It's safe to assume that not many people are fans of anti-piracy software such as Denuvo, but many companies have deemed it a necessary evil to have them installed on games just before release. Unfortunately, DRM seems to be causing many issues for games, with titles like Deathloop being review bombed on Steam allegedly because of problems caused by it. Despite how much it seems to be a burden on game performance, it doesn't stop studios like Ubisoft from using it, and a major incident occurred recently which caused a slew of popular titles to become unplayable for fans.
According to a report, there was an outage a couple of days ago which left the gaming community baffled. Some took to forums and Reddit to try and work out what was the cause of the issue, only for the consensus to agree that what all the games had in common was their use of Denuvo. In a tweet, it was claimed that the expiration of the software's domain name was what set things in motion, with the poster referencing games like the business simulation title Planet Zoo as well as Middle-earth: Shadow of War as being unplayable at the time.
There doesn't appear to be a full list of the games that have been affected, but a forum post says Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Guardians of the Galaxy had been swept up in the outage. Interestingly enough, Shadow of the Tomb Raider recently had Denuvo removed, which makes it curious as to how it could have been affected by the issue, unless players had been using an outdated version of the game. In any case, it seems that the problem has now been resolved, and the games affected should be playable again.
These latest developments only seem to strike a further blow for the anti-piracy software, which is already marred in controversy. With some studios now removing it post-launch, and games like Resident Evil 8 allegedly running better without DRM, there's a strong case building against it which is something that is rapidly becoming an issue, more so than it already was.
However, it seems as though Denuvo is likely to stay for the time-being, especially as publishers and developers are keen to prevent piracy on releases. With Ubisoft being a big proponent of it, it's probably not going away for a while, even as news of the Intel processor being incompatible with the disliked DRM software begins to circulate and, once again, causing issues for a lot of gamers.
Source: Venturebeat, Resetera (forum post)