There is basically only one or two people involved with any sort of denuvo cracking, someone named Empress and another I can't remember.

Well, when the game is essentially running in a virtual machine with an address translation layer that scrambles the backing memory every few minutes you're lucky the game even runs. Good luck trying to decipher that hell. A few guys have done it, I remember the one dude ranting on Twitter about trying to crack Borderland's 3 back around launch.

And then the follow up which was that Denuvo was basically adding a ~30fps overhead to the game and everyone was initially blaming the devs for releasing unoptimized garbage.

Gabe had it right, piracy is a service problem. And my motto has always been if the game has some garbage like Denuvo, then you couldn't even pay me to take a copy. Not worth the headache.

There's an r/crackwatch, with a pinned list of Denuvo games.

For example, in 2021, only 7 games released with Denuvo were cracked (out of an approximate 30). In 2022, only one. There was only one cracker in the world who was any good at breaking Denuvo, and Denuvo hired them, so it almost never happens anymore.

(Be careful when reading the crackwatch updates, because they mark 'denovo removed' the same colour as 'denuvo cracked', you have to read the notes) My mistake, they stopped doing this a little while ago.

We're talking about a rhythm game with a smaller audience then, say, Binding of Isaac. I'm guessing yeah, it might not be a prime target for cracking.

The Dead Space remake hasn't been cracked for example. And there'd be a lot of interest i guess

I guess you'd start with a dupe check or pre db site to see what known Denuvo games have a cracked version, and when it came out. Example: https://predb.me/

Not anymore, Hogwarts Legacy was just cracked, almost a year after release, but EMPRESS is only one person, there are several games releasing with denuvo every year, my friend is still waiting for a crack to Stranded Alien Dawn but since it's a smaller game it's not even on their radar.

Most denuvo games you are seeing on sites, if you go to the crackwatch twitter account, you'll see it's just the devs themselves removing denuvo since they probably didn't want to renew the contract for a game that already sold for an entire year.