Notorious game cracker “Empress” removed Denuvo from Hogwarts Legacy

In context: Denuvo is an anti-tamper technology and DRM solution created by Austrian software company Denuvo Software. The tool is often adopted by large game publishers (and sometimes by indie studios) to protect their latest titles against piracy. There’s someone, however, who has apparently made cracking this powerful DRM their life’s mission.

“Empress” has once again achieved the impossible. After a brief beta period managed through their recently introduced Telegram channel, the notorious game hacker has now released a “cracked” version of Hogwarts Legacy. The new action RPG set in Harry Potter’s wizarding world was released just a couple of weeks ago, and it likely won’t suffer much as publisher Warner Bros. has already sold more than 12 million copies (on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S).

Empress’ ability to crack Denuvo on the latest DRM-protected games is a remarkable achievement. The cracker explains that Hogwarts Legacy is protected by “Denuvo v17” plus Steam’s own (mild) DRM. The “NFO” file accompanying the cracked release (no download link is provided, of course) is extremely opinionated as per tradition, as Empress is seemingly fully supporting authoress J. K. Rowling as a “real woman” against what she describes as the “woke system.”

Despite questionable opinions and foul language, Empress’ technical skills are among the best in the “scene.” As a Reddit user put it, being able to crack Denuvo today is essentially “insane.” Empress is just a single developer against an entire team of professionals, she has (or should have) no access to Denuvo source code, and yet can seemingly defeat the DRM and anti-tampering technology in just a couple weeks.

Denuvo is often accused of affecting game performance in a very negative way, and the proposition of a DRM-less version of Hogwarts Legacy seems to corroborate this assumption once more. One YouTuber compared the Steam version of the game and the Empress release on a low-end gaming system (Core i7-7700, GeForce GTX 1060 6GB, 16GB of RAM), and found the cracked release to provide higher frame rates on a constant basis.

Before being banned from Reddit, Empress had expressed some frustration against the complexity she found in the latest Denuvo versions. For this reason, the anti-DRM cracker decided to change her habits by reserving a considerable amount of her time to defeating the much maligned Denuvo tech on the latest games coming on PC.