Denuvo sues the cracker voices38 over 26 DRM-protected games
Denuvo has filed a DMCA anti-circumvention lawsuit in California against the anonymous cracker voices38, listing 26 games whose anti-tamper protection it says was bypassed.
Denuvo has run out of patience with the cracker known as voices38. The Austrian anti-tamper company filed a lawsuit in the Northern District of California on 14 September accusing the anonymous hacker of bypassing its protection on at least 26 games and of feeding pirated copies to the public.
What the complaint alleges
The filing, Denuvo GmbH v. Voices38, lists the defendant as 'voices38, an unknown individual or entity', alongside ten unnamed Does. Denuvo, which is owned by the Netherlands-based Irdeto group, says voices38 'has bypassed the Denuvo Anti-Tamper and thus bypassed DRM restrictions, removed copyright protections restricting unlawful access, and allowed for the creation and distribution of pirated versions' of every game on its list. The claim is brought under the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, not for copying the games themselves, and each title is described in the same repeated paragraph with its publisher named. The company also identifies several works by copyright registration, including Electronic Arts' Need for Speed Heat, EA Sports FIFA 20 and Star Wars: Squadrons.
The 26 games named
The titles span blockbusters and back catalogue: Hogwarts Legacy, Black Myth Wukong, Resident Evil Requiem, Stellar Blade, Doom: The Dark Ages, Pragmata, 007 First Light, Mafia: The Old Country, LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight, Sonic Frontiers, Assassin's Creed Mirage, Anno 1800, Total War: Three Kingdoms, Hi-Fi Rush, Dead Space Remastered, Star Wars: Squadrons, Need for Speed Heat, Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit Remastered, EA Sports FIFA 20, EA Sports FIFA 21, F1 2021, PES 2020, Starlink: Battle for Atlas, Shining Resonance Refrain, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World and Shin Megami Tensei III Nocturne HD Remaster. TorrentFreak notes that the list is already out of date: voices38 has released further cracks for Persona 3 Reload and Star Wars Outlaws since Denuvo compiled it.
How Denuvo hopes to identify the cracker
The complaint does not name a person, so it leans on account data instead. It reproduces the Discord user ID tied to the voices38 handle, seven Steam profile links, and a Reddit account, and pleads jurisdiction on the basis that both Reddit and Discord are headquartered in the Northern District of California. The working assumption is that once the case is filed Denuvo can ask the court for permission to subpoena Discord, Reddit and Valve for the registration details behind those accounts, which is the usual route from a pseudonym to a defendant.
What is being asked for, and the response
Denuvo wants a finding that the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions were wilfully violated, an injunction barring voices38 from 'circumventing Denuvo's Anti-Tamper in any past, present, or future video game' - a phrasing broad enough to cover titles that do not yet exist - and general, special, actual and statutory damages plus the defendant's profits, with a jury trial. The cracker does not appear troubled. Posting on the CrackWatch forum on Reddit, voices38 wrote: 'All is fine. Everything will continue as normal.' Earlier this year a wave of hypervisor-based bypasses let pirates crack Denuvo-protected games on release day, and voices38's older-style patching output accelerated over the summer, with five Denuvo releases in a single day earlier this month.
Our opinion
Denuvo's problem has never really been one cracker; it is that the company sells a promise of delay, and delay is only worth money while the clock is still running. Suing voices38 does two useful things for the business regardless of the outcome: it makes an example of the patient, old-school cracks that quietly defeat anti-tamper without asking players to disable Windows security, and it gives Denuvo a legal route to the account records behind a pseudonym. What it cannot do is make the protection harder. Paying customers are still stuck with the version of the game that stutters under the DRM while the cracked one runs clean, and that asymmetry, not the pirates, is what keeps sending people to torrent sites. A lawsuit is a maintenance cost, not a fix, and the industry knows it.