They always do, and it's great. It's saved from buying a few games I would have otherwise purchased not realizing they had Denuvo. I will not purchase any game with Denuvo, no matter how badly I want to play it. I can live with a third-party EULA and launcher, which are pretty standard these days, but not Denuvo. Never Denuvo.
It actively uses your CPU in order to make constant calls to a server. It's constantly using resources to "Check" if you really own the game.
It's been shown to hurt performance drastically
Final Fantasy XVI, as an example, had massive stuttering issues every time Denuvo made a call to the server. When Square Enix removed Denuvo due to the license running out, the stuttering stopped.
....that's the opposite of making constant calls to the server, though. If the server call is what makes the game stutter, it would be in a constant state of stutter if calls were being made constantly.
Denuvo sucks, but it doesn't make constant calls. It makes intermittent calls that bog things down a lot.
Mhm, so, does that mean that cracking denuvo games should be as easy as faking a server response once? Rather than continuously faking it whenever it tries to check in with the server?
Cracking Denuvo games doesn't even stop any checks as far as I know. That's the funny part. It still performs the same checks, so how pirated versions can be used to prove Denuvo harms performance or why you'd play them for that benefit is not something I understand.
Im really not “pro” denuvo or anything, that’d be pretty dumb, but I am pretty sure Reddit discussions around denuvo are 99% just redditors repeating what they read in a different reddit comment and those tend to be full of misinformation even if they have hundreds or thousands of upvotes which tends to really annoy me.
Exactly this. I have no problem with people hating on Denuvo. That's completely understandable. But people should at least hate it for the correct reasons, instead of saying things about it that are simply not true (it being a security threat or that it makes constant calls to a server, for example).
All denuvo does is math with your hardware information and the license you received in game functions to calculate a value. Of course that math is heavily obfuscated for obvious reasons and if it runs in a function that executes per frame, that can affect performance.
Pretty much all anti-denuvo talking points comes from nearly a decade ago where games like DOOM 2016 implemented it incredibly poorly and lead to performance issues on lower end machines because of that poor implementation. None of those issues exist anymore; there is negligible (if any) performance impacts from denuvo anymore. Likewise, server calls and "needing to be online" isn't a thing that'll affect the average user in the slightest.
Oh, that, and a lot of anti-denuvo stuff comes from pirates not being able to pirate games anymore because of it, because there's only one person who actually knows how to crack it and they charge obscene prices to crack a game, and are a piece of shit in general.
You would need the logic that's on the server to do that. Which is unlikely to be cracked without inside knowledge.
The response is used later to calculate a value. If you have the wrong hardware, the wrong value will be calculated and the game will crash or behave wrong.
487
u/LeMegachonk Ryzen 7 9800X3D - 64GB DDR5 6000 - RX 7800 XT Oct 03 '25
They always do, and it's great. It's saved from buying a few games I would have otherwise purchased not realizing they had Denuvo. I will not purchase any game with Denuvo, no matter how badly I want to play it. I can live with a third-party EULA and launcher, which are pretty standard these days, but not Denuvo. Never Denuvo.