Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

I like to call them HIV bypasses sometimes

I will never run them. Opening up your PC so thoroughly is not worth the risk just to play a pirated game. Besides, on a long enough timeline all those HV-only cracks will have safer cracks made for them, so just be patient and wait.

As long as GOG exists I don't really see the point, as long as the game is also on GOG.

What I understand you're saying is, a hypervisor (HV) bypass that basically gives the crack the highest root access to your PC. That's not smart. I got a great deal on an Xbox Series X, so I just game on that. My Macs are generally not good for gaming, but I play Animal Crossing on the MacBook with an emulator. No root or hypervisor bypass necessary, it works with no more permissions than a media player. It loads the rom image, it boots it, the game plays. Probably the cleanest way to game since nothing is really installed (game wise, the emulator is of course installed, though Macs "install" things more cleanly than Windows — beside the point, but a Mac ".app" file is basically a container (think ISO) that gets loaded (like mount, but it's not mounted) and it has its own internal file system (think %APPDATA% on Windows) but it's all in that one .app file. On Windows you have projects like PortableApps that aim to do the same thing, but not quite as well and only with some apps (few if any games). I don't have Cyberpunk 2077 installed any more (runs like shit on M2/M2 Pro, rather plan on XSX) but I'm pretty sure Cyberpunk2077.app was just this one ~85GB file. Now I'm not saying Macs are better for gaming (they're objectively not), but I wouldn't fuck with a hypervisor bypass on a Windows machine if I had one. I already don't like how Windows itself works. It's a shitty system that's been shitty since the 90s and they refuse to modernise it because they'd lose compatibility with the old stuff, like Macs have done 3 or 4 times over the years. Windows is already bad. It does have some decent security though. Bypassing that is just asking for trouble. I say don't do it. But I have a Mac, so I can't do it.

Generally I'd say they're one of the most dangerous things you could voluntarily run on your PC. As someone whose education and profession is in infosec, games are one of the things I refuse to pirate because the risk is just too high for me.

Just running an untrusted exe from a shady source is enough to make my hair stand on end but the idea of intentionally replacing low level hypervisor components makes me run away screaming.

FWIW, the type of games that require HV bypasses are ones that I would pass on because the "legitimate" DRM is basically equally as scary from a security perspective.

Everyone's risk tolerance is different though. 🤷‍♂️

https://xkcd.com/1200/ comes to mind.

Games have no sandboxing anyways. They can access most of the data on the systems on which they run. Whether the game, crack or a HV crack makes little difference.

Sure, running a hypervisor or kernel level does allow them a bit more access, mostly around persistence. But I don't think it is a huge difference to most people.

So IMHO you are already putting a lot of trust in any pirated software or crack, hypervisor bypasses are really just a small matter of degree. If you don't trust the crack don't run it. Easy as that. Or if you want robust protection run games on dedicated hardware with no personal information or in a dedicated untrusted gaming VM.

I feel glad that they exist on a socioeconomic principle of fairness, as well as having the option to play those games becomes more "grounded". But from the perspectives of consumer rights and of digital sovereignty HV bypasses are absolutely terrible, and technically at least one level worse than DRM-ed games.

Honestly, all that effort could be better spent developing original indie IPs with ethically respectable distribution channels. But then again the same should be said of corporate DRM in games in general.

I've tried to understand what the hypervisor bypass is and I feel like I'm not fully grasping it, I just wanted to say that first so that if I sound stupid, it is because I am stupid. From my loose understanding, it sounds like you are trading giving a corpro entity more access than they should need to your hardware/system, to giving a modified and possibly sketchy program from an unknown source even more access. Sounds like a lose/lose situation and I am staying away from it, but I am glad someone (other than a complete lunatic) was able to break that DRM