It took roughly two years for crackers to put the first dents in Denuvo's surprisingly robust anti-piracy protection for PC games. Now, a Denuvo-protected game has been cracked just six weeks after its release, seemingly presaging an increased pace of efforts against the DRM scheme.

TorrentFreak reports on the new crack for indie critical darling Inside, which hit the scene earlier this week. The crack comes courtesy of CONSPIR4CY (aka CPY), the same group responsible for a crack of Denuvo-protected Rise of the Tomb Raider earlier this month.

While CPY's ROTTR crack came nearly seven months after the game was released, Inside's protection was broken about six weeks after it launched on the PC. This is an important distinction, since the bulk of a game's legitimate sales tend to come in the first few months after release (or during sales much later in their lifecycle). If crackers can manage to get the wait time for a Denuvo crack down to a matter of days, the protection's value to developers and publishers could wither.

There's not much public discussion of how the new crack works exactly, but cracker Voksi (responsible for an earlier, since-patched Denuvo crack) writes on Discord that CPY seems to have made a workaround for the multiple in-game checks set up by Denuvo:

They catched [sic] all triggers in the game and then memory patched the executable so triggers can be never executed. Also they patched the license checks and anti-debug checks. But every Denuvo game have its own pattern. Meaning that can take few days or a week for them to properly patch the next Denuvo game.

Speaking to TorrentFreak, Royalgamer06 also noted that after the ROTTR crack, it only took two additional weeks for CPY to find all those triggers in Inside. "They either waited to release it (just before the new Deus Ex game is nice timing) or it’s all the time it took them to patch all in-game triggers and polish the crack,” he said.

Denuvo could of course update any cracked games in a way that moves those piracy-checking triggers around, forcing an endless game of hide-and-seek inside the code. But if finding and getting around those triggers only takes a week or two to do (a process that's likely to become more efficient as community attention increases), that could be a losing battle for Denuvo.

As Royalgamer06 points out, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided is the latest big-budget game to be released with Denuvo protection. If that game can be cracked in the next few weeks, it's probably safe to say that the floodgates have officially been opened wide, and PC gaming's most robust bit of DRM has been well and truly damaged.