This is decidedly not what I’d expect to be discussed at Thotcon. That said, super interesting!
As an avid pirate, I’ll say these days even the Denuvo game which were going years without cracks now have “cracks”, although they rely on hypervisor fixes and disabling secure boot and giving the hypervisor cracks unfettered access to your system to intercept the Denuvo checks. [0] It’s a dangerous game we’re playing to keep these AAA games bottom lines fat.
> This get you to within 85% to 90% of original perf of an untransformed binary.
Punishing every one of your paying customers with a 10-15% performance penalty for crimes they didn't commit, lovely work you've committed yourself to doing.
As an avid pirate, I’ll say these days even the Denuvo game which were going years without cracks now have “cracks”, although they rely on hypervisor fixes and disabling secure boot and giving the hypervisor cracks unfettered access to your system to intercept the Denuvo checks. [0] It’s a dangerous game we’re playing to keep these AAA games bottom lines fat.
[0] https://www.thefpsreview.com/2026/04/03/denuvo-has-been-brok...
Punishing every one of your paying customers with a 10-15% performance penalty for crimes they didn't commit, lovely work you've committed yourself to doing.
Which provides way more information than the article
I don't think any competent security researcher has anything positive to say about "security through obscurity"
at best this is lawyer position
Some people find cracking them interesting and fun.