In what is considered a huge development in the video game piracy community, a title with Denuvo protection has been hacked by pirates. The development comes just weeks after pirates began wondering whether Denuvo, an anti-piracy measure that has protected dozens of notable releases from being decrypted, has won the battle against piracy.
As first shared on Reddit, the Ubisoft game Starlink: Battle for Atlas has been cracked by voices38. While the game itself isn't particularly noteworthy (it has a score of 74 on Metacritic and certainly doesn't make Ubisoft's most important franchise), the fact that it was able to bypass the Denuvo title is significant in itself.
It's unclear why this game was chosen first, especially since piracy secrecy is kept fairly tightly on Denuvo. However, one Reddit user theorized that Starlink was a title with a patched loophole, meaning it was a good test to see if the new method could work in the first place.
Now the real test is whether current titles like Stellar Blade or Borderlands 4 can become the next titles.
The battle with Denuvo took a long time
For those not in the loop, games with Denuvo have historically been impossible to crack by pirates, forcing malicious actors to buy the game outright or wait for it to be cracked. The latter is the result of one blue moon type thing.
Still, that hasn't stopped the piracy community from thriving. To be honest. For every game that includes Denuvo, there are dozens more that don't, so games like Dying Light: The Beast and Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater are all available for free. Recently, Call of Duty titles have joined the ranks of being decrypted after years of piracy.
In other words, if Denuvo were to crack it, it would be a step forward for the very active piracy community.
