Just last month, Resident Evil Requiem became the first 2026 game with Denuvo to be cracked by Voices38, but just a few weeks later, it looks like most games with the anti-piracy technology have been cracked or bypassed.

According to a post by FitGirl, a popular game repacker, all single-player, non-VR games have been either cracked or bypassed. Most of these games have been bypassed through Hypervisor workarounds, which run underneath Windows to trick the DRM into thinking it's running on different hardware. This is opposed to a "true crack," which doesn't need this kind of risky workaround to run.

While these Hypervisor bypasses are dangerous, that hasn't stopped people from using them to pirate games much earlier than they otherwise would have been able to. After all, Pragmata had a Hypervisor bypass before it even came out.

In a statement to TorrentFreak, Denuvo parent company Irdeto claims that it is "working on a countermeasure while warning that the new cracks are a security concern."

I've reached out to Irdeto for comment as well, and I'll update this story if and when I hear back. But, even if the company is working on a countermeasure for this new wave of Hypervisor bypasses, the speed with which these bypasses are coming begs the question: Is Denuvo even worth it anymore?

Performance in the Age of Expensive Hardware

One of the biggest problems with Denuvo over the years has been the performance impact. For a technology that's ostensibly supposed to punish people who download games illegally, it has a huge impact on people who do buy the game. And now that PC hardware like graphics cards are getting more expensive due to AI, taking any kind of performance loss through unnecessary software is getting harder to deal with.

That performance hit was likely a worthy sacrifice in the eyes of game publishers because it stopped people from pirating the game within the first couple of weeks of release. But now that these Hypervisor bypasses are becoming available within hours of a game coming out, it does seem like there's little point to this form of DRM anymore.

To be clear, there are still very clear risks to running this kind of exploit on your gaming PC. You have to shut down basically every form of protection in order to get it running right, and because it's software running on ring -1 (here's a handy Medium post explaining how that works), or under the Windows kernel itself, it really opens your PC to attack. However, it doesn't seem like that risk is stopping people from using these exploits, especially when games and hardware keep getting more expensive.

Jackie Thomas is the Hardware and Buying Guides Editor at IGN and the PC components queen. You can follow her @Jackiecobra