Why it matters: If you couldn't boot up the PC version of Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy or Football Manager 2022 over the weekend, it was possibly because of a problem with Denuvo DRM's servers. This will likely be seen as another flashpoint among the arguments against DRM in PC games.

Over the weekend, users in a Resetera thread and on the Steam forums reported errors related to server access when trying to boot up games like Guardians of the Galaxy, Football Manager 2022, Yakuza: Like A Dragon, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Persona 4 Golden, and Total War: Warhammer II. Eventually it was theorized that Denuvo had accidentally allowed the domain name for one of its servers to expire. Denuvo later confirmed this to PC Gamer, stating it had fixed the issue and would make sure it didn't happen again.

An event like this is particularly distressing for single-player games like Guardians, Persona, or Yakuza, which aren't supposed to be dependent on internet connections once they've been installed. Denuvo has been unpopular with players pretty much ever since developers started employing it to fight piracy.

Most recently it was discovered that many games might not boot on Intel's new Alder Lake processors because of compatibility issues with DRM like Denuvo. Intel released a temporary fix last week.

Earlier this year, Resident Evil Village suffered performance issues that were traced to Denuvo when cracked versions of the game were shown to run better, and Capcom had to release a patch to resolve the problem.