South Park: The Fractured But Whole's DRM Has Already Been Cracked

Ubisoft's South Park: The Fractured But Whole is currently available for home consoles and PC. The game is the typical South Park adventure, filled with crude jokes and lewd content. Well, even though the game has only been out for a day, it has already been cracked.

DSO Gaming is reporting that the regular sites that are raging rivers for illegal content have been hosting the crack for South Park: The Fractured But Whole. Yes, even though the game just launched on October 17th for the Xbox One, PS4 and PC, there is already a crack for the game's anti-tamper Denuvo DRM.

Previously it would take several months to crack Denuvo, but crackers have been cutting down on the time. One particular Italian scene has been working diligently to bring down Denuvo's anti-tamper tech as quickly as possible, so much so that the small team has managed to reduce crack times from months down to weeks, and now from weeks down to days. It won't be long before cracks will be issued within hours.

DSO is also reporting that the scenes have already cracked other games from other publishers that have recently come out, including FIFA 18 from Electronic Arts, Middle-Earth: Shadow of War from Warner Bros., and Total War: Warhammer 2 from Sega. So, the cracks aren't publisher specific, but there's an aim to take down Denuvo at all costs.

One definitely has to wonder if publishers will continue to rely on Denuvo when games like South Park: The Fractured But Whole are being cracked in under a day?

One of the other issues this raises is how this inconveniences legitimate customers. Basically, the people who pirate the games for free don't have to worry about any issues blockading them from playing their games, and they get the benefit of playing offline without having to check in or prove they own the game. However, those who actually are first-adopters and pay top dollar for a day-one experience are inconvenienced with DRM.

This was especially egregious for gamers who wanted to support Tequila Softworks' RiME, which launched with a lot of problems on PC that were spawned from Denuvo, which caused massive frame-rate and performance issues for the game. Thankfully, the developers said that if RiME got cracked that it would remove Denuvo from the title via a patch, and shortly thereafter the crackers managed to bypass Denuvo, so a patch was issued to remove the DRM from the game for legitimate customers.

A lot of publishers use some form of DRM to appease investors and shareholders who feel as if top-name games need some form of copyright protection as a means of protecting their investment(s). However, at this juncture -- as is evident with games like South Park: The Fractured But Whole -- literally the only people the DRM is inconveniencing are the legitimate customers since pirates can have access to a cracked version of the game literally just one day after the game released.

Now we see if Ubisoft will continue to keep Denuvo within the game or if it will take a cue from the RiME developer and remove the DRM from South Park: The Fractured But Whole.