Summary
Whenever anew game releases, specifically onPC, providedit doesn’t have Denuvo, it becomes a race between pirates to see who can “crack” the game first. In the case ofMarvel’s Spider-Man 2, the game didn’t even make it two minutes before it was reportedly cracked. Elsewhere,The Last of Us Part 2 didn’t even make it a full day before it found itself in the hands of pirates.
However, for as quickly as new games do get cracked, recentCall of Dutytitles have eluded pirates. Due to a proprietary DRM coupled with an always-online connection, the games have been next to impossible to break, but that appears to have changed.
Activision Is Almost Surely Working On A Way To Patch This
As first spotted on Reddit, a Call of Duty cracker, or person dedicated to finding a way to make the game available to pirates,managed to break Vanguard, nearly four years after its release.
Using their method, they were able to replicate their success across a number of recent Call of Duty titles, managing to release the campaigns ofModern Warfare (2019)andModern Warfare 2 (2022). The pirate alleges thatit took them about a week to figure things out, and they’ve since released their source code in the hope that other pirates can replicate their success with even more recent titles (Modern Warfare 3 and Black Ops 6).
That said, it appears that cracking Black Ops 6 might be harder than expected, as that game apparently uses a different code, making any attempt potentially futile.
Still, it represents a major development in the pirate community that someone was able to figure out Activision’s methods to break its recent Call of Duty titles, which were widely considered to be impossible to crack. It’s highly likely that the company has become aware of the exploit and will find a way to make things doubly harder for its 2025 release.
