Denuvo is there to prevent piracy within the first 90 days of release. Something like 60 to 80% of a game’s revenue is during that period. They don’t care that it’s eventually cracked, and they absolutely do not care about performance.
Not strictly after 90 days, but Denuvo is usually removed after the peak sales period for a game. It's really at a publisher's discretion when to remove it, as the sales model for Denuvo is that you have to continue paying for it on a subscription basis to keep it active.
This is untrue. Yes Denovo got removed from some games relatively early, but mostly it was long after this "peak sales window" I would have to make a list of how long it took for games, and I am too lazy to even ask AI, but I think it took years in some cases and a lot of community outrage for the devs to remove it, and they did not just remove it after some peak sales window but when the games were actually cracked and the steam forums were flooded with pissed of people who realized pirates had a better experience then actual buyers. THEN they removed it.
So it's more like after they were cracked rather than some time window, sometimes these may have been overlap.
1 year after release is for sure not "peak sales window".
Having the game wishlisted is a signal of players waiting for a sale, or future patches/correction, or simply not bothering to cleanup wishlist, not a signal of someone is eager to pirate the game.
- Devil May Cry 5: released March 2019, Denuvo removed February 2020
- Forspoken: released January 2023, Denuvo removed July 2023
- Final Fantasy XVI: released September 2024, Denuvo removed March 2024
- Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster: released September 2024, Denuvo removed September 2025
These are just a few examples, there are many more. I can't say whether it was removed because the contract ran out or another reason, but, as I said, Denuvo demonstrably is often removed 6–12 months after PC release.
It can, but that seems to be more related to poor implementations by the game devs, and not inherent to it. There are plenty of examples of games with Denuvo that still run fine (give or take your opinion on whether the presence of DRM is inherently "impacted performance").
More modern version: No you are holding your iPhone wrong, it is not a design fault that makes a ground loop in the antenna if you hold two metal surfaces with your hands.
Isn't Denuvo actually implemented in a game by the DRM developers, though? I remember reading that they have a process where the game dev sends Denuvo an unprotected executable, who adds the DRM to that executable and sends it back.
Thus, I believe the poor implementations are directly the fault of Denuvo.
The games run terribly on release because they have Denuvo, and then when the sales volume no longer justifies the licensing costs of Denuvo, the devs strip it out and sell it to the players in patch notes as "optimizing performance."
Someone else mentioned GTA getting more aggressive copy protection out of nowhere. It's not out of nowhere. With GTA6 ads out for a while, sales of GTA5 are up as people either play it for the first time or replay it. Sales going up means they can justify copy protection.
Denuvo has layers upon layers of obfuscation that inflates nearly every instruction and function call, extra code execution that does nothing to throw off someone trying to follow code execution paths, and constant moving around where the game stores stuff in memory, again, to throw someone off watching via debugger.
It's pathetic because one company has been almost entirely responsible for people needing to buy faster and faster CPUs and GPUs trying to eek out more and more performance. CPUs, GPUs, memory - all of it has gotten enormously faster, we have more cores, etc. Despite all that, every new game barely runs at 60fps.
Do you really believe that year after year game developers and game engines get worse and worse at performance? Of course not.
> With GTA6 ads out for a while, sales of GTA5 are up as people either play it for the first time or replay it. Sales going up means they can justify copy protection
How does that justify it? Adding stronger DRM when cracked copies of the same content are already out there is like trying to get insurance after your house has already burnt down.
> Do you really believe that year after year game developers and game engines get worse and worse at performance? Of course not.
If you strictly want to blame Denuvo then that assumes game developers cannot think of a way to spend their extra performance either. Which is obviously not the case.
False. There's lots of side-by-side recordings of Denuvo and non-Denuvo versions of games on YouTube clearly showing that Denuvo does impact performance.
No there aren't, because having identical builds of games with Denuvo actually removed and present is vanishingly rare.
If you compare a game that's had significant performance patches over a period of years and had Denuvo removed to the launch version (as so many of these videos are) then no shit you see performance differences, but it doesn't tell you anything.
Should be noted that even scene cracks don't fully remove denuvo and all the performance intense checks so the impact should be even larger on actually denuvo free versions.
CPU cache space for code is much smaller than GPU memory for models (and the former is more important for performance since many CPU operations like pipeline parallelism are latency bound, not compute bound).
>This. Why spend extra on x3d cpu when you can have a reasonable game size (not that it has large enough cache anyway)
Because game(SW) devs/publishers don't care about spending money to optimize for reasonable size, and the enthusiast gamers want to play the game either way and will gladly fork out the cash for the HW to play it, if anything for the bragging rights.
Remember "will it run Crysis?" vintage 2007? Yeah, enthusiasts will be enthusiasts.
I'm a fan of the free market here. Badly optimized games will hurt their sales and force the studios to change or go bust, if the market decides so.