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.
[0] https://www.thefpsreview.com/2026/04/03/denuvo-has-been-brok...
disabling secure boot
...making it even more clear what "secure" boot actually secures: the control others have over your own computer.
What I'm wondering for a while now: How do the game streaming services run the Denuvo titles? Do they get special builds? They will not run on bare metal hardware but in some kind of VM right? Wouldn't Denuvo detect that and stop working?
The main site to get these hypervisor cracks thoroughly vets them, requiring the devs to publish the source code to it all.