An expired domain caused problems launching games

On November 7, consumers of many different titles found themselves unable to launch their games. The range of games affected seemed wide, leading users to take to forums such as ResetEra, Reddit, and the Steam community pages to see why. They quickly discovered that all games that couldn’t launch had one thing in common: Denuvo software. A little detective revealed that an expired domain was the cause.

The infamous digital rights management (DRM) technology Denuvo is often in the news. These headlines are rare because gaming fans are happy. Developers use DRM protection software to prevent piracy, but the software often causes other problems with games.

Gamers accused Denuvo of slowing down the game’s performance. In 2018, Tekken 7 director Katsuhiro Harada blamed Denuvo for the frame rate drops in the PC version of the game.

A problem has occurred in “TEKKEN7 for PC”. that the frame rate drops when hits like “Shakunetsu Hadouken” from Akuma.
Since this is not a graphics and CPU processing issue, it will not solve even if you change the PC settings (issue with the encryption program).
We will repair it soon. Sorry please wait.

– Katsuhiro Harada (@Harada_TEKKEN) April 13, 2018

A more recent developer who commented on performance issues caused by Denuvo is Amplitude Studios. Ahead of Humankind’s release, fans took to the Amplitude forums to ask the developers to remove Denuvo sometime after the game’s launch. Romain de Waubert de Genlis, co-founder, COO and creative director responded directly to the thread to explain the decision to use Denuvo.

“We’ve been one of the top-rated games on Steam this year, so we know we’re going to be targeted by hackers more than any of our previous games. If Denuvo can hold up a cracked version, wouldn’t be. – what a few days, that can already really help us protect our launch, “he explained.” That being said, our priority is always the best possible experience for the players who buy our games and support us. Denuvo should never impact player performance, and we don’t want to sacrifice quality for you guys. We believe this is possible with the right integration – however, we found that the way it currently is. built-in wasn’t good enough, and that’s not something we can fix before release, so we’re removing it.

However, the inability to launch a game is a new performance issue.

Denuvo provided a statement to PC Gamer which confirmed that domain issues were the root of the problem. They claimed that the problem was now resolved and that they would work to avoid such downtime in the future.