DRM is not very well-liked among the gaming community. In a time where game preservation is becoming increasingly important to players, DRM acts an obstacle, allowing older titles to fade away from memory as physical copies of a game disappear and older digital storefronts get shut down. In a 2021 article from Kotaku, Zach Zwiezen discusses No One Lives Forever and how Warner Brothers turned down an offer from Night Dive Studios, who specialize in reviving older games, to bring the game back to modern storefronts. This in turn led to preservationists later putting the game online for free, despite the violation of intellectual property laws. But if Warner Brothers didn’t plan on rereleasing the game anyways, making no other profit off of it, does it really matter? 

As reported in Tom’s Hardware yesterday, digital pirates posted on Reddit on April 27th saying they’ve officially cracked every singleplayer and non-VR game with DRM attached to it. This is done through using a hypervisor-based bypass, which essentially utilizes a kernel-level driver to detect and bypass Denuvo’s checks, which technically isn’t a legitimate crack but works well enough for digital piracy. 

While many celebrate this effort at game preservation, gaming companies are not too happy. Denuvo and 2K Games have implemented a 14-day mandatory online check to many of their games, including NBA 2K26 or Marvel’s Midnight Suns. PlayStation will also be implementing a 30-day check-in digital games. Unfortunately for our digital swashbucklers, this uses a fixed online authorization token which expires after 14 days, making it so that the game won’t start unless you’re connected to the internet and have a new token, effectively making it impossible for hypervisor-based bypasses to emulate. According to Pirat_Nation on X, “The requirement is not clearly disclosed on Steam store pages, in the EULA, or at the time of purchase, meaning many buyers were unaware they would need periodic internet access even for single-player modes”. 

2k and Denuvo work together to brick your game, requiring an always online connection:

Recent reports confirm that Denuvo Anti-Tamper, in partnership with 2K Games, has introduced a new restriction in several titles including NBA 2K25, NBA 2K26, and Marvel’s Midnight Suns.… pic.twitter.com/awFKHLu2Uq

— Pirat_Nation 🔴 (@Pirat_Nation) April 26, 2026

Hopefully things turn out better for game preservationists. Many titles have been lost to time as a result of companies sitting on an IP and doing nothing with it, shutting down servers and storefronts where such content would have been previously accessible. And as I asked earlier, if they don’t plan on making any profit with an older IP, why act so viciously towards those who are cracking games and putting them online for free? And if we have the likes of Project Gutenberg or the National Film Registry, why can’t such a thing exist for games? While older games may not be a priority for publishers who are more focused on newer titles, it would go a long way in preserving the history of games for future generations.