3dm, a Chinese group known for releasing cracked versions of pirated games, has stated that it has successfully broken Denuvo’s anti-tamper program, which is used on games like Dragon Age: Inquisition and FIFA 2015.

Although it is generally referred to as “Denuvo DRM” in gaming media, Denuvo states that its software does not actually work as a Digital Rights Management (DRM) program.

DRM programs are meant to prevent games from being played by non-legitimate owners, and game cracks circumvent those protections. Denuvo’s anti-tamper software is designed to prevent the game from being cracked, preserving whatever form of DRM it already uses.

So essentially, Denuvo protects the software that protects the game.

While Denuvo went uncracked for several months, the group that broke through the software stated that they worked on it for less than 15 days. They began trying to crack the program in November at the release of Dragon Age: Inquisition, the latest entry Bioware’s highly acclaimed Dragon Age franchise.

3dm’s announcement stated that while they had broken the code on Denuvo, they still had more tweaking to do before they released their information, which will likely be used by software pirates to create unlocked versions of the games that use Denuvo.

Controversies surrounding Denuvo

Video game piracy obviously benefits from 3dm’s success, but there also have been numerous concerns raised by legitimate game owners over the functions of Denuvo’s anti-tamper software.

In November, threads such as this one on Neogaf circulated on several video game and PC forums claiming the methods Denuvo used to protect games had a side effect of shortening the lifespan of solid-state drives (SSDs).

There were also claims that the software negatively affected game performance because it unnecessarily hogged computer resources.

Denuvo issued statements in its FAQ refuting these claims.

“Anti-Tamper has no perceptible effect on game performance nor is Anti-Tamper to blame for any game crashes of genuine executables,” Denuvo’s FAQ reads. “As mentioned before, Denuvo Anti-Tamper does not constantly read or write any data to storage media.”

Despite the company’s assurances, many gamers still worry about that alleged performance issues that could be caused by the software.