DD2 is a single player game, those generally don't maintain their active player counts forever. It peaked at 228,285 concurrent (not total) Steam players which are pretty good numbers.

The peak was the release, after which it promptly cratered. It was below half that within a month and below 14k the next month.

This obsession with concurrent player counts, especially for single player games, is just obtuse. It's not actually telling what you want to believe.

Even if we do go by concurrent players, Black Myth Wukong had one of the biggest launches in Steams history with a peak concurrent of 2.4 million players, and that hasn't been cracked either after five months.

there's only one person releasing cracks for modern denuvo and their last release was a year ago, and they're crazy

Apparently the people doing this kind of work have been disproportionately in Eastern Europe and what's going on in Ukraine has so disrupted that part of the world that they currently have bigger problems.

So then you're waiting for either that region to stabilize or demand for cracks to cause people somewhere else to get into the game, and in the interim you effectively have a temporary supply chain issue.

But it's hard to give credit for the ravages of war to the DRM pushers and it's not at all obvious that they've secured any kind of permanent advantage.

Who was cracking denuvo on a regular basis back in say, 2021, before the war started? Basically no one. So I'm not sure that's true.

There is an ocean of difference between "basically no one" and "actually no one" when you only need one person in the world to do it.