Dozens of games were unplayable at the weekend thanks to a fault with Denuvo DRM

Over the weekend just gone (October 6-November 8), dozens of games were unplayable on PC thanks to a Denuvo domain going offline. The outage affected single-player and multiplayer games, and suffice to say people are not happy.

If you tried to boot up a game that uses Denuvo DRM over the weekend (one of which may have been the recently-released Guardians of the Galaxy from Square Enix, for example) you may have noticed that the game would not run. Both Resetera and Steam communities had various threads talking about the issue, with both parts of the gaming community lameting – once again – that Denuvo was spoiling their good time.

But why did this happen? It appears a Denuvo domain was not renewed, resulting in a "server not reachable" error for players trying to log in, and falling at the Denuvo hurdle.

"A Denuvo domain was unreachable yesterday afternoon CET," said the company in a statement to PC Gamer, seemingly confirming domain woes were behind the outage (but only issuing the statement once the problem was sorted).

"The problem was fixed after we got notified from our automatic system control. After the fix, there was no whatsoever restriction or limitation for the gamer. Denuvo is working to implement further improvements to avoid such downtime in the future."

Other recently released games, like Football Manager 2022, were affected by the outage, too.

Of course, this isn't the first time DRM has gotten between the gamers and their games: Metal Gear Rising’s DRM disabled the game’s Mac edition, Crash Bandicoot 4: It’s About Time locked players out of a single-player game because of always-online DRM, and Resident Evil Village on PC was hugely affected by the anti-piracy tech, too.

More and more, studios are moving to remove the tech from their games – and some studios even resolve to get rid of Denuvo ahead of their game's launch. Errors and instances like those that happened this weekend, then, do little to convince players that the tech is a good thing, actually.