Hogwarts Legacy was one of the most-awaited open-world games due to the millions of Harry Potter fans around the world, and now, mere days away from the global release on Feb. 10, people are more hyped than ever.
There are lots of Harry Potter fans that are not too keen on paying to play Hogwarts Legacy because of the controversy around J.K. Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter series. The author clashed with the LBGTQIA+ community on June 6, 2020, after tweeting an op-ed piece by Devex that referred to women as “people who menstruate” instead of simply using women.
There was an enormous backlash, but Rowling has doubled down on her views and claimed she believed that trans women and trans men aren’t women and men, respectively. Since then, people from all around the world, and not just the LGBTQIA+ community, have vowed to boycott Harry Potter official products to not give any royalties to Rowling anymore.
Related: Why are people boycotting Hogwarts Legacy? JK Rowling controversy explained
Even though Avalanche Games, the developer of Hogwarts Legacy, hasn’t involved Rowling in the production and has set the game almost 200 years before the events narrated in the original Harry Potter novel, some fans are still not buying the game and rather pirate it. This has left people wondering whether or not Hogwarts Legacy has Denuvo, the famous anti-cheating technology implemented in some titles.
Does Hogwarts Legacy have the Denuvo anti-cheat?
Yes, like many games published by Warner Bros. Games, Hogwarts Legacy has Denuvo. It is the most efficient anti-cheating technology, and its main purpose is to avoid crackers from distributing the game for free right after the release, which hinders initial game sales.
Since Denuvo was created in 2014, game piracy saw a decline over the years as more games started to come with Denuvo protection. It’s not impossible that Hogwarts Legacy will be cracked, but it depends on several factors, including whether or not crackers are interested enough in working on breaking the game’s anti-tampering protection.
It’s unclear if Hogwarts Legacy will ever be cracked, but it’s safe to say that crackers will at least take some days or weeks before they can distribute the game on pirate websites across the internet. There were games like Devil May Cry 5 that were cracked on the first day, but that would be too optimistic.