Developer hacks hated PC protection system Denuvo and discover things may not be as they seem

You should believe nobody, or at least that’s what the people who want you to believe that tell you to believe. For the last few years anti-piracy DRM Denuvo has been blamed incessantly for ruining the game performance of legitimate purchases, while pirates got away scott-free with playing the game the way it should be. However, a hacker has thrown shade on that suggestion with findings that make out that this is not the case at all.

Of course, who do you believe? The seemingly thousands of gamers who adamantly say that their games run like filth when Denuvo is present as companies try to protect their bottom line at the expense of players, or some dude from the internet? Let’s be brave and make our own minds up.

It has taken six months for DRM developer Maurice Heumann to finally crack the Denuvo protection system on Hogwarts Legacy – not to pirate the game, but for research purposes – for context, Hogwarts has been cracked for over a year and has been available as an illegal torrent since then).

Heumann posted on X, “I spent the last 5 months reverse engineering Denuvo’s protection in Hogwarts Legacy and finally managed to bypass it using more than 2000 hooks.

One of the toughest challenges of my life.”

The post then contained a link to his blog, which you can read here for yourself.

Heaumann deliberately leaves out a lot of the key details of his method so that any Tom, Dick, or Harry can’t just download a copy of 7Zip off the internet and have a playable game within minutes, but some of the findings he did reveal were interesting.

The developer carried out a series of tests to see how many times the DRM software made calls, therefore with each call potentially impacting software performance, and found that the calls were infrequent, only one or two times per second, or during loading times. This leads Heumann to believe that Denuvo cannot have as much impact as, to his knowledge, the DRM is not doing enough consistently to cause a slowdown.

Heumann states, “To me personally, it tells that Denuvo executes checks so infrequently, that the likelihood of it causing major performance issues seems rather low. I don’t know whether this is actually the case or not. This requires a different, more time-consuming measurement, which to me doesn’t seem worth setting up.

Next time I am going to play a Denuvo-protected game, I am not going to worry about it being the major cause of performance issues.”

I spent the last 5 months reverse engineering Denuvo's protection in Hogwarts Legacy and finally managed to bypass it using more than 2000 hooks

One of the toughest challenges of my life.

Here's my blog post about it:https://t.co/DLf6g5nv0n

— Maurice Heumann (@momo5502) April 1, 2024

It is important to reiterate here that these tests were performed solely on Hogwarts Legacy, and even then with the aim of getting the game to boot to the main menu.

Many gamers who have experienced poor performance in Denuvo-protected games will not be so quick to accept Neumann’s findings and may point to the fact that his line of work as a DRM Developer in the first place invalidates them.

Denuvo DRM remains an important tool in the armory of AAA publishers looking to ensure their games don’t end up as torrents within minutes of release, even if that may, or may not come at the expense of the people actually buying the products.

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