One hacker’s war against Denuvo has reached a fever pitch with Hogwarts Legacy

Hogwarts Legacy has received its fair share of controversy since its launch, but few would probably have imagined that it would become the battleground for a very different kind of fight. The battle that many hackers and pirates have been waging against DRM has been going on for many years now, and Hogwarts Legacy is the latest target of one of the community’s most prolific members.

Denuvo Alerts, a Twitter account that shares news about games with Denuvo DRM integrated, today shared a Telegram message from Empress, a well-known hacker and cracker in the anti-DRM community, in which she claimed to be “doing great” in her attempts to crack Hogwarts Legacy. This comes after previous messages in which Empress expressed anger at the “thousands of new obstacles” brought in by a new version of Denuvo, and makes reference to the issues that many players found with the game’s day-one patch as well.

Related: How to submit bug reports for Hogwarts Legacy

The anti-DRM community is adamant that digital distribution and the digital rights management software that inevitably gets bundled with purchased games are ruining the industry, forcing players to essentially “rent” their games rather than buy, with the idea that the right or ability to play them could be pulled at any time, for any reason. Many fans may not feel quite as strongly about the issue as the die-hard dedicatees in the anti-DRM mines, but constant patching and always-online DRM is still a common target for player anger.

The latest patch for Hogwarts Legacy, for example, managed to fix some stability issues with the game — however, some of those issues appeared to be caused in the first place by the game’s day-one patch, which also reportedly beefed up the copy protection. It’s undoubtedly difficult for developers to thread the needle between player experience and IP security, but any misstep is fated to irritate even some of the most die-hard fans.