Denuvo asks to subpoena Discord, Valve and Reddit to identify hacker it’s suing for cracking its DRM protection
The company sued ‘voices38’ last month in the hope it could reveal their details
DRM company Denuvo has asked a court for permission to subpoena Discord, Valve and Reddit to identify a game hacker it’s suing for releasing game ‘cracks’ that remove its protection software.
Last month Denuvo targeted ‘voices38’, a prolific games cracker who has released cracks for nearly 30 games which specifically remove Denuvo’s DRM from them.
According to the complaint, which lists 26 titles, 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 each game.
The list includes Resident Evil Requiem, Stellar Blade, Black Myth Wukong, 007 First Light, Pragmata, Hogwarts Legacy, Sonic Frontiers, Assassin’s Creed Mirage, Mafia: The Old Country, Doom: The Dark Ages and Dead Space Remastered.
Although Denuvo wasn’t able to name voices38 in the complaint, it does list their Discord user ID, their Reddit account and seven Steam accounts associated with them.
It was presumed Denuvo hoped that by filing its case, it could then ask for permission to subpoena Discord, Reddit and Valve to ask for details associated with the accounts, allowing them to identify the person involved.
As reported by TorrentFreak, Denuvo has now done exactly that, asking the US District Court for the Northern District of California to give it permission to subpoena all three companies in an attempt “solely to determine [the] defendant’s true identity”.
The new motion explains that Denuvo already reached out to the three companies in an attempt to get the information without having to resort to a subpoena. It says that Discord failed to reply, while Valve and Reddit said their privacy policies meant they couldn’t share the information without any legal backing (hence the subpoena request).
While the case is ongoing, Tom’s Hardware reports that a separate group called DenuvOwO, which released cracks for dozens of Denuvo-affected games, has disbanded, reportedly citing the court case as a concern.
Denuvo’s anti-tamper software has been the source of controversy for some time now, as some players believe it can have an adverse effect on PC game performance.
At the end of last year, the game pirating community created a bypass which installs a driver at a PC’s kernel level, and can intercept and respond to Denuvo security checks, theoretically blowing open Denuvo’s security.
Some players are uncomfortable with the idea of giving kernel-level access to their PC to software that was created by a hacker, however, and as a result there are still those who download ‘cracks’, which are essentially unauthorized patches for games they either own or have pirated.
