Update August 8, 2016: Rise of the Tomb Raider has been cracked and released by a different team of pirates, this time seemingly bypassing Denuvo completely.
Well this has been tough to keep up with. In a seemingly unrelated and coincidental set of circumstances, another cracker group has released a cracked version of Rise of the Tomb Raider.
No need to steal, plenty of great free games on Steam to check out.
I won’t link to them here, but this crack comes from CONSPIR4CY, the group which cracked other Denuvo games like: Lords of the Fallen, Batman: Arkham Knight, Battlefield: Hardline, Dragon Age: Inquisition and FIFA 15.
What this means for the future of Denuvo is uncertain, but surely this particular method will also see itself plugged for future games. The battle continues.
Update August 8, 2016:Denuvo have plugged the recent Doom and Rise of the Tomb Raider cracks, with the next activation check breaking already pirated copies.
Voksi, the pirate who managed to bypass Denuvo and release cracks for several games recently, has confirmed that the method he used no longer works.
Denuvo have plugged the activation method used, so the next Denuvo activation check will break existing cracked copies, and new ones won’t work at all.
Voksi claims that over 600,000 people played the cracked games over the last three days, before Denuvo sealed up the exploit.
Ta, Reddit.
Original Story August 6, 2016: Last month a Russian crackerclaimed to have defeated the notorious DRM software Denuvoby showing a pirated copy of Rise of the Tomb Raider running. Now, Doom is the next title to be subject to the cracking process, but Denuvo appears to have survived the salvo intact.
Denuvo’s anti-piracy measures have kept several of the biggest triple-A releases this year from falling into the hands of thousands of torrenters and filesharers, confouding cracking groups to the point that an entire subreddit is devoted to tracking their progress.
Now a Bulgarian cracker by the name of Voksi has released two cracks that allow Doom and Rise of the Tomb Raider to be run illegally – by bypassing Denuvo entirely.
Much like leaving a doggy door unlocked at the bottom of a three-metre thick titanium vault door with intricate anti-tamper locking mechanisms, Voksi appears to have simply avoided the hardest problem posed to crackers in many years.
It’s difficult to explain the exact process used (and bordering on illegal to link to it, obviously) but the current crack relies on an interaction between Denuvo, Steam and the demo version of Doom.
The same process is being tested by Voksi to allow Just Cause 3 to also run without a key, a game which has evaded cracking in any form since its release in December last year.