It wasn't too long ago that Denuvo was seen as the holy grail of anti-tamper DRM software. It prevented games from being cracked on day one, two, three, and in many cases weeks, or even months after that. But that's no longer the case. Once hailed as an impossible-to-crack protective system, Denuvo is now being cracked on day zero, with games like Rage 2 being cracked before they've even been out for 24 hours.
Other games that have been cracked despite their Denuvo and other protections this year along include Metro Exodus, Devil May Cry 5, Resident Evil 2, Far Cry New Dawn, and Ace Combat 7. As PCgamer highlights the best of those was the last, managing 13 days before it was cracked open, but several were cracked on their release date and others within the first week. That doesn't bode well for the future of Denuvo.
In some cases it's not Denuvo's fault that it was cracked, with game developers releasing unprotected launchers alongside their more protective systems, but all of this suggests that it may not be too long before developers decide to stop using it altogether.
That will no doubt please gaming fans as they have often suggested that Denuvo was a notorious CPU hog, causing PCs to not deliver the performance in-game that they are capable of because of its anti-crack protections.
While that has never been proven, it is certainly useless to implement something like this if it doesn't work. So we may soon have a turning point where Denuvo isn't the vogue DRM system it once was. It will probably be replaced by something else, but it can't get any worse, right?