Denuvo is suing a cracker it can't name yet - and that tells you how the DRM fight is going

Twenty-six games. That's how many titles Denuvo lists in the lawsuit it has just filed against a cracker known only as voices38 - a list that, per TorrentFreak's report on the complaint, runs from Need for Speed Heat and FIFA 20 through Hogwarts Legacy and Black Myth: Wukong to Resident Evil Requiem and Doom: The Dark Ages. Old catalog stuff and big recent releases in the same filing.

The suit was filed by Denuvo GmbH in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California and rests on two claims under the DMCA's anti-circumvention provision, 17 U.S.C. § 1201. Denuvo wants unspecified monetary damages and an injunction barring the defendant from circumventing its Anti-Tamper protection in any game - including ones that haven't shipped yet.

Here's the awkward part: the defendant is described as an unknown individual or entity. Denuvo is suing a handle. What the complaint does have is a trail of accounts - one Discord user ID, one Reddit account and seven Steam profiles it believes belong to the same person. TorrentFreak notes there's no discovery request on the docket yet but expects one to follow, with Valve, Reddit and Discord as the obvious targets. Steam accounts tend to have payment details attached, so that's the thread I'd pull first too.

voices38's public reaction on Reddit was two short sentences: "All is fine. Everything will continue as normal." Bravado or genuine confidence, I can't tell you. Nothing in the report says where this person lives, and that's the whole ballgame. A California judgment against someone who isn't within reach of a U.S. court is a very expensive piece of paper.

My read, as someone who has never loved Denuvo: going to court is what you do when the technical side isn't holding by itself. For years the pitch to publishers was simple - protect the launch window, because that's where the sales are. If one person keeps putting out conventional cracks that, as TorrentFreak points out, don't even require users to switch off Windows security features, that pitch gets harder to make with a straight face. Lawyers become part of the product.

And I'll be blunt about where I sit. I don't pirate games and I'm not going to cheer for someone who does it at scale. But I'm also the guy who stares at frame-time graphs for fun, and I've never been happy about paying customers running an extra protection layer that the people who didn't pay get to skip. If Denuvo unmasks voices38, it removes one name from the scene. It doesn't change that equation for a single legitimate buyer.

The next thing worth watching is boring and procedural: whether a request for early discovery lands on the docket, and how Valve, Reddit and Discord respond to it. That filing, not the complaint, decides whether this case ever has a real defendant.

Image: Joe Gratz / CC0, source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Courtroom_One_Gavel_-_Flickr_-_Joe_Gratz.jpg