Denuvo, the DRM that is used in many games these days, had an outage over the weekend. Unfortunately, because Denuvo is in a plethora of games, the outage meant that dozens of titles were completely unplayable for gamers. Denuvo is one of the best DRM services for stopping piracy. Games with Denuvo in them take much longer on average to crack; they tend to still get cracked though. Denuvo is also widely hated by gamers. Not because it stops them from getting games for free, but because it has been the source of countless issues for paying consumers.
Earlier this year, pirated versions of Resident Evil Village were found to be running better than the official, paid-for counterparts. The difference between the two? Denuvo had been removed from the pirated version. This caused outrage among the community as paying customers were receiving an inferior product. Denuvo has also recently been removed from a plethora of games. The mass exodus from the DRM system is related to Intel’s new Alder Lake processors. There have been multiple reports of games refusing to boot on the new processors. As such, developers have been removing the DRM instead of trying to patch the mostly older games.
The latest issue with Denuvo appears to be related to an unrenewed domain name. Some eagle-eyed Reddit and Resetera users found that Denuvo had failed to renew a domain that is used for game verification. The outage seems to have happened in conjunction with when the renewal period expired. It left gamers unable to access a huge list of games and the notably new release, Guardians of the Galaxy.
After this weekend, Denuvo has taken another hit to its reputation. Many gamers will be adding this to the list of reasons why their favorite games should remove the DRM system.