approach is that, as long as the workaround works, online functionalities such as multiplayer and leaderboards also work.

The impact on the sales of the games will be limited not only because the workaround will not work forever, but also possibly because the affected games are already slightly older and thus may have already had a significant part of their sales. Just Cause 3 was released in December, Rise of The Tomb Raider in January, and Doom and Total War: Warhammer in May. For Inside and ABZÛ, this is just much less true: Inside is just a month old and ABZÛ is less than a week old.

Denuvo is known as a copy guard that is exceptionally difficult to crack. Many games that use recent versions of the technology are still not available on torrent sites. It appears to offer such strong security that, for example, cracker group 3DM has now given up. In fact, the group believes that Denuvo could spell the end of game piracy. The Austrian developer deliberately does not disclose how Denuvo works.

Not only users who don’t want to pay for games complain about Denuvo. Every time a user makes changes to hardware, a game has to be reactivated. There is a certain maximum per 24 hours that a paying user can get in the way. In addition, the technology prevents the use of mods in, for example, Doom and users cannot play Windows-Denuvo games on Unix operating systems with Wine. Finally, the risk of Denuvo’s activation servers going offline increases over time and the possibility of incompatibility with new operating systems arises, as happened with SafeDisc and SecuRom under Windows 10. The discontinuation of Games for Windows Live brought similar problems. . Without things like cracks, many of these older games won’t work.