Denuvo has fallen in Assassin's Creed Shadows — the game now launches without any workarounds

One of Ubisoft's most heavily protected games has finally given in. A hacker going by voices38 announced the release of a classic crack for Assassin's Creed Shadows 1 and did so personally, from a verified account in the community that tracks the state of DRM protections. It's a 144 GB version for Ubisoft Connect. Within the first forty minutes, the post had racked up close to two hundred comments and nearly unanimous approval from the audience.

What makes the news especially satisfying is that this same hacker was already written off a month ago. Back in June, rumors spread online that voices38 [had stopped trying to crack the game[/url] because of an unbeatable combination of the latest Denuvo and Ubisoft's own in-house protections. At the time, we noted that the information came from a source with a questionable reputation, and the hacker himself never confirmed anything 1 he's simply not in the habit of announcing his work in advance, and he doesn't let others speak on his behalf. As it turned out, that skepticism was warranted: while everyone was busy discussing his supposed surrender, he was quietly finishing the job.

Now, as for why "without any workarounds" matters so much. Assassin's Creed Shadows' protection had already been bypassed back in February, but through a method that relies on a hypervisor: users had to dig into Windows settings and disable security features, and the result was finicky at best. A classic crack requires none of that 1 the game simply runs. That's exactly the joke voices38 built his release around. Alongside it, he included a "complete guide to launching on Windows, Linux via Proton, and macOS via CrossOver" consisting of exactly one step: apply the crack and launch the game. The note attached to the guide was short: "Lol."

The community loved it. The author of the top comment asked the hacker how he even walks around with balls of steel like that 1 which is, honestly, a pretty accurate description of the move. The game had held out against a classic crack for almost sixteen months, and for all that time it was considered that the combination of Denuvo and Ubisoft's proprietary layers was simply too much to crack. For Denuvo itself, this is also an unpleasant wake-up call: over the past few months, voices38 has already dealt with DOOM: The Dark Ages, Assassin's Creed Mirage: Valley of Memory, and Hogwarts Legacy.

He works methodically: pick a target, prep the tools, test, release, and patch things up if needed. He rarely makes public statements 1 it seems he'd rather let the releases speak for him. As for Assassin's Creed Shadows itself, it's an action game set in feudal Japan during the Sengoku era, featuring two protagonists: the nimble kunoichi Naoe and the powerful samurai Yasuke. The game launched in March 2025 on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S.

Do you think there's even a point to protection that eventually gets cracked anyway 1 or would sales have suffered even more without it? Share your thoughts in the comments.