When DRM is Harmful: a Popular Game Became Unplayable for Hours on PC!

General news News 05/06/2024

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The use of copy protection or anti-tampering is understandable, as publishers want to protect their games (or their PC port), but it is not entirely a positive step, as if a small error happens in the system, it will quickly be noticed by gamers.

Persona 5 was released in 2016, but the western version had to wait until 2017 for both PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 3. Persona 5 Royal was an expanded version that was released in Japan in October 2019 for PlayStation 4, with the western version arriving in March 2020. Other platforms had to wait a long time, with the native PlayStation 5, as well as the Xbox series, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and PC port arriving on October 21, 2022.

Atlus’ RPG, like most SEGA games, uses Denuvo on PC. There are several problems with this. One is that Atlus games have NEVER removed Denuvo from their games since 2020 (while Capcom does it in 1-1.5 years!), and the other is that the technology is such that it requires an internet connection. The DRM has to “phone home” to the Denuvo (Irdeto) servers. If the connection fails, the game will not start, even if the player bought the Denuvo-encrypted game…

At the end of April, Persona 5 Royal was available for purchase at a 60% discount, bringing the total number of concurrent players on Steam to over 25,000. Then, on May 2nd, the number of players suddenly dropped to almost zero (600) because Denuvo’s DRM servers went down, making the game’s authentication process impossible for about four hours. And only the servers of Persona 5 Royal were affected, so the other games using Denuvo (e.g. F1 23) worked fine.

But it is a popular game, so Atlus and SEGA were rightly criticized on Reddit and other social platforms for using Denuvo. They said it was ridiculous and unacceptable that they had spent a lot of money to buy the game and were unable to play it through no fault of their own (even though it can be played solo, so it’s not a co-op or MMO title…).

PSA: Denuvo is down, P5R is unplayable
byu/Mordred_Morghul inPERSoNA

What is the lesson? Denuvo should die. SecuROM caused a similar headache back in the day, but you could cite an even worse example: Starforce.

Source: GameRant, SteamDB

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Angyal Anikó

Anikó, our news editor and communication manager, is more interested in the business side of the gaming industry. She worked at banks, and she has a vast knowledge of business life. Still, she likes puzzle and story-oriented games, like Sherlock Holmes: Crimes & Punishments, which is her favourite title. She also played The Sims 3, but after accidentally killing a whole sim family, swore not to play it again. (For our office address, email and phone number check out our IMPRESSUM)