Some of the games protected Denuvo by Irdeto-owned company were unplayable over the weekend…

We’re not talking about the fact that several games on Intel’s new 12th generation Alder Lake processors won’t run on Windows 11 and Windows 10 (we’ve written about this before), but now another issue has reared its head. Since Denuvo DRM requires an internet connection, it makes sense that the technology has to “phone home”, so servers on the “other side” are needed. Suppose the copy protection system does not achieve that. In that case, the game will not work, despite the money spent, so you cannot launch your product, which can be very annoying (especially when it comes to games released several years ago, which raises questions about the publishers’ responsibility because they would rather throw license fees out the window than remove the protection, which would result in better, or at least more stable, performance).

The image below is from ResetEra. There were a lot of games that players couldn’t launch over the weekend, such as Wolfenstein Youngblood, Planet Zoo, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 + 2, Mortal Kombat 11, and Total War Warhammer (and meanwhile we’ve heard here and there that Denuvo is being removed from a few games). Now, what caused the outages this time, which only cause problems for paid players, but not for players with inactivated (but running!) Denuvo in the pirated editions?

Denuvo sent an announcement to PCGamer: “A Denuvo domain was unreachable yesterday afternoon CET. The problem was fixed after we got notified by our automatic system control. After the fix, there was no whatsoever restriction or limitation for the gamer. Denuvo is working to implement further improvements to avoid such downtime in the future,”… What happened? One of their domains expired and they didn’t take care of the DNS. Is it an amateur mistake? Yes.

This outage caused legitimate anger, especially in newer games’ communities. On Steam, someone rightly asked, “Why does this game [Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy] even have online DRM servers? It’s ridiculous, considering it’s a single-player game with no microtransactions.” Another commented: “This is why I refuse to support games that use Denuvo. I don’t want to support a DRM that will make games unplayable if some junior forgets to renew a bloody domain or the company just shuts everything down.” (And this game was published by Square Enix, by the way. The same Square Enix that put Denuvo in the free prequel to Life is Strange 2, and one of the worst games of 2018, and they still have the Denuvo in them.)

Copy-protected games cannot be preserved for the future. The pirated versions will be able to be launched in the future without any problems, and if publishers are not willing to remove DRM from their games over time, they will be the only way to launch them in the future. This issue should not be left unmentioned.

Source: VGC