Denuvo sues anonymous cracker ‘voices38’ over DRM bypasses on 26 games
Denuvo, the company behind the widely used anti-tamper DRM software found in many major PC releases, has launched legal action against a prolific but anonymous game cracker. According to Rock Paper Shotgun, Denuvo filed a DMCA complaint on Monday 14th September in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, targeting a person or group operating under the name “voices38”.
The filing, obtained by Torrent Freak, alleges that voices38 has bypassed DRM restrictions across 26 copyrighted games, stripping out protections designed to control access and enabling pirated copies to circulate. The list of affected titles reportedly includes Black Myth: Wukong, Resident Evil Requiem and Doom: The Dark Ages.
Notably, this is not a conventional piracy or copyright infringement claim, since Denuvo does not hold the copyright to the games it protects. Instead, the company is relying on a section of US copyright law that bans the circumvention of digital locks on protected works, as well as the distribution of tools or guidance enabling others to do so. Denuvo is seeking damages and an injunction preventing the removal of its anti-tamper software from any past, present or future video game.
A significant complication for Denuvo is that it does not actually know who voices38 is. The company says it has traced a Discord ID, a Reddit account and several Steam profiles it believes are linked to the cracker, but the defendant is named in court documents only as “an unknown individual or entity”, alongside ten further unnamed defendants. Torrent Freak suggests the complaint may partly be a legal mechanism allowing Denuvo to seek permission to subpoena Valve, Reddit and Discord for further identifying information.
Should the case succeed, it could set a precedent that discourages other crackers from targeting Denuvo’s protection, or make it easier for the company to have links to circumvention tools taken down. For now, the person or people behind voices38 appear unfazed. Rock Paper Shotgun cites a Reddit comment purportedly posted by the cracker in response to the lawsuit.
“All is fine. Everything will continue as normal.”
Denuvo’s DRM remains a point of contention among PC players, many of whom seek to remove it not for piracy but over concerns about its impact on game performance, with debate ongoing about how significant that impact actually is. Denuvo pledged in 2023 to establish independent performance testing to address its reputation for hurting frame rates, though it is unclear whether that initiative has materialised. A further criticism levelled at the software is that it can require online verification checks to run, raising concerns among preservationists about the long-term playability of protected games once servers or support are eventually withdrawn.