In what is considered a massive development in the video game pirate community, pirates have cracked a Denuvo-protected title. The development comes just weeks after pirates began wondering whether Denuvo, the anti-piracy measure that has protected dozens of notable messages from being breached, had won the war against piracy.
As first shared on Reddit, Ubisoft's Starlink: Battle for Atlas has been cracked by 38 votes. While the game itself isn't particularly noteworthy (it has a 74 on Metacritic and certainly doesn't make Ubisoft's most important franchises), the fact that it was possible to bypass a Denuvo title is significant in itself.
It's not clear why this game was chosen first, as pirate secrets are fairly closely guarded, especially Denuvo, but one user on Reddit believed that Starlink was the title that contained the patched loopholes, meaning it was a good test to see if the new methods could even work.
Now the real test will be whether other current titles like Stellar Blade or Borderlands 4 could be.
The battle against the Danube was long
For those not in the loop, games that contain Denuvo have historically been impossible to pirate, forcing would-be bad actors to either buy the game outright or wait for the game to be cracked, a once-in-a-blue-moon kind of result.
Still, that hasn't stopped the pirate community from thriving, frankly. Because for every game that includes Denuvo, there are dozens that don't, meaning Dying Light: The Beast and Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater were all made available for free. Recently, Call of Duty titles have been among those that have been hacked after years of pirate work.
Which means that if Denuvo is cracked, it will take the extremely active hacking community to the next level.
