Resident Evil: Requiem Denuvo DRM fully cracked in 40 days, making it the first title of 2026 to be bypassed

When game publishers first began adopting Denuvo, many assumed it marked the end of piracy. And for a while, that was the case. Until recently, when a cracked copy of Capcom's Resident Evil: Requiem surfaced just days after launch. The hypervisor-based crack became so widespread that Denuvo's parent company, Irdeto, began working on countermeasures.

And just as the company is trying to quell that fire, a bombshell has dropped. A fully cracked version of Resident Evil: Requiem has now been released with DRM completely disabled. On Reddit, user voices38 revealed the crack, making it the first 2026 Denuvo game to be stripped of its anti-tamper protection. Alongside Doom: The Dark Ages, Requiem has joined a small but growing list of titles where Denuvo has been removed.

Unlike the hypervisor-bypass method, voices38 used the old-school approach to strip all Denuvo code. Previously, that process would take months or prove impossible altogether, but a game only 40 days old being cracked this way suggests that recent Denuvo implementations could soon be stripped cleanly and quickly. Voices38 has reportedly been building toolkits for contemporary Denuvo for some time, and it apparently took only two weeks to pull off the feat once everything was in place.

There is also more bad news for Irdeto on the hypervisor front. According to MKDev member KiriGiri, a way has been found to make the hypervisor crack work without disabling any Windows security layers, potentially making it plug-and-play for anyone who wants it. However, many would lean towards the safer crack, where you don't have to do anything like that. It also seems to run faster and uses far fewer resources than the HV version.

YouTuber ChillyWillMD ran a comparison between the hypervisor bypass and the voices38 proper crack, finding roughly 5% higher FPS, a whopping 1.5-2GB drop in VRAM usage, and nearly 1GB less system memory usage on the cracked version.

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The video also showed that CPU usage spikes and frametime graphs improved on the cracked version, with fewer usage spikes and occasionally lower frametimes, making gameplay feel much smoother. The test system used an Intel Core i9-13900K and an RTX 3090. Machines with weaker processors may even benefit more from removing Denuvo.

All of this puts serious pressure on Irdeto. With paying customers already frustrated by Denuvo's performance overhead, the argument for adopting less invasive protection methods is getting harder to ignore. Completely eliminating piracy has always been wishful thinking. Maybe the more realistic goal is protection that doesn't punish the people who actually bought the game.