Denuvo

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Denuvo

Basic information
Founded	2014-09-26
Legal Structure	Subsidiary
Industry	Video games
Also known as
Official website	https://irdeto.com/denuvo/

Denuvo Anti-Tamper (not to be confused with Denuvo Anti-Cheat) is a video game digital-rights management (DRM) software developed as the successor to SecuROM by Sony Digital Audio Disc Corporation (DADC) since 2014. After a buyout in 2018, it is now distributed by the company Irdeto. It is commonly referred to simply as “Denuvo”, and it is currently the most advanced video-game DRM on the market. The goal of Denuvo is to make cracking a game as difficult as possible, in order to protect a game’s launch window. Denuvo does this successfully in most cases, but it has been cracked multiple times. These cracks have mostly been done by a mysterious cracker known as Empress.

General problems

High resource usage

Despite Denuvo's denials, its software has been documented to consume a lot of computer resources, notably documented for Tekken 7 and Sonic Mania Plus, both games where slowdown is extremely detrimental to players, especially in competitive settings. This slowdown often encourages users to prefer a crack of the game as soon as a crack releases, as seen by early cracks significantly harming sales.Consumers who run lower-end hardware are often unable to even launch these games without running cracked versions, especially when the game's publisher has under-optimized it.

Machine Activation Limits

Many games that implement Denuvo's protections also come with machine activation limits, usually 5 activations per 24-hour period.[1] This stops consumers that have legally acquired their game software from being able to use it on all their devices by imposing arbitrary limits on activations.

There are also accounts of being locked out of access to your game software by simply changing the Proton version you use multiple times to get the game working/running correctly.[2]

Notable anti-consumer events

October 2016:

The following games during were unavailable due to Denuvo's authentication servers going offline for a couple days causing games to display an error on start up: Batman Arkham Knight, Mad Max and Shadow of War.[3]

November 7th 2021:

Guardians of the Galaxy, Football Manager 2022, Planet Zoo, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Tomb Raider trilogy, Wolfenstein Youngblood, Mortal Kombat 11, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 + 2, Persona 4 Golden, Demon Slayer, among others became completely unplayable due to the Domain Codefusion expiring and not being renewed.[4]

May 2nd 2024:

Persona 5 Royal was affected after Denuvo's authentication servers became unavailable. [5]

To maybe delete

Editor's note: This section of the article is unsupported and lacks significant development. It may be deleted, or if verifiable sources can be located, it will be integrated into the rest of the article.

According to a listing on AWS Denuvo has a base cost of $25,000 per month, with an additional $0.50 per game sold. However it is worth noting that Denuvo does not provide a standard price on their website, so this price may not apply in some situations.

Developers have also blamed Denuvo for negatively impacting performance. Many developers have stopped using Denuvo in their games, with others using it but removing it from their games after some time has passed. Controversies surrounding performance issues has resulted in Denuvo’s brand image being severely tarnished, with them being unable to even host a Discord sever properly due to the amount of harassment and trolling they faced.