Ghostwire: Tokyo got Denuvo DRM – over a year after launch. This was packaged in the latest update, forcing fans to play the game with anti-piracy tools long associated with poor performance on many PC setups. .
Unsurprisingly, players aren’t happy with the update, and have made their frustrations known in the game’s Steam reviews. Negative reviews refer to the Denuvo update.
Denuvo DRM is becoming more and more common to be added to PC releases, but it’s very strange to see it added to a game more than a year after its initial release. Usually the opposite, games are launched with DRM to prevent piracy until the end of the initial sale period. We recently saw this at Resident Evil Village who stuck with the Denuvo for about two years and ditched it earlier this week.
Of course, this only adds to the frustration of our player base. In the latest Steam review, fans have expressed deep disappointment with the new update, reporting performance issues that weren’t present prior to its release. Some say it has fallen to
“Adding Denuvo a year after release is just [a] Ridiculous way to treat paying customers like criminals,” read one negative review from Steam user Prudis06.
“Load times are about 25% longer than they were before the patch,” agrees SmokeOfC. “[I] I had to downgrade the visuals for the game to run smoothly. [the] After about an hour of gameplay, the game randomly crashed to my desktop.
“Don’t buy at this time. If you bought recently, get a refund.”
To add insult to injury, this isn’t the first Bethesda public game to get Denuvo this week. There was a serious backlash to the earlier report.
Unfortunately, anyone wanting to play Ghostwire on a DRM-free PC is out of luck. This game didn’t get his GOG release, so if you run into performance issues after a new update, you might have to wait, DRM is rarely permanently built into games but it’s strange that it’s added after launch.
In any case, it remains to be seen if publisher Bethesda or developer Tango Gameworks have any plans to help users who experience a significant drop in quality after the update. was contacted but did not receive a response at the time of publication.