good shit. I hope they eventually work their way up to the newest denuvo versions. It was pretty depressing thinking about how there weren't any denuvo crackers around anymore.
this post was submitted on 09 Dec 2025
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I don't know who this Denuvo guy is, but I don't think calling him a cracker is to nice : (
Ladies gents and enbs we have found them. The one good cracker.
HiFi Rush had Denuvo removed in a recent update, unless he cracked it before.
You are right. This game had other DRM layers that this person cracked.
Star.Wars.Squadrons-voices38
Wait, this is 2020 pretty mid game that was on huge sales tons of times and even iirc was free on epic, how come it STILL have Denuvo?
It's mostly a licensing agreement thing. Publishers are rentiers who do not care about game preservation. My reading that in the past Denuvo used to give perpetual licenses because of which some really old games still have Denuvo. In the past few years they have moves to a time bound ageeement kind of deal. So some games end up shedding denuvo are 6 or 12 months.
That would fit, thanks.
Damn, EMPRESS retired?
Nonetheless, I'm happy to see someone new on the scene, we desperately need it, reverse engineering is no easy task. I hope things don't go like they went for Voksi though, with the police raiding them.
Death to Denuvo and all DRM
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!!
If I remember correctly I think hi fi rush has gone through development problems of its own, like the studio that made it was later closed down or something. So this will definitely preserve it, because it's never a good sign for a game when that sort of thing happens.
Also for the story the game fenyx immortals rising (botw clone in ubisoft style) used denuvo but one time they pushed an update and had forgotten to put it in the exe so from then on every new version was able to be cracked lol. It's also routinely on sale and was even free on ubisoft connect so I think they just quickly wrote it off as a loss.
Still waiting for wukong crack...
They dropped Denuvo, he didn't crack it.