long story short, I bought FFXV long before I cared about Denuvo but never played it, the game got cracked but Square Enix still haven’t removed Denuvo from the game on Steam; now I don’t want to install Denuvo spyware, if I download the game from Steam, don’t launch it, and just overwrite the .exe with the one from a repack, am I in the clear? would it work? I’d like to get the achievements, otherwise I’d just install a repack
You might also need to copy some other files over, depending on what’s in the crack. Sometimes they also have a steam_api.ini file and maybe a .DLL file, in addition to the .exe.
But yeah, you’d really just want to copy what’s in the crack over and overwrite anything it’s trying to. If it doesn’t work, you can just “verify game files” in steam to get the originals back.
Of course this also assumes the crack is for the Steam version. If it was cracked for the EGS version, it won’t necessarily work with a Steam copy.
good observation, the executable might not be enough, depending on how the crack was engineered. thanks!