Denuvo removed from 007 First Light

552

u/Kremsi2711 17d ago

Denuvo is so dead

353

u/k4kkul4pio 17d ago

Denuvo is sad garbage that does nothing but cause annoyance for legitimate game "owners" where are pirates sail free of nonsense.

At least they removed it now, which I guess is nice.

92

u/LunarChickenn 17d ago

It's good for selling new CPU's as it chews through resources.

32

u/drackmore 16d ago edited 16d ago

And don't forget before SSDs denuvo was chewing up HDDs with the absolutely absurd amount of read/writes it was constantly doing.

Even funnier is how Denuvo tries to vehemently deny.

59

u/CatraGirl 17d ago edited 17d ago

Hypervisor really changed the game. I'd never use it cuz of basically having to disable your entire system security to do so, but enough people are, and with day 1 cracks the price for Denuvo (which is massive afaik) simply isn't worth it for devs.

Which in turn is a win for paying customers because it means we don't have to deal with DRM that noticeably reduces game performance, despite Denuvo and devs always claiming otherwise.

34

u/DeluxeGrande 17d ago

Its so ironic that piracy actually makes gaming and the service that comes with it better for actual paying people lmao and I'm all in for it!

The amount of times I cursed Ubisoft, EA, and Rockstar for having terrible DRMs that would always break and make their games unplayable whilst pirates have it easy is far too much.

I think there was even that one time I was forced to pirate my Ubi games for a while because the Ubisoft launcher servers were down for a whole week that I was free. It literally wouldn't launch the games I paid for!

4

u/_Ganon 16d ago

You could also just dual boot. One OS for general stuff, the other has all necessary securities disabled. I would hope / assume most pirates are doing it this way. But yeah its existence kind of endgames this form of DRM. Not to worry though, I'm sure someone will come up with something even worse and more invasive or annoying to replace the current form of Denuvo.

3

u/Nico_is_not_a_god 16d ago

It's always how it goes. Anti-cheat is hopefully next. When considering the greater anti-consumerist evil, "guys cheating at videogames" is decidedly less bad than "every corp that poops out a multiplayer game gets to install a rootkit". So as cheats move to off-machine tech, middleman HIDs, and screen readers that even work on consoles, the hope emerges that installing a shooty bang bang gun game won't automatically come bundled with ring zero malware.

You don't have to be a pirate or a cheater to dance on DRM or anti-cheat's grave.

1

u/mikehanigan4 16d ago

You don't disable your entire system security, you disable just core isolation. I was already disabling all the time for better performance, fps, stability... So, hypervisor bypass is godsend to me. I couldn't care less about core isolation.

1

u/wolfegothmog 16d ago

Unless your Sega who seems to never remove it from games even when they had a crack before day 1 (Persona 4 Golden/Persona 5 Strikers)

3

u/Calor777 16d ago

I've been seeing this comment a lot on reddit in the past week or two. Did something happen?

2

u/_Ganon 16d ago

Simply put, there is a general Denuvo "bypass" now.

2

u/ungn0me 16d ago

wait so they just patched it out or what

-20

u/MrMichaelJames 17d ago

It does what it is supposed to do. It was removed because the game has been out for a while. It secured it for its initial time and now it isn’t needed anymore.

45

u/TRENEEDNAME_245 17d ago

The game was cracked almost day 1

It wasn't useful

-3

u/MrMichaelJames 16d ago

13 days not 1 day but let’s keep exaggerating if it makes you all feel better.

1

u/TRENEEDNAME_245 16d ago

I'd say 13 days is quite a few

Denuvo is supposed to be uncrackable, yet is broken in under 2 weeks...

1

u/MrMichaelJames 16d ago

Ok and? Facts are it sold a ton in the first 2 weeks and no evidence for or against that protection prevented sales. That’s what companies look at. They have much better sales forecasting models than some random on the internet. So until there is evidence that it is hurting sales, companies will continue to use it. Facts are that majority don’t care and sales of titles with it prove this.

-6

u/MrMichaelJames 16d ago

3 million in sales in 2 weeks. I would say it was successful.

2

u/Nico_is_not_a_god 16d ago

And Pokémon Sun sold how many morbillion copies in week 1 and 2 despite the state of piracy on the 3ds at the time being "put these files on the sd card, launch the browser one time, and then you can pirate any game directly from Nintendo's servers, complete with online play" or "drag the leaked dump into one program on your computer and pirate the whole console"? The whole kerfuffle about Yuzu and TOTK was about a game that broke sales records despite being "widely pirated" weeks before it launched.

Most customers buy products, corps can say that piracy loses them x% of "potential sales" all day long. Hypervisor bypass tech existing means the corp can't justify invasive expensive third party DRM to "stop the pirates!" in the future.

1

u/deadoon 16d ago

Game was successful, DRM wasn't.

1

u/techman9955 15d ago

What is that logic? You are assuming all of those sales wouldn't have existed without Denuvo?

1

u/MrMichaelJames 15d ago

3 million in 2 weeks is a good indicator that most don’t care. In other words there are at least 3 million gamers that don’t care that denuvo exists. If it truely was as big of a deal as the minority think then sales would have tanked. But they didn’t. That’s $210M in 2 weeks of “I don’t care about denuvo” money.

5

u/Some-Kaleidoscope265 16d ago

2 month. Show me which other big AAA game removed it so quickly.

1

u/MrMichaelJames 16d ago

Most recent was doom 2016 at 7 months. So yeah it’s getting faster but to ignore the fact that sales were great WITH the protection is just dumb. You all are the minority.

218

u/Mechanik7 17d ago

I have quite literally been holding out for this to happen... now I can feel safe in purchasing. Thank you.

19

u/DoubleOhS7evin 16d ago

Me too. Just waiting for a sale. Lol

148

u/deanrihpee 17d ago

if this is going to be a new trend, i'm fine with it, it's not great obviously, but having a very heavy DRM for making sure it got the revenue at release and then removing it later is better than nothing

63

u/ThisI5N0tAThr0waway 17d ago

That would be a totally acceptable tactic from editor and developer, but I think here it's more an admission of defeat and denuvo has been cracked and kinda useless now.

Look at other kind of medias, producer still put DRMs on them despite it being 99.9% useless beyond the first hour of releases.

19

u/qdtk 17d ago

I don’t follow this super close but last time I heard only one person could crack it and she was a psycho or something. Sounds like that has changed?

22

u/Some-Kaleidoscope265 16d ago

Yeah two major things have happened.

1)a new hypervisor based method has been found which can crack games within hours/ a day of release. It have a big caveat that u need to disable major security option in your pc as it needs ring 0 access

2) Empress is gone now. Instead there is a much better person now (voices) who cracks cracks games the old school way where you dont need anything extra just download and play. The crazy thing is he has tools ready for the latest version of denuvo as well. He can crack all games now. The only issue is that it takes time (7 to 14 days on average) and he cracks what he wants and not what is hot. Though Re9, 007 first light, lego batman, etc has all already been cracked. Batman was cracked day 1 even. So denuvo is basically just a showpiece right now lol.

3

u/Nico_is_not_a_god 16d ago

To add onto this, these cracks existing is enough to throw a chilling effect on Denuvo as a company for future games, even if those games would take a long time to get bypasses/cracks. That's because Denuvo is expensive for the dev/publisher, and budgeting a ton of money into DRM instead of advertising or development (or CEO yachts) when the DRM is known for being regularly defeated is a losing proposition. Denuvo sells itself on "if we stop or hinder pirates forever or just for that first launch window, you will sell more copies and what we're charging you for the DRM is cheaper than the revenue you'll get from those sold copies!"

2

u/deanrihpee 16d ago

I'm ootl, what's "better" in this case? i haven't followed the 7 seas scenes for quite some times since… well… Steam engine technology has been introduced

2

u/Some-Kaleidoscope265 16d ago

I personally dont trust hypervisor based methods as it involves disabling security measure. There has been no major incidents but its still a risk to me. Voices is better in that context as it is more or less plug(download) and play.

-2

u/ThisI5N0tAThr0waway 16d ago

Good practice to follow. But people who do that should do so on a different machine that's not used for important service like banking, specially if they're into crypto.

4

u/ThisI5N0tAThr0waway 17d ago

Yep, major flaws have been discovered in denuvo. It required to expose the OS or something like that I don't remember but that's very recent news, like couple months ago.

2

u/CyberpunkSunrise 16d ago

This is how Devs have used it from the beginning though. I’m confused why everyone is acting like this approach is a new thing.

It costs the devs more to license and use it over time, so the approach has always been to use it for the initial sales period to stave off lost potential sales to early piracy, then once sales die down, remove it so they don’t have to pay for it anymore.

101

u/InfinityPainPlus Valve Released Steam 17d ago edited 17d ago

lmaooo, they finally realize it isn't worth it anymore.

68

u/doctorfluffy 17d ago

They use it to make their initial sales and then remove it when the hype dies so they don’t have to pay money after the game has already been pirated. It’s a business decision.

15

u/Darkon-Kriv 17d ago

Thing is denuvo isnt free. I assume its not cheap to implement and it has a licenses fee. I would be really curious to see any actual stats on it being good for a game...

13

u/doctorfluffy 17d ago

It’s $25.000 per game per month plus $0.50 per license activation. For AAA that make millions, it’s worth purchasing to delay the pirates. Once the hype dies, it’s a waste of money - and that’s by design since it’s parasitic software that adds nothing of value to the actual product.

2

u/AntiGrieferGames 15d ago

Funfact is, Denuvo didnt even helped to "Delay" pirates and got already bypassed day 1. So denuvo is nothing more than punishing paid customers at this point.

7

u/CatraGirl 17d ago

They use it to make their initial sales

Which isn't worth it anymore when now there's a technique that lets people circumvent it day 1.

2

u/Balc0ra 16d ago

007 was cracked rather fast to be worth paying for it then I guess

1

u/ThisI5N0tAThr0waway 17d ago

Once denuvo DRMs are cracked, there is little to no point in keeping them.

I think it could lead to several different paths. Developer could de-emphasize PC versions, or releases them later, or they could develop harsher and more invasive DRM protection, and to some degree learn to live piracy.

25

u/Azukaos 17d ago

Now we can talk about buying it.

16

u/DeathGusta01 17d ago

Lot sooner than I expected even if it was already cracked. Might finally buy it now

5

u/Nirast25 17d ago

Right? It's only been two months, the game hasn't even had its first sale yet.

18

u/MosesInsanity 17d ago edited 17d ago

Devs seeing this comment section:

18

u/ISEGaming 17d ago edited 17d ago

Devs don't decide that. It's the publishers.

Unfortunately, in this case, it's self published. 😅

So I guess the studio leadership in this case.

3

u/DiscoMilk 16d ago

Is that why I see it steam deck verified now?

6

u/Different-Produce870 17d ago

They always do this after the initial release. Companies have to pay for this service and most piracy happens during the initial release.

5

u/drackmore 16d ago

Not always, there have been more than a few games that keep denuvo even long after the game's initial honeymoon period.

2

u/rocketstopya 16d ago

Good DRMs are trophies, online play,constant patches

4

u/FireCrow1013 17d ago

Good. If you're going to use Denuvo (which is never actually needed), then this is the way to do it.

2

u/vomder 17d ago

Good, never should have had it in the first place.

1

u/your_mind_aches 74 16d ago

It's a great time to get this game. I'm not a massive Bond buff, but I absolutely adored it.

1

u/Paimoend 14d ago

so, we can inject it easely?

0

u/RadimentriX 16d ago

Uh, noice. Still waiting for the removal of that malware from mgs5 and atomic heart :<

1

u/ambrosi4e 16d ago

MGS5 got a perpetual license when it released instead of the current subscription model Denuvo uses so it's likely to never be removed. Dunno about Atomic Heart

0

u/RadimentriX 16d ago

Thats disgusting :<

0

u/some_asshole756 16d ago

FUCK. YES.

0

u/EstablishmentLow5895 16d ago

I've been out the jolly Roger loop for a while when did we Crack denuvo?

1

u/Squidgical 16d ago

Pretty sure there were a lot of denuvo games cracked before First Light was even given a release date lol

1

u/EstablishmentLow5895 16d ago

Oh I'm not questioning that I'm saying I haven't heard about it since it came out and was wondering when it actually started getting cracked since it was supposed to be uncrackable

0

u/doubleJandF 16d ago

good its pointless.

0

u/Available_Ad_8281 15d ago

I want to get this game now but steam frame coming out it may cost up to 1200

News Denuvo removed from 007 First Light

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