A great day for DRM as Denuvo lapse renders tons of games temporarily unplayable

When you tried to fireplace up a sport in your PC this weekend, you could have run into the teeny tiny difficulty of it refusing besides. It appears as if Denuvo's servers had a little bit of a hiccup on November 7, rendering tons of video games with the DRM expertise briefly unplayable.

Reviews started flooding in on ResetEra and varied Steam neighborhood pages, with many getting a “server not reachable” error when trying besides varied video games. The problem plagued latest massive releases like Guardians of the Galaxy and Soccer Supervisor 2022, in addition to video games like Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Yakuza: Like a Dragon and Persona 4 Golden (thanks, VGC).

There's no clear cause for precisely why Denuvo crapped-out, however some are speculating that the corporate merely forgot to resume its area used for verifying sport activations. The registration for the Codefusion area expired on September 24 this yr—yesterday appears to have been when the grace interval for renewal ended, booting it off DNS. It appears a possible state of affairs, contemplating the area has now been renewed and all the pieces is again to regular. I've contacted Denuvo to make clear if this was the explanation for the downtime, however have but to listen to again.

For a little bit of tech that’s already pretty well-hated, conditions like this don't assist Denuvo's case. Each the ResetEra and Steam threads have been crammed with discontent for it, and the frustrations are extremely legitimate when hiccups like this stop you from enjoying your single-player, offline video games.

Earlier this yr noticed much more disdain for Denuvo when it was found that pirated variations of Resident Evil Village apparently ran better as a result of the dearth of DRM was fixing its stuttering points (Denuvo denied its software program was the trigger). Extra just lately, Intel Alder Lake has run into issues with some Denuvo-enabled video games refusing besides on the brand new processors.