The ongoing battle between the skull-and-bones community and Denuvo’s digital rights management (DRM) has reached a significant milestone. As of yesterday, the pirate crew has officially declared that there are no games utilizing Denuvo that remain uncracked or bypassed. This revelation, while not shocking to those who have been closely monitoring the situation, marks a pivotal moment in this cat-and-mouse game.
Recap of Recent Developments
To provide context, in late 2025, the MKDev collective, alongside the well-known DenuvOwO, developed a hypervisor-based bypass (HVB). This innovative approach involves installing a kernel-level driver that intercepts Denuvo’s verification checks. While this method does not constitute a traditional crack, it has proven effective for piracy purposes. Concurrently, the cracker known as voices38 successfully removed Denuvo from several high-profile titles, including the much-anticipated Resident Evil: Requiem.
In response to these developments, Denuvo has implemented a 14-day mandatory online check for various titles, such as NBA 2K25, NBA 2K26, and Marvel’s Midnight Suns. This new requirement poses a challenge for the HVB, as it involves a request and response mechanism with Denuvo’s servers that cannot be easily emulated. Although it may be possible to eliminate the code responsible for this check, doing so would necessitate a complete game crack rather than a mere bypass.
As it stands, the number of uncracked or non-bypassed games has dwindled to zero. Notably, the HVB method has evolved; the latest “V3” iteration demands far less from users compared to earlier versions. Now, to run a game utilizing HVB, players need only disable Core Isolation (also known as Memory Protection) and toggle off Driver Signature Enforcement (DSE). After launching the game, they can re-enable DSE. The most recent version of the widely used “VBS.cmd” script has also been reported to be more user-friendly and compatible with a broader range of games.
While keeping Memory Integrity disabled does expose users to potential security risks, and trusting pirates to install a kernel-level driver is a considerable leap of faith, the current scenario is a marked improvement from early 2026 when users had to modify motherboard UEFI settings and disable Secure Boot.
The community celebrating this achievement includes notable figures such as repacker FitGirl, who has publicly acknowledged the collaborative efforts of DenuvOwO and voices38. This endorsement carries significant weight within the community, as FitGirl is regarded as a trusted curator of releases, lending an implicit assurance regarding the security of the titles in question.
