Many recently released PC games were unplayable over the weekend, and it looks as though it was because DRM company Denuvo had problems with its servers.
As reported by VGC, many recently released high-profile titles were unplayable on PC over the weekend, and those that use the digital rights management (DRM) software from Denuvo were being met with errors that rendered them unplayable, even if they were solely single-player titles.
A Steam thread from yesterday (November 7) concerning Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy had many players saying they had a “server not reachable error” that prevented them from playing the game.
“Thank you DRM very cool, I love having to contact an unreliable server to play my single-player game,” said one user.
The issue was also reported by players of Planet Zoo, Football Manager 2022, and the Tomb Raider series, as codefusion.technology (a domain address reportedly in use by Denuvo) was down, which was updated on November 7.
One possibility is that this is in fact a domain name Denuvo uses for game activation and that it lapsed over the weekend, meaning there was a brief period where games using Denuvo’s DRM couldn’t be played.
Game developers can license Denuvo’s DRM software as a way to combat piracy of their titles, but Denuvo’s technology repeatedly comes under fire for worsening game performance for those who buy the game legitimately. Tekken 7 director Katsuhiro Harada tweeted about the software in 2018 saying that “anti-tamper third-party middleware” was to blame for performance slowdowns with the title.
Recently released Intel documentation suggested that the company’s Adler Lake CPU’s may face problems due to Denuvo DRM as well.
In other news, Nintendo has said that its Nintendo Switch Online service has 32million subscribers, jumping by six million in the last year.
The post Denuvo DRM issues may be cause of PC games going down this weekend appeared first on NME.
