Pirates say they’ve already cracked Resident Evil 7's PC version and have found a way to disable the game’s anti-piracy measures less than a week after release.
As TorrentFreak reports, a piracy group called CONSPIR4CY say they figured out how to crack Resident Evil 7 just five days after the game’s release. This has apparently allowed players around the globe to download working pirated copies of the game, despite the fact that it uses strict DRM that’s meant to prevent that.
Resident Evil 7 uses Denuvo, a robust software protection that links each copy of the game to one specific computer. Denuvo, which is used by many different game publishers across the world, is popular because it’s ostensibly supposed to stop piracy. By using Denuvo, publishers hope to ensure that nobody can buy a game, download it, and share the files with other people via torrents or other distribution services.
However, in recent years, pirates have found ways to crack Denuvo’s copyright protection, sometimes months after release, as in the case of Rise of the Tomb Raider. Resident Evil 7 marks the first time that Denuvo crackers have succeeded within a week of a game’s launch.
Some fans have complained that Denuvo is unwieldy and annoying. It forces games to be dependent on third-party activation servers and makes certain types of modding impossible. Publishers use the program regardless, in hopes of boosting game sales by rendering piracy more difficult.
Yet people appear to be finding ways to bypass Denuvo more quickly every day. Last year, months after pirates cracked games like Doom and Inside, the publishers of those games removed Denuvo from them. At the time, a Denuvo representative told Kotaku that Bethesda removed Doom’s anti-piracy service because “it had accomplished its purpose by keeping the game safe from piracy during the initial sales window.”
Update—Jan 31 3:15 p.m.: Denuvo has offered comment on the situation. Their statement follows:
It’s correct that the title in question was cracked some days after release. Given the fact that every unprotected title is cracked on the day of release - as well as every unprotected game update - our solution still made a difference for this title.
Please note that we always position our Anti-Tamper solution as hard to crack, not as uncrackable. So far only one piracy group has been able to bypass it.
As always, we continue working to improve our solution to create security updates for upcoming Anti-Tamper versions. We will do the same with the learning from this bypass.