from Hacker News

Bypassing Denuvo in Hogwarts Legacy

by Epskampie on 4/1/24, 7:36 PM with 100 comments

• by jsheard on 4/1/24, 11:32 PM

  For the curious, there's a running tally of which Denuvo games have or haven't been cracked over on Reddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/CrackWatch/comments/p9ak4n/crack_wa...

  Currently not a single Denuvo game released during 2024 has been cracked, and more games released during 2023 remain uncracked than those that were. It's actually pretty effective unlike most other PC DRM schemes.

• by badsectoracula on 4/2/24, 8:33 AM

  > It doesn’t do that very often. [..] It’s only once every few seconds. [..] To me personally, it tells that Denuvo executes checks so infrequently, that the likelyhood of it causing FPS drop seems rather low.

  Keep in mind that FPS drops are only one issue with Denuvo's performance. Another common one (which i think is more common in recent releases, judging from comments i've seen) is frame pracing/stuttering/etc - people very often mention in Reddit threads about Denuvo's removal from a game that the update that removed Denuvo fixed these for them (of course it could also be some other change the game had, but this has been the case with more than one game and games receive other patches before removing Denuvo, so i have a hard time accepting all are coincidences).

  A slow/lengthy call every few seconds wont affect your average framerate (which is what often developers check for performance measurement) but it will affect your frame pacing and give a stuttery feel. Most people tend to call this a "performance issue" (regardless if it is due to performance or not).

• by kiririn on 4/1/24, 11:59 PM

  The performance impact Denuvo is known for is not due to the license checks, it is due to running parts of the game in a custom vm. Hogwarts Legacy is new enough that they might be taking a different approach entirely after the whole vmprotect controversy

• by lordgrenville on 4/1/24, 11:52 PM

  Pity most of the interesting information is missing because of legal concerns.

• by p0w3n3d on 4/2/24, 8:41 AM

  There are already many games that are not playable because servers used for DRM were turned off. In this matter I support cracking such "play only online" DRMs, because when I pay for a game I want to play it even after a few years, and maybe even especially after a few years

• by snvzz on 4/2/24, 1:17 AM

  Denuvo is why I do not own this game.

  And Denuvo will be why I pirate it, should I get tired of waiting for the vendor to remove that crap.

• by zooweemama on 4/2/24, 6:39 AM

  I sincerely thought that Denuvo was a boss in the game.

• by metalcrow on 4/2/24, 12:56 AM

  I'm really disappointed this doesn't include technical details, especially the bit about "The game can not run without the token, as it is used to e.g. decrypt certain values at runtime and similar things."

  Is the game installed encrypted? What encryption schema allows you to decrypt the same set of data using multiple different keys in this way?

  If the game isn't installed encrypted it seems easiest just to not allow it to encrypt itself before running.

• by redder23 on 4/2/24, 12:58 AM

  The so-called "rumors" that Denuvo kills performance are not rumors. It's just not true ANYMORE. Older versions impacted performance heavily, but later on the performance impact became negligible.