For a long time Denuvo has been uncrackable. There was one prominent cracker who went by the name of EMPRESS but they have retired. Apart from this sometimes games like Football Manager would get cracked but the person behind it is not a prolific cracker.
Recently though someone named voices38 has started cracking many Denuvo games. I think they started from the older uncracked games, moving on to the newer ones gradually. I personally don't care for the games they have cracked but it is good to see that the games will be preserved from now on. Some recent releases by them:
- Scott.Pilgrim.vs.The.World-voices38
- Hi-Fi.RUSH-voices38
- Need.For.Speed.Hot.Pursuit.Remastered.CRACKFIX-voices38
- FIFA.21-voices38
- Shin.Megami.Tensei.III.Nocturne.HD.Remaster-voices38
- Star.Wars.Squadrons-voices38
- FIFA.20-voices38
- Need.for.Speed.Heat-voices38
Hopefully thye continue cracking.
lol the empress story is wild, and she tried to create a comm on lemmy.ml too so it's especially close to this community. basically being the only denuvo cracker she charged up to 500$ on commissions for the next game to crack and there was a whole fetish thing about how she treated her paying fans. There was also some shady shit about how she hinted at adding some tracking software to her releases I think? She didn't like that people like fitgirl repacked her cracks, but I think it went nowhere. She also like to philosophize in her NFO files, including transphobic rants and ranting about 'woke'. The 'feud' seems to have been entirely one-sided and imagined from her, she even claimed people in the scene tried to get her arrested and leaked her address to the feds but no real evidence surfaced of any actual arrests. I'm not in the scene but the consensus was basically that she was making it up and other groups didn't really want any of this drama, they just do it for the love of the game.
Stunningly when she retired she argued that denuvo actually had benefits and people should buy games instead of pirating them.
She tried to form a lemmy community after being driven off reddit but due to the baggage that would follow the admins there banned her and the comm immediately.
I could see not wanting people to pirate some games, but the thing is the large majority of games that use Denuvo are AAA anti consumer garbage that fully deserve to be pirated. Denuvo is too expensive for indie games anyway.
It depends on your perspective I think, even I did not read her actual farewell letter but a writeup of it, so who knows if they changed things to fit their bias (even undiagnosed bias like having preconceptions around piracy and denuvo). It does feel hypocritical to make a career and "semi-cult" (again depends on perspective) out of cracking denuvo only to turn around and say actually people should not crack games lol
Didn't know about the lemmy.ml community and that she argued in favor of Denuvo after retiring...
There is some incredible lore right here... Reading a bit online now, I am also seeing people claiming that it wasn't Empress doing the cracking but an individual associated with her (due to her NFOs getting less technical over time), this person stopped for some time thus making Empress keep saying that she'd be back, until this individual abandoner her, and this caused her to go against piracy and do her retirement... I am also reading that Voksi and Empress might be the same person? Could voices38 also be the same person? The plot thickens!!