Now, that domain has now been renewed, so the problem for those gamers and games is fixed. This meant that the domain would not resolve to an IP address, effectively breaking the system. Following the failure to renew, the domain then went into a grace period but when that expired too, it appears to have been removed from DNS records. One Twitter denizen poked around and appears to have figured it out: someone at Denuvo forgot to renew a your DRM provider has let their domain name lapse, and it’s killed your game startup… along with multiple other games I imagine,” he wrote.īuckland identified the domain ‘codefusion.technology’ as the culprit and offered a screenshot of its WHOIS records, which clearly shows that the domain expired on September 24, 2021, and had not been renewed.

From there, the internet did its sleuthing thing and the one commonality uncovered was Denuvo DRM software. Once the same reports of games failing to load came in about several other titles, Twitter lit up about the topic. It was so simple as to be almost unthinkable but so devastating that it rendered games completely useless. However, as more and more complaints came in, another potential problem was identified. The problem seemed to appear after players updated the game, leading some to believe that code may have broken the game. A whole bunch of PC video games suddenly became unplayable this past week, such as Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy. But, it’s an ongoing disaster, it appears. If that sounds like a recipe for disaster, well, yeah. In other words, Denuvo is a case study in real world DRM: no real protection from piracy, but plenty of headaches for paying customers. While all that was going on, plenty of paying customers of games protected by Denuvo complained about various issues: authentication issues intermittently preventing the customer from playing the game they bought, performance issues that are linked back to how Denuvo runs and behaves, or Denuvo simply breaking games. As a result, plenty of publishers have taken to patching Denuvo out of their games, while Denuvo did a mini-pivot to create anti-cheat software for online games. Once touted as “ uncrackable“, Denuvo went from there to becoming indeed crackable, then crackable shortly after release of games, to then being crackable the same day, to then being cracked in some cases hours after a game’s release. It’s been a while since we’ve mentioned Denuvo, the once-vaunted anti-piracy video game DRM that subsequently became an industry punchline. Wed, Nov 10th 2021 08:12pm - Timothy Geigner

Denuvo games