The anti-piracy firm Denuvo has filed a lawsuit in a US federal court against an anonymous game cracker, in what appears to be the first time the Austrian company has taken such a case in the United States.
The complaint, filed on Monday at the US District Court for the Northern District of California and obtained by TorrentFreak, accuses a person using the handle 'voices38' of bypassing Denuvo's Anti-Tamper protection on 26 games.
The titles listed range from older releases such as FIFA 20 and PES 2020 to recent blockbusters including Hogwarts Legacy, Black Myth: Wukong, Resident Evil Requiem and Doom: The Dark Ages, with publishers named in the filing including Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, SEGA, Capcom, Bethesda and Sony.
Denuvo does not own the copyright to any of those games, which is why the case rests where it does. Unable to bring a conventional infringement claim, the company relies on the anti-circumvention provisions of the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which prohibit bypassing a digital lock controlling access to a copyrighted work and allow anyone harmed by such bypasses to sue.
Denuvo argues it is harmed directly, since its business is selling tamper protection to game companies including EA, Ubisoft, Capcom and Sony. None of the rightsholders named in the complaint are parties to the lawsuit.
The context is a difficult year for the technology. Earlier in 2026 a wave of hypervisor bypasses allowed Denuvo-protected games to be cracked on release day. Separately, 'voices38' has continued releasing traditional cracks that patch Denuvo's checks directly and do not require users to disable Windows security features, an approach that has proved popular; earlier this month five such releases appeared on a single day.
There is, however, an obstacle at the centre of the case: nobody knows who 'voices38' is. The complaint names the defendant as "an unknown individual or entity", alongside ten unnamed Doe defendants.
Denuvo has assembled what it can. The filing lists a Discord user ID, a Reddit account and seven Steam profiles that it believes are connected to the cracker, on the reasoning that games must be bought before they can be cracked, and Steam purchases carry payment details. With a case on file, the company can ask the court for permission to subpoena Valve, Reddit and Discord for the associated account details, though no discovery request has yet appeared on the docket.
The complaint contains two anti-circumvention claims and seeks damages, together with an injunction barring the defendant from circumventing Denuvo's Anti-Tamper protection in any games, including future ones that have yet to be created.
That last clause is doing more work than it appears. The list of 26 games was already out of date when the complaint was filed: in recent weeks cracks for Persona 3 Reload and Star Wars Outlaws have been released under the same handle. Responding to news of the lawsuit, 'voices38' wrote on Reddit: "All is fine. Everything will continue as normal."
Set out plainly, then, the court in California is being asked to prohibit a person whose identity is unknown from interfering with software that has not been written. Both halves of that arrangement are currently hypothetical, and the injunction would join them.
The Questionable Times' analysts regard this as the most efficient instrument in modern litigation. A conventional lawsuit decays, because the world keeps producing new facts. This one has been immunised: the defendant cannot be superseded, having never been identified, and the protected works cannot be omitted, not yet existing.
The Department of Unnecessary Research therefore notes that the complaint was out of date exactly once, on the day it was filed, and has been future-proof ever since.