Recently, a statement by dataminer-hacker Andreh went viral in the pirate community, which was noticed by user No-Location-843.
He said that 2K (2K Games) together with Denuvo updated the protection in their games. A "limit" has been set on offline activation — after a certain period of time, the system will check for a license:
For the past couple of months, I've been heavily involved in creating bypasses for Denuvo games using a hypervisor approach [...] I want to share what we've found out about some Denuvo games, especially those published by 2K. It seems 2K is an extremely greedy company: not only do they ban our accounts, which we use to activate games, for weeks, but we also found that they entered into some agreement with Denuvo, due to which activation tokens expire after a certain time.
Andreh clarified that the activation token expires even if the player's hardware has not changed:
This means that even if you successfully activated the game and did not change either the hardware or the Windows version, after some time the game will stop working and ask for a new token.
Currently, this Denuvo update has been noticed in several old games: Marvel’s Midnight Suns, NBA 2K25, and NBA 2K26. It has not yet been confirmed in others. The approximate duration of offline activation is two weeks. If the player fails the license check, the game launch will be blocked:
This is a very dirty move by both 2K and Denuvo, which agreed to such changes. Moreover, this does not affect those who pirate at all — a fix for the hypervisor crack appeared literally in a few hours, and offline activation users can always just get a new token. As a result, only buyers who honestly purchased the game suffer, and all statements by Irdeto that tokens have no expiration date are simply lies.