The cracks, they don’t remove our protection. The cracks still have all our code in and all our code is executed. There is even more code on top of the cracked code - that is executing on top of our code, and causing even more stuff to be executed. So there is technically no way that the cracked version is faster than the uncracked version

That’s some bigly code there.

For my single user instance, I can be charitable and say that it’s running on hardware that I already had that is running regardless on spare otherwise unused resources with a already registered domain so the only cost is time spent setting it up. Or I could apply all the costs from the server Lemmy, then it would be about $1200 initially plus ~$10/mo per user.

Yes, cracked Denuvo games actually run better because you aren’t running a virus anti piracy software in the background. It runs at the kernel level and Crowdstrike is a pretty good case study on why that’s bad.