Even before reviews roll in, Crimson Desert has become one of the year’s most anticipated games thus far, but the discovery of a DRM being added has soured the excitement. Digital rights management (DRM) software is widely used as a means to protect brand-new PC releases from piracy, but it often comes under fire for hampering performance.
On March 12, one week before release, Crimson Desert‘s Steam page was updated to show that the game would be using Denuvo to block early piracy attempts, per Eurogamer. It’s not entirely unexpected, but the quiet admission just days before launch has shined a spotlight on the issue, especially since Crimson Desert has already been at the center of various performance discussions. How it would run on base consoles – i.e., the PlayStation 5, compared to the PS5 Pro – was a growing concern due to a now-remedied lack of footage, and now a similar fear has crept into the PC version because of Denuvo’s involvement.
Crimson Desert Is Adding Denuvo DRM
The revelation that Crimson Desert will utilize Denuvo is quite innocuous. A small box in the sidebar of Crimson Desert‘s Steam page notifies potential buyers that the game “Incorporates 3rd-party DRM: Denuvo Anti-tamper.” That hasn’t stopped it from gaining attention days before Crimson Desert‘s launch.
Pearl Abyss’s latest is an ambitious open-world adventure, and comparisons to monoliths like Red Dead Redemption 2, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild have seen Crimson Desert accrue an incredible amount of hype. Anti-piracy measures were practically guaranteed, though Denuvo’s addition just adds to the list of concerns frequently echoed online. Crimson Desert‘s long development time sparked questions about whether its gameplay promises were too good to be true, and more recently, Pearl Abyss had to release base PS5 gameplay to prove that we weren’t seeing another Cyberpunk 2077 situation.
Why Do Some Gamers Have An Issue With Denuvo?
The crux of Denuvo’s contentious reputation is quite simple: Denuvo has been proven to adversely affect the performance of games it is packaged within by bottle-necking CPU usage. At the time of writing, there’s no way to tell if this will be the case with Crimson Desert – testing will have to be done. But the unknowns of the situation haven’t stopped PC players from worrying that an already graphically intensive game may be kneecapped by DRM.
DRM software like Denuvo occupy one of the more fraught spaces in the gaming industry. Companies feel a need to protect their new products from piracy (at least early on; Denuvo is often removed later or inevitably cracked), but crippling a game’s performance with another software layer can also jeopardize sales. DRM is also a major barrier to game preservation, not only in making sure a game can be archived, but being able to archive its raw code base.
With how much excitement is behind Crimson Desert – it is currently the fourth most-wishlisted game on Steam – the late announcement of Denuvo’s involvement feels unlikely to have a major impact on sales. That won’t stop players from grumbling, though, and will certainly put Crimson Desert under yet more scrutiny. Pearl Abyss assuages one set of performance doubts, only for another to pop up right before launch.
- Released
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March 19, 2026
- ESRB
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Mature 17+ / Blood, Drug Reference, Intense Violence, Strong Language
- Developer(s)
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Pearl Abyss
- Publisher(s)
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Pearl Abyss
- Number of Players
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Single-player
- Steam Deck Compatibility
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Unknown
