Various Games Become Unplayable as Denuvo Servers Go Down

Denuvo has long been one of the most contentious parts of the PC gaming community, with many gamers openly protesting against its use. The DRM is known to cause performance issues in many of the games its used in, including the recent Resident Evil Village which only recently had its Denuvo DRM removed causing a major boost in performance for a lot of the players. According to various forum posts around the internet, it seems a lot of the games that are currently employing Denuvo have stopped working, this is due to the fact that the servers for Denuvo have gone down.

These games include, but are not limited to major titles like Middle Earth: Shadow of War, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Dead Rising 4 and the most concerning is the new Marvels Guardians of The Galaxy which came out only a week ago. I think moments like this make for a great argument against the use of strong DRMs like Denuvo that prevent games being cracked at the cost of significantly hurting the experience of players who have bought the game. 

This is for the domains https://t.co/bkHjp6vNeX and https://t.co/XZZd7hu2pn and effects multiple games including: @FootballManager @DeadRising @tombraider and more…

— Alex Buckland (@alexbuckland96) November 7, 2021

Twitter user Alex Buckland has discovered that this is due to the fact that Denuvo has let their Domain names expire which has led to many of the games using this DRM to not start up at all.

Ever since its inception, people have been advocating against the use of this service for the harm it causes to the overall experience, so many publishers have instead opted to release their games with Denuvo and then remove it from their games sometime after the launch of the game when they’ve managed to get all of the early sales. Publishers like CAPCOM are particularly notable for this as they’ve done this multiple times with their Resident Evil releases including Resident Evil 3 Remake, Resident Evil 7 and Resident Evil Village. Players can possibly expect CAPCOM to take the same step with the upcoming release of Monster Hunter Rise on the PC. 

Square Enix has also recently taken steps to remove the Denuvo DRM from their games, only a few weeks ago, Square Enix removed the DRM for various games using Denuvo like Rise of the Tomb Raider, Life is Strange: True Colors as well as NieR: Replicant. Its probably safe to assume that Enix was aware that the licensing for Denuvo was going to expire soon.

Players have also discovered through playing cracked copies of games like Resident Evil Village and NieR Replicant that the pirated versions of these games actually end up running better than their paid copies. Which only makes the argument against such a DRM even stronger. 

Many players are also viewing this as an opportunity for publishers to finally opt out of using Denuvo for their releases considering something like this is going to be pretty damaging for a game, at least until a fix is released.