Rime removes Denuvo DRM

Denuvo’s time as the shining light of PC piracy protection seems to be over.

Developer TequilaWorks has released an update to remove the DRM from the PC version of Rime after it was cracked within five days of being released. That’s the same amount of time it took for hackers to crack fellow Denuvo release Resident Evil VII.

Polygon reports that the group who cracked the title also claim that Denuvo itself had a negative effect on the game’s performance, elongating loading times.

We at Team Grey Box are following through on our promise from earlier this week that we will be replacing the current build of Rime with one that does not contain Denuvo,” a developer has now confirmed. Please make sure your PC version of Rime has been updated, if it has not done so automatically.”

Grey Box had previously admitted that Denuvo may have been causing some performance issues, although it played down the extent of the issue.

At this time we do not believe [Denuvo] is causing problems that are currently being reported,” the studio previously said of the slowdown reports. We might be wrong. We’re monitoring the situation.”

The studio later added: If Rime is cracked we will release a Denuvo-free version of Rime and update existing platforms.”

Denuivo was once so successful that some of the established big players in the PC piracy sector actually called it quits.

However, the first suggestion that the system was beginning to crack emerged last summer and by the autumn it became clear that loopholes had been discovered. It was not long before big name titles were dropping the DRM entirely.