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Bypassing Denuvo in Hogwarts Legacy

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Re: Bypassing Denuvo in Hogwarts Legacy

#11

Post by wincy »

molticrystal wrote: post #7
wincy wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was going to say Lies of P was cracked, but turns out they just removed it from their game. It was up on piracy sites the same day. I wonder why this happens? Does Denuvo cost a lot of ongoing subscription money for a developer or something? I’ve noticed this happens a decent amount.

I believe Denuvo charges for access to the activation servers. [0] While the pricing structure has likely changed, for most game companies the long tail end [1] of the sales doesn't justify continuing. For example, Square-Enix(Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest) removes Denuvo 6 months into a release. For a counter-example, Atlus(makers of Persona/Shin Megami Tensei) are known to never purposely remove the protection. [0] h…

With Atlus games you can just emulate it for switch better than it runs on the original console.

Re: Bypassing Denuvo in Hogwarts Legacy

#12

Post by the_mitsuhiko »

kiririn wrote: post #10

The performance impact Denuvo is known for is not due to the license checks, it is due to running parts of the game in a custom vm. Hogwarts Legacy is new enough that they might be taking a different approach entirely after the whole vmprotect controversy

Denuvo protected games only let some functions go through that VM and typically not functions invoked every frame. Only when you screw up as a developer and hook the wrong thing will performance suffer.

Re: Bypassing Denuvo in Hogwarts Legacy

#13

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

codetrotter wrote: post #5
wincy wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was going to say Lies of P was cracked, but turns out they just removed it from their game. It was up on piracy sites the same day. I wonder why this happens? Does Denuvo cost a lot of ongoing subscription money for a developer or something? I’ve noticed this happens a decent amount.

Every graph I’ve ever seen of video game sales from people who distribute via Steam etc typically has an initial spike if they caught on and got featured, and then a few spikes for things like holiday sales. Maybe the devs of the game you mentioned decided that after the initial spike had passed, and they are in a long tail period, it is cheaper to remove Denuvo. Or they just used Denuvo to protect the game during ea…

Also "X removes DRM" is an opportunity for a news cycle that could result in new sales.

Re: Bypassing Denuvo in Hogwarts Legacy

#14

Post by jsheard »

wincy wrote: post #11
molticrystal wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe Denuvo charges for access to the activation servers. [0] While the pricing structure has likely changed, for most game companies the long tail end [1] of the sales doesn't justify continuing. For example, Square-Enix(Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest) removes Denuvo 6 months into a release. For a counter-example, Atlus(makers of Persona/Shin Megami Tensei) are known to never purposely remove the protection. [0] h…

With Atlus games you can just emulate it for switch better than it runs on the original console.

Denuvo claims to have a solution to that as well, but to date it hasn't actually shown up in any games. I kind of hope at least one publisher bites just because I'm curious to find out what horrors they've cooked up to make emulation difficult.

https://irdeto.com/denuvo/nintendo-switch-emulator-protectio...

There is precedent for that kind of thing, Wii emulation matured early enough that a handful of retail games had code specifically intended to frustrate running them in Dolphin. They abused some details of the real Wiis L1/L2 cache which aren't simulated by Dolphin, and couldn't be without adding an unreasonable amount of overhead.

https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2017/02/01/dolphin-progress-rep...

Re: Bypassing Denuvo in Hogwarts Legacy

#15

Post by miki123211 »

jsheard wrote: post #8
bakugo wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, Denuvo has recurring costs to the developer, it's not a one time payment. In the case of Lies of P though, the developers accidentally included a debug build .exe without Denuvo in an update, only afterwards was it actually removed entirely because there was no point in including it anymore.

It's always funny when they go to the expense of licensing Denuvo but then accidentally release a DRM-free version one way or another. The other classic blunder is to release a free demo version with an executable that is complete enough to play the data packages from the full version of the game if they are swapped in. That's what "demo bypass" means in the Reddit table.

My (unnamed) favorite was an indie game that you could download with no payment required, but that would prompt you for a key at installation time. If you had 7zip installed, you could just hit context menu on it, do "extract all", click on .exe and there it was, the full version with no key required.

Re: Bypassing Denuvo in Hogwarts Legacy

#16

Post by johnny22 »

jsheard wrote: post #14
wincy wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With Atlus games you can just emulate it for switch better than it runs on the original console.

Denuvo claims to have a solution to that as well, but to date it hasn't actually shown up in any games. I kind of hope at least one publisher bites just because I'm curious to find out what horrors they've cooked up to make emulation difficult. https://irdeto.com/denuvo/nintendo-switch-emulator-protectio... There is precedent for that kind of thing, Wii emulation matured early enough that a handful of retail games ha…

It could be they are just waiting for the switch 2 to really focus on it. Somebody mentioned how atlus never removes denuvo and also aren't releasing persona 3 for the switch, but will release it for the switch 2.

Re: Bypassing Denuvo in Hogwarts Legacy

#17

Post by [deleted] »

johnny22 wrote: post #16
jsheard wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Denuvo claims to have a solution to that as well, but to date it hasn't actually shown up in any games. I kind of hope at least one publisher bites just because I'm curious to find out what horrors they've cooked up to make emulation difficult. https://irdeto.com/denuvo/nintendo-switch-emulator-protectio... There is precedent for that kind of thing, Wii emulation matured early enough that a handful of retail games ha…

It could be they are just waiting for the switch 2 to really focus on it. Somebody mentioned how atlus never removes denuvo and also aren't releasing persona 3 for the switch, but will release it for the switch 2.

[deleted]

Re: Bypassing Denuvo in Hogwarts Legacy

#19

Post by aaomidi »

wincy wrote: post #3
jsheard wrote: post #2

For the curious, there's a running tally of which Denuvo games have or haven't been cracked over on Reddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/CrackWatch/comments/p9ak4n/crack_wa... Currently not a single Denuvo game released during 2024 has been cracked, and more games released during 2023 remain uncracked than those that were. It's actually pretty effective unlike most other PC DRM schemes.

I was going to say Lies of P was cracked, but turns out they just removed it from their game. It was up on piracy sites the same day. I wonder why this happens? Does Denuvo cost a lot of ongoing subscription money for a developer or something? I’ve noticed this happens a decent amount.

Denuvo is awful on Linux since switching proton versions causes an activation to happen.

You’re limited to 3 or 5 activations per day.

Re: Bypassing Denuvo in Hogwarts Legacy

#20

Post by mksrew »

the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #12
kiririn wrote: post #10

The performance impact Denuvo is known for is not due to the license checks, it is due to running parts of the game in a custom vm. Hogwarts Legacy is new enough that they might be taking a different approach entirely after the whole vmprotect controversy

Denuvo protected games only let some functions go through that VM and typically not functions invoked every frame. Only when you screw up as a developer and hook the wrong thing will performance suffer.

On the other hand, functions that go through the VM messes with the Branch Predictor and increases Cache Miss, which affects anything that runs after (for a short period tho, depending on how often it runs).

You can argue that a good developer will configure Denuvo to only "compile" functions where those side effects doesn't matter (like after loading screens, during cutscenes, when the game is paused, etc). However, I've seen so many stupid mistakes in this industry that I would never trust the experience and skill of said developers, unless I can asses it myself by working on a daily basis with them.

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