In the endless back-and-forth war between DRM makers and crackers, it looked like Denuvo had established a temporary beachhead recently. A revamped version of the piracy protection (which the community is referring to as "v4") had started appearing in a handful of games in recent months, and v4 seemed more resistant to the kind of quick cracks that had plagued titles like Resident Evil 7 and Mass Effect Andromeda , which each ran older Denuvo versions.

But the Denuvo beachhead has now been breached, as cracking collective CPY has released a DRM-free version of 2Dark, an Alone in the Dark spiritual successor that launched with v4 Denuvo protection about a month ago.

The vagaries of Denuvo mean other games with similar protection (including Dead Rising 4, Nier: Automata, and the recently released Bulletstorm: Full Clip Edition) will still need to be cracked individually. Still, the 2Dark crack proves that the newly revamped version of the DRM is just as breakable as the old version (which was itself considered unbreakable for quite a while). That also means Mass Effect: Andromeda, which had Denuvo v4 patched in alongside other improvements after launch, may soon see a cracked version that includes the game's post-launch updates.

As TorrentFreak points out, the new crack comes with some small level of ironic glee for the cracking community. That's because the developers of 2Dark originally promised to release a DRM-free version of the game in a 2014 European crowdfunding campaign. Big Ben Interactive, which later picked up the publishing rights for the title, told TechRaptor it added Denuvo protection to protect "those first days and weeks of sales" from the effects of piracy.

Big Ben did indeed get a little over a month of effective piracy protection for 2Dark from its embrace of Denuvo. At this point, it seems that's about the most publishers can reasonably hope for if they sign on with the anti-tamper technology today.